SOPA on a ROPA (1 Viewer)

SOPA and PIPA postponed indefinitely after protests

It's surprising to me to see all of this. These bills have been a hot topic in my industry for some time, and we started organizing against them back in August at HostingCon.

When I spoke to our congressional representatives on behalf of the company I work for (because that's just how I roll) they all gave me the same line, which I can translate from political-speak to English like so: "Hollywood is big business in Southern California, so we're going to do what they want us to do."

We continued to chip away, and when the idea of an online protest was hatched I thought it was a good idea but unless some big sites took part, it would be ineffective. I guess you could call Wikipedia a big site, so when Jimmy Wales agreed to go dark for 24 hours, it was like the dams burst. Then when everyone actually did what they said they were going to do, I knew we had a shot.

Politicians love money, but if they don't get re-elected, the gravy train stops. So it's good to see that us peons can still put a hurt on them. They are fear-driven, so if we can manage to frighten them they will do our bidding.

At least until some closed-door meeting where they pass this shit somehow under the radar.

But until then, I'm proud that everyone pulled together to present a unified message. Even if that message was only, "NO!"
 
I think Congress was unprepared and afraid of the amount of successful hacking that went on after megauploads was busted.

they are regrouping, but I think the pirate geeks will always trump the government geeks. at least until the government starts hiring more pirate geeks, but then those pirate geeks will get soft on job security and pensions, and the new breed of pirate geeks will win. then government will try to hire them...

vicious circle.
 
Site stats from the blackout. First is bukowski.net, second is thisisnotatest.com, where all the traffic was redirected. Not especially thrilling, but here they are.

sopastatsbuk.png
sopastatstest.png
 
At first I didn't know what was going on. Than I did know and I think it is/was cool.

Although it sucked to have to wait for buknet.
 
I read somewhere you could still access Wikipedia if you disabled Java script. I don't know if it's true, though.
 
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You could have, yes. And I think they only blocked it for the English language site. But what they did was very good, because it made the news. Without Wikipedia it would have still been a story, but maybe not as big a story.
 
Google was a bit *subtle* I think:
On their English language sites they put a black bar over the Google logo. A little less subtle, but still, I was disappointed that they didn't do more. In the end it wasn't really necessary for them to do more, but it would have been a bold gesture.
 
Yes, cispa and acta and probably some other alphabet soup of restriction and laws I've never heard of. I was reading cispa yesterday to try to find something I could pull out and write about for the work blog here, but it's a typically lawyerly political shitpile that's hard for normal humans to interpret.
 

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