I take it you haven't seen the Whitehouse's stance on this then, as you've not listed it? Tweet Linking through to full article Good stuff.
Also: Gizmodo comments on the Whitehouse comment (AFAIK that's what that comment is on). And since this is filed under "Education" What is Sopa actually?
Ah, the key statement I was expecting: Jingoism is the lubricant of political cornholing. But as all psychologists know, when someone says one thing, they often mean the opposite. This is not about protecting American property from foreign thieves, but blocking Americans' access to foreign Internet material. I mean, Wikileaks would have been so much easier to deal with if US citizens could not have accessed it at all... Not convinced? It is already obvious that the average US citizen lives in an informational bubble. This is just another step further.
Well said, Nexxo, just like your post in the SERIOUS thread. I think the really scary bit (other than the DNS blocking, which has limited impact and even less enfoceability) is the bit about strongarming payment gateways (like AmEx, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, etc) into blokcing payments to and from those sites... at least within the confines of the american law's reach. Either way, in order to keep this lighthearted: Firefox said their start page would be black for 12 hours today (8AM to 8PM EST, I believe) Wikipedia is blacked out. Reddit said they would (I just cheked and saw everything as normal) Google has a notice up (on .com, and apparently a doodle for those browsing from stateside as well) TwitPic went black (with a stop cencorship skin) Cheezburger network said they would
rofl... silly as it may be, they hae substantial traffic, and seemingly an impact on peoples' lives...
Loading Ready Run put a video up today about it: http://loadingreadyrun.com/videos/view/1151/Stand-Together-The-Gaming-Community-vs-SOPA-and-PIPA
This. I'm impressed. And against SOPA 100%. The rest is just babble... I'll support this anti SOPA campaign as much as possible until it's thrown out or passed. [edit] Speaking of restoring faith in humanity, a Foo Fighters song just won the live lounge vote on BBC Radio 1 against two other songs. This is a good day. Now, that awesome news being delivered, back OT
one particularly interesting contributer to the "blackout" is www.greenpeace.org - though they'e IMHO just doing it because it's anti-everything-the-government-does...
Wallbase is on strike too- oh the humanity, damn you America / politicans / big business / greedy corporations / etc. EDIT: What is Bit-tech's stance on E3 coverage I wonder?..
Agree with Neil. Americans and companies on a whole are becoming too greedy, and this is what it has led to...
A dystopian future where corporations, not the people, make up laws to protect their profit margins? With this and the state of the financial system, it could be said that we're just a hop, skip and a jump away from Soylent Green and a zombie George Orwell popping up to say "I told you so."
But look at the amount of companies suing eachother of late... Nobody will be allowed to improve an idea anymore.
At any rate, it's impressive that people have actually mobilized with this. The scary thing is that there are people still supporting this. That scares me, but I am glad that the majority of people are actually paying attention now. Oh and by the way, the White House claim, that scares me. Clearly it's just to assuage our fears to allow the passage of the bill, which is utterly insane anyhow.
Did anyone see this one? Fair play to Razer. They're basically the driving force behind a good percentage of online users - namely gamers, so to see them stand up and oppose this is great.