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PROTECT IP Act Breaks the Internet

PROTECT IP Act Breaks the Internet
I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to vote "no" on cloture for S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, on Jan. 24th. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. It does not deserve floor consideration. I urge my representative to vote "no" on SOPA, the corresponding House bill. Over coming days you'll be hearing from the many businesses, advocacy organizations, and ordinary Americans who oppose this legislation because of the myriad ways in which it will stifle free speech and innovation. The video above discusses the Senate version of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). PIPA would give the government new powers to block Americans' access websites that corporations don't like.

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web College researchers often need more than Google and Wikipedia to get the job done. To find what you're looking for, it may be necessary to tap into the invisible web, the sites that don't get indexed by broad search engines. The following resources were designed to help you do just that, offering specialized search engines, directories, and more places to find the complex and obscure. #FactsWithoutWikipedia: Twitter Users Fill Wikipedia Blackout Void With Hilarious 'Facts' (TWEETS) After Wikipedia shut down at midnight on Tuesday, Jan. 18, students everywhere began to panic about how they were going to do their homework. The online encyclopedia's temporary closure is intended to signal their protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), both of which are being considered by congress as ways to curb online piracy and copyright infringement. Instead of pages of information, visitors to Wikipedia are now greeted with a black-and-white page reads "Imagine a world without free knowledge" and a link to information on the two controversial bills. Just when students everywhere were about to throw in the towel, the Twitterverse decided that, if they couldn't have actual facts, they would be forced to make up their own. Below are a few choice tweets we found that were tagged with "#FactsWithoutWikipedia" that present some interesting and hilarious takes on the truth in a world without Wikipedia.

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs' traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked. Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers.

Permission To Speak: Conservative Lord suggests that government “may end up regulating” the blogosphere « Richard Wilson's blog Last month Liberal Conspiracy reported on plans by David Hunt, a Conservative Member of the House of Lords, and the new head of the Press Complaints Commission, to “invite political bloggers to volunteer for regulation by the PCC’s replacement”. Hunt was also reported to have said that bloggers posed a “greater challenge” than the tabloid press, and that “At the moment, it is like the Wild West out there. We need to appoint a sheriff.” How SOPA Affects Students, Educators, and Libraries Big media groups like the MPAA and the RIAA have historically targeted college campuses with “anti-piracy” measures, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — the blacklist bill they’re trying to push through Congress — is no exception. The bill’s supporters insist that it targets only “rogue” foreign sites dedicated to piracy, but its vague language and overbroad enforcement methods all but ensure it could be used to stifle student and educator speech. Open educational resources Some sites with reason to be particularly concerned are international communities dedicated to “open educational resources” (OERs), which are created to be shared, built upon, and used in education. Sites like the Japan Opencourseware Consortium or Universia, which offer resources from more than 1,000 universities and represents over 10 million students, could fall into this category.

Over 40 Internet Companies Come Out Publicly Against SOPA (Including Us) Since the list of 120 or so SOPA supporting companies hit the Internet yesterday, the lines have been drawn; People are publicly promising to pull thousands of domains from domain registrar Godaddy after it appeared on the list as a supporter. Other people are calling those people “bullies.” Whether you’re for or against it SOPA has become somewhat of a pain point amongst techies, with the overwhelming majority, including myself and almost every other writer on the TechCrunch team, leaning heavily towards “against.” SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) essentially allows ISPs to block entire domains because a piece of hosted content infringes copyright.

How SOPA could actually break the internet We’ve discussed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) at some length, but haven’t said much about the serious technical problems with the bill as its written. Depending on how its implemented, SOPA could demolish the cohesive structure of the internet by damaging the core functionality of the Domain Name Service (DNS) system. As written, SOPA tasks ISPs with preventing US internet users from accessing a site that’s been deemed to contain infringing content by preventing their browsers “from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address.” The question is, how might that sort of blocking actually be accomplished? Existing legal structures already allow the government to petition Verisign to remove the DNS records that resolve to any given website (we’ll use pirates.com as an example).

Stop SOPA! A Plea from the Inventors of the Internet What happens when you combine an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with elected representatives who don’t know the difference between DNS, IM, and MP3? You get SOPA--draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens. And it may just pass.

What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012 The Internet is in an uproar over the Stop Online Piracy Act. The battles lines are drawn. Big Media (the record labels, movie studios and TV networks) support the bill while Big Tech (search engines, open source platforms, social networks) oppose it. The bill, introduced to Congress by Representative Lamar Smith, is ostensibly supposed to give the Attorney General the ability to eliminate Internet piracy and to "protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. support of infringing sites." There is a lot that may be wrong with SOPA, but putting the power to censor the Internet into the hands of the government is chief among citizens' concerns.

MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It Right now Congress is considering two bills—the Protect IP Act, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—that would be laughable if they weren't in fact real. Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I'd have to tell them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional. Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the "good faith" assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant.

Thank you for picking this pearl-this will affect the world. by kathologist Nov 18

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