The Net's new guardians. Clash of the pasty-faced titans Epic battles of geekdom.
Hackers break the recording industry's vaunted music protection system.
The hacker boycott of SDMI organized by members of the programming community who were suspicious of what they saw as an attempt to coopt their labor in the service of a corrupt industry has turned out to be effectively irrelevant. According to one witness attending the SDMI conference, recording industry members held an emergency meeting at 6 a.m. PDT Thursday to discuss the results. SDMI members and the press will likely be informed Friday, several sources said, although most speculated that the record industry would try to downplay the results. They will try to skate out of this without releasing the information that it's all broken. But SDMI officials disagree vehemently with this.