On the other hand, I suppose they could sue half the population of the Earth. It could work.

If you've had your head in a bucket for the past few days, you won't have heard about the HD-DVD Title Key fiasco. Essentially, a keycode that allows you to break the copy-protection on the new high-definition DVD standard was found by a hacker going by the name of "muslix64". Even if your intention is to back up an HD-DVD that you have legally purchased, or even to watch it on your equipment rather than the equipment that the technology producers want you to use, it is technically illegal to break copy protection in this way.

(Incidentally, it is also illegal in this country to copy a CD to your computer's hard drive. I expect dawn raids on everyone with a copy of Windows Media Player within the next couple of days.)

That's more or less where the whole issue would have ended - HD-DVD isn't a particularly widespread technology yet, and in any case you need to have a certain degree of technical knowledge to use the keycode - but for the fact that the AACSLA, founded by a whole bunch of big tech companies, started sending out takedown notices under the US's incredibly flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an attempt to stop the key from getting out into the public awareness.

If the material that they had been trying to stop had been, say, a 50-page PDF detailing complicated instructions, this strategy might have worked. When it's a number, though, that makes things rather trickier. You simply can't stop a 16-digit number from being transmitted across the internet, especially if you're a large technology consortium with a poor reputation for concern for customers who's made it very clear that you don't want it transmitted. This leaves us in the situation where knowledge of the number is growing by the minute - BoingBoing reported at 3am this morning that 368,000 sites were listed on Google as containing the keycode, up from only a couple of thousand the day before.

And what of the AACSLA? They've resorted to the only option available to them - they're changing the keycode and making everyone who's bought one of their players download an update so that it won't work with the code that's currently being copied at lightning speed. Of course, the fact that they're not changing anything else means that muslix64, or one of the many, many other intelligent young people with computers who now knows about this whole issue, can now extract the new keycode and start the whole business off again.

Oh, and the other option that they've also taken is to spin the issue to a ludicrous extent - go to their homepage (linked earlier) and count the number of times they use the word "attack" in reference to the code. This isn't an attack on their players - it adds functionality to them, rather than taking it away. All that it does is remove a restriction that was never going to stop serious hackers anyway, but does seriously inconvenience the general public (and you'll note that their solution will inconvenience the public even more). This kind of thing really does give the technology industry a bad name.

And by the way, Uncle Phil is about to Make Arithmetic Fun again. Multiply the entire population of the world by the number of pigs it would take to give everyone a ham sandwich. Then multiply your answer by the land area of the Isle of Skye (in square km). Lastly, multiply your result by the magic number 23.01122527.

Give your answer in hexadecimal.