Reddit will enact 'nuclear option' to protest SOPA, PIPA Reddit announced today it is to shutter its online doors for 12 hours in protest of legislation that will threaten the very foundations of the web. The news-sharing site is without doubt one the strongest Internet communities the web has ever seen. It is also one of the strongest collective oppositions to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Its users have spearheaded an online war against SOPA from its initial conception, and have campaigned vehemently against the bill now being debated in Congress. Its users helped spur on nearly 90,000 phone calls to U.S. But Reddit has seemingly one last trick up its sleeve: a 'strike' in form of an entire site blackout. From 8am to 8pm U.S. Others have considered a synchronised blackout, from Google to PayPal, Twitter and Wikipedia, in a bid to replicate in the effect SOPA could have on the web and its users. "We're not taking this lightly", the administrators wrote in a Reddit blog post earlier today. Image source: Reddit.
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. I'm not kidding. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998, is a lousy piece of legislation and a very useful lens through which to regard these two new pieces of legislation. This is exactly what will happen with Protect IP and SOPA. The Internet is probably the most important technological advancement of my lifetime. And we're better than that. Please don't just take my word for it. Educate yourself.
Dan Gillmor - Google+ - A Stop SOPA Phone App I've been planning to do an app like… Android Barcode Scanner App Detects If A Product's Maker Supports SOPA Corporate lobbyists be warned. Push a bill like the Stop Online Piracy Act that threatens broad restrictions on the tech industry, and you’ll face some very clever coders focusing all their innovation on fighting back. The latest example: a tool that makes identifying and boycotting SOPA-supporting companies as easy as a tap on your smartphone. No More SOPA, a free Android application developed by a group of students at the University of British Columbia, allows users to scan any product’s barcode and determine if it was made by a company that officially supports SOPA, or even a parent company or subsidiary of a SOPA supporter. The app, which requires downloading the free app Barcode Scanner, uses a public UPC database to find a product’s manufacturer, then queries a remote server to compare the manufacturer with a list of 800 firms with lobbying ties to the bill. Download No More SOPA to your Android phone here.