At digg.com yesterday, there was time for misty eyes.

The site – one of the most popular destinations for technology readers on the internet – had recently undergone a seismic moment, and its readers were taking the time to lick their wounds, settle past scores, and, occasionally, open new ones.

The bout of soul-searching, which follows a dramatic 24 hours in which the site crashed and its founder was forced to issue a grovelling apology to his revolting readers, was triggered by the posting several days ago of a single line of code, 32 digits in length, which would let hackers circumvent antipiracy measures on high-definition DVDs.

Digg.com works by letting contibutors vote for the articles they like, and the HD-DVD code soon became popular.

The site was subsequently issued with a 'cease and desist' order – apparently from the AACS, a consortium which licenses the encryption software on HD DVDs – demanding that the code be taken down. On Tuesday afternoon, after much deliberation, the site's chief executive, Jay Adelson, ordered that the offending links be dismantled.

"In order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law," Mr Adelson wrote in a post on the site. "Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information. ... In order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits. Thanks for your understanding."

But Digg.com's readers were not understanding. Chaos ensued.

At one point today the entire front page of the site was plastered with rogue posts linking to the code anew. For a time, the site crashed. Finally, Digg.com's founder, Kevin Rose, was forced to issue an apology, and agreed to re-post links to the code.

"You’ve made it clear you’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company," Mr Rose wrote. "We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with the consequences. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

The upswell of emotion on the site in response was, if nothing else, heartfelt.

"Thank you Kevin!", wrote 'dongioconia'. "You've listened to the masses."

"Kevin, that took some balls," said 'zpweeks'.

Still another reader quoted Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. "I think we, as a community, collectively stood up and Jefferson would be proud," it said.

Other comments were less earnest: "Kevin has always been courageous! Whether it's being true to himself, or standing up for the right to steal movies, he's always been one not to be swayed by popular opinion," wrote 'superKdooper'.

There were also some fiery exchanges. 'Savecore' wrote: "This is not about some stupid code, this is about resistance of centralized control," and proceeded to quote a poem about the Third Reich. 'dn11' replied: "you are just sad and pathetic. you think being able to steal is your most important right and you are comparing a company protecting intellectual property to Nazis? you people need to wake up."

'Mr Stabby', trying to restore order, wrote: "If we're all done acting like 5 year olds, I'm sure someone's got a great picture of a cute kitten in a computer to submit."

Gradually, the atmosphere cooled. Towards the end of the day, a post by 'littlejohn134' asked of the code, which was by now available to everyone: "How the hell do you use this?"

Icarsdeveloper replied: "Out of the 22,000 people who dugg this story so far, only around 0.05% will actually be able to answer your question. I'm a geek, but even I can't answer your question, because I don't have/want/need any HD-DVD movies, and I have no intention of buying any anytime soon."

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