US Government taking the Internet - SOPA Bill
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The US killing sites at a top DNS level would be comical because you'd end up with the root servers (the big central servers that every ISP goes to in order to get domain info) being out of sync with each other which would have all sorts of weird and wonderful consequences.
Remodez
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I do have to just sit back and laugh at all these sites participating in the blackout, you would think sites like Wikipedia would have more sense than that. Yes, shutting up and cutting yourself off from outside communication with millions of other people is a fantastic way to "raise awareness."
Also irony at it's finest, someone already has come up with an extension to bypass the blackouts http://techpp.com/2011/12/26/desopa-a-firefox-extension-to-bypass-sopa-restrictions/
A message of solidarity intended to fight Government's crackdown on hackers and script kiddies...is overridden by hackers and script kiddies, awesome work guys. That blackout message really got through.
Also irony at it's finest, someone already has come up with an extension to bypass the blackouts http://techpp.com/2011/12/26/desopa-a-firefox-extension-to-bypass-sopa-restrictions/
A message of solidarity intended to fight Government's crackdown on hackers and script kiddies...is overridden by hackers and script kiddies, awesome work guys. That blackout message really got through.
wxwax
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It did.
It's working. Important Senators retreating on PIPA, and SOPA is also in trouble.
wxwax
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This site would be shut down the second anyone complained about your avatar, which you're using without permission. Mine too. All of ours. Never mind the photos, videos etc. which appear here.
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ThunderDan
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I'm beginning to suspect that this is about a hugely lucrative indusrty (motion pictures) which sees free online movie viewing as inevitable and damaging to their bottom line. Big money will always find legislators to write up their proposals and see if it flies. You guys may not like alot that comes out of the USA, but our system of checks and balances between executive/legislative/judicial branches assures that bad law gets struck down. Most of the time it works, certainly it's working here.
wxwax
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Gonna disagree with you, ThunderDan. Big money in Hollywood almost got this legislation passed without a hint of opposition. Congress was well greased with close to $100 million, I understand. PIPA sailed through a Senate committe without a single dissenting vote.
It wasn't until the internet (I saw it on Boing Boing and Reddit) began reacting strongly against the legislation in December, and legislators began getting a lot of e-mails, that the bills ran into trouble.
Bad bills which favor rich special interests get passed all the time, because usually their opposition isn't a PR megaphone like internet-based companies.
Music, movies and television are big business in the United States. But none of those industries has found (or has really tried to find) an internet business model that would make piracy less attractive. The recording industry got its special interest laws passed because nobody with power opposed them. As a result, for the past few years they've been suing people for absurdly punitive amounts in order to dissuade music piracy.
Spiller86
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I think TD is trying to make a similar point wxwax if in a different way.
You're right about the megaphone that internet companies possess. I was considering this bill in one of those late night kitchen discussions you have over tea/beer with your housemates, and they were of the opinion that despite the enormous amount of money that piracy obviously costs the film and music industry that fixing it in this manner would actually cost far bigger tech companies like Google etc. a lot more. Meaning it doesn't really make a lot of sense from a utilitarian perspective, if you were considering the whole economy.
BTW Wikipedia's shutdown is starting to annoy me I keep forgetting its on and looking something up and getting the same message. Lucky Google's cache of it is still working.
You're right about the megaphone that internet companies possess. I was considering this bill in one of those late night kitchen discussions you have over tea/beer with your housemates, and they were of the opinion that despite the enormous amount of money that piracy obviously costs the film and music industry that fixing it in this manner would actually cost far bigger tech companies like Google etc. a lot more. Meaning it doesn't really make a lot of sense from a utilitarian perspective, if you were considering the whole economy.
BTW Wikipedia's shutdown is starting to annoy me I keep forgetting its on and looking something up and getting the same message. Lucky Google's cache of it is still working.
Eggy McMuffin
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Or you could have pressed escape as soon as the page loads and the message pops up...
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I was going to do it on here
Just to stop a day's worth of stupid rumours, daily mail copy-and-pastes, Torres bashing and random tweets from idiots! Then I realised we're all suckers for punishment!- Status