On January 18th, the online community known as reddit will go offline for 12 hours in opposition of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently being considered in the House and its companion PROTECT IP Act in the Senate. These two bills would give copyright holders power to have websites blocked, to get their advertising cut off, and to shut down their credit card or PayPal payments.
reddit’s community has been organizing all manner of oppositions to the two bills. Their most successful attempt included targeting GoDaddy, who supported the legislation until reddit’s Move Your Domain Day. This time, site admins decided to get involved in order to get the word out to all of reddit’s users.
“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action,” they announced yesterday.
“We’re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it.”
reddit community members have been using /r/sopa to organize, posting custom signs, various pieces of Internet anti-SOPA artwork, such as the image at the top targeting SOPA backer Representative Lamar Smith, and suggestions for making their collective voice be heard around the world. One of the bigger ideas that I’ve seen included trying to convince Google to join the blackout, which more than likely won’t happen, but it sure would be powerful.
Source: Ars Technica
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is remaining on the same side of the fence when it comes to the state of high-speed internet being deployed throughout the United States. Last year, the cable industry protested against it, but the FCC’s Seventh Broadband Progress Report reinforces the conclusion it reached during the sixth survey. This survey shows that as many as 26 million Americans are in areas in which there is no broadband available that is capable of “delivering video, graphics, data, and high quality voice services at affordable prices.”
Hopefully you aren’t getting too tired of hearing about Anonymous going against Sony. And I hope even more that my postings aren’t too biased and you do not get upset if you happen to be siding with Sony on all of this.
WhiteRabbit: its pretty much game over....Plolexic can stop attack at 150GBps.
narc0synthesis: hahaha unless we r00t prolexic and fuck them up,
make them back off
