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Wikipedia is blacked out

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Meanwhile on Twitter
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That Guy with the Glasses is blacked out too. Not like it's a big site, but Channel Awesome's videos are very popular.

RIAA of course posts this smartassed message on Twitter.
http://gizmodo.com/5877143/riaa-reminds-us-why-we-hate-them-with-obnoxious-smartass-tweet
Bunch of crooks.

Here's my take on SOPA. I have worked in the media industry as a content creator. I have worked in radio, television, and will be moving on to web production (hopefully) in the next couple of months. I strongly oppose this bill. What I see is a ploy by the media giants: namely Newscorp, Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Sony, and Viacom.

Over the past three decades, the number of companies involved in media has shrunk considerably. At the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s, these six companies control the vast majority of information flow. This is down from several dozen only 30 years ago. Everything you see, watch, read, and hear goes through these gate keepers.

During the early days of media consolidation, Noam Chomsky wrote a pessimistic piece called the Propaganda Model. It basically stated that government was controlling a lazy media through fear tactics to push through official propaganda. However, I don't think he was quite aware of where the media was heading. Today, the propaganda model is backwards. Media empires are controlling government through fear tactics. For what ends? Further consolidation. To buy up and control all media in the United States, and globally. This hurts journalism and the free movement of ideas, because today there are fewer voices than ever in traditional media.

The internet is the last wild west for the big six to conquer. SOPA helps this by effectively giving them an internet kill switch. There is no due process. All that is required is an accusation, and that's it. The site is pulled. It creates an environment where corporations can commit vigilante justice without being bound to the limits of the Constitution or common law. SOPA supporters already have a long track record of abuse as is. There have been a number of erroneous DMCA claims, and piracy law suits over the past decade.

For social sites like Wikipeida, Google, Facebook, YouTube or even AnandTech, this can be disastrous. What provisions past copyright laws allowed for fair use are implicitly undermined by this bill. It may start at foreign sites but don't think it won't be expanded to domestic censorship as well.

I can fully see SOPA used as a bully tactic to eliminate dissenters, or for hostile takeovers. As is, we simply cannot trust these media empires to do the right thing and not abuse the power they're asking for. There are no guarantees they won't abuse it, and no checks in place to ensure they cannot abuse it.

If you support this bill, you support vigilantism and you oppose the free flow of ideas. This cannot be allowed to pass as it is. There must be strict checks in place to ensure claims are legitimate.
 
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Leros said:
Interesting. The blackout is done using javascript, so you can disable javascript and browser normally (they did this intentionally).
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Yeah, when I went to see what the Wikipedia blackout looked like, everything was normal. If you block scripting from either wikipedia.org or wikimedia.org, that seems to stop the blackout.
 
If Zuckerberg had any balls, Facebook would be blacked out. THEN the masses would scream.

Google would have been a good black out, but as previously stated they could lose business.
 
Homerboy said:
If Zuckerberg had any balls, Facebook would be blacked out. THEN the masses would scream.

Google would have been a good black out, but as previously stated they could lose business.
Click to expand...

For what it's worth, Zuckerberg made a pretty convincing anti-SOPA post on his wall today.
 
ultimatebob said:
For what it's worth, Zuckerberg made a pretty convincing anti-SOPA post on his wall today.
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Wow Zuckerburg wrote a few words, where are the deeds to back it up.

But the SOPA bill is losing congressional sponsors real fast now that WIKI followed up words with actual deeds.
 
actually you can get though all these sites, if you deep dive, i.e. go directly to a URL of an article, the page will be first fully loaded and then redirected to the blackout page, right before it redirects of you hit escape you can stay on the page. I am going to them through the Firefox Wikipedia search bar, works every time...
 
bunnyfubbles said:
google has legitimate competitors with bing recently passing yahoo, FB is an unstoppable freight train that has completely cornered its market
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not entirely. Foursquare is still holding strong. Twitter is quite a strong force, and while Google+ wasn't the biggest success in the world, it's doing moderately well.

Facebook's become less and less attractive over the years, especially to us old timers who started since day 1 of Facebook. It's lost the whole college feel to it.
 
mmntech said:
There is no due process. All that is required is an accusation, and that's it. The site is pulled. It creates an environment where corporations can commit vigilante justice without being bound to the limits of the Constitution or common law. SOPA supporters already have a long track record of abuse as is. There have been a number of erroneous DMCA claims, and piracy law suits over the past decade.
Click to expand...

This is not true. Under SOPA a copyright holder must go to court and get a judge to issue an order to block the site or take it down. How is that not due process? I'm also pretty sure you don't know what a hostile takover is.

I oppose SOPA but the level of FUD on this is ridiculous.
 
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