There has been a lot of trouble at Digg in the last 24 hours. Some stories were posted that tell all about hacking the security for HD-DVD. At first Digg removed these stories and Jay Adelson blogged on the Digg blog about why.

This then blew up in their face and numerous stories began to appear on Digg with thousands of diggs telling Digg just what sort of people they are; spineless.

All over the blogosphere people are talking about this and, just when we though all hope was lost, Kevin Rose grew a pair and posted on the Digg blog about it.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin Rose on the Digg Blog

Finally I get to say something nice about Kevin Rose again! It's been a long time coming but I'm glad you finally grew a pair and stood up for what Digg is supposed to represent. You may not be the Sixty Million dollar man yet but now you have some amount of honor and class.

Wait a minute. Did I fall for it? Did he grow a pair or did he just cave to the bigger group?

Is it possible that the diggers were so pumped up over this that to continue to anger them would only drive them away and kill Digg? After all, Digg is one of those web 2.0 companies that makes its money off of other people's work. Think about it, user generated content is just a fancy way of saying, "we make money off of other people's work."

Yeah, Kevin did grow a pair, but the pair he grew sprouted from his chest and not between his legs.

Think about it. This Hex code is now all over the Internet. Any trade secret status that HD-DVD had over that key is now effectively lost. So what if diggnation loses some sponsorship money from the HD-DVD people over this it would be a far bigger disaster to lose the diggers!

If anything, this particular episode shows us that digg is not about democracy it's about the bottom line. There is nothing wrong with being profit driven and cow-towing to your sponsors but, don't lie to us and tell us it's not true. If your sponsor, HD-DVD, called you on the phone and threatened to pull their sponsoring based on this just tell us. Tell us that you are beholden to your advertisers and that you will use your editorial powers to erase all content that places your advertisers in a negative light.

Kevin, you almost had me on this one... Almost!