Wikipedia to join reddit in SOPA blackout Wednesday

Reminds me of the general plot of Atlas Shrugged... Elite members of society, responsible for some of the infrastructure of commerce, decide to "drop out." If Ayn Rand believed in God, she'd be looking down from heaven and smiling.

This is a protest, noisy but impact-free, and that's all it is. To have any impact, the infrastructure has to turn its back on the firms supporting SOPA and their bought congresscritters so their domains don't resolve and their emails are blackholed and rejected. A day of that treatment might bring home to these people that "the Internet interprets the US as brain-damaged and routes around it".

It may all end up as performance art but I am hopeful that the unclued masses may take a look at the messages on these sites and say WTF. We'll be participating as well on my 3 sites too, although I doubt a readership of 3 dozen will make much impact.

Please don't just blank your page like Linux Today recently was. Please post or point to a succinct statement of the issue. I'm hoping that WP will do the same.

Linux Today is chronically broken and their overlords refuse to fix it. We don't want to be like them :) I'll protest on my little sites too, putting up an explanation page. The spammers who infest the comments will be sad, I'm sure.

These kinds of things are useful in my opinion. We tend to find in our circles that the SOPA issues etc are big news and widely known about.

I actually think that outside of the computing area, this is not that well known, or if people have heard about SOPA then they would not necessarily understand what it means to them.

Having a well used site like Wikipedia downing tools and putting up a page explaining what is happening is a pretty powerful marketing tool for those opposed to the proposed legislation. I think it is a good idea.

Some people are going to have a "setup" page explaining what PIPA is (or what SOPA was) and then a click through to get to the page. We're not going to do that. We will be blacked out for the entire 24 hour period at HeliOS. Blogger has a tool that will do the same but early reports is that it can completely erase your entire site and I'm not going to risk that. We will have the day's blog with the warning and the follow-up info but it won't be completely blacked out there. The others will, and will include linked info.

@skelband

Agreed! It seems to me that Wikipedia downing and getting publicised about this gets significantly MORE people informed on SOPA (and PIPA) than they otherwise would be.

2c

I will be participating in the blackout, too. My personal site http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog will deliver an explanatory page to all requests.

Nobody ever visits my personal website (not even me). If they did I might consider blacking it out...

I will not be participating in the blackout.

http://mindplusplus.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/no-protest-blac...

Quoting:I will not be participating in the blackout.

http://mindplusplus.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/no-protest-blackout-here/

Same goes for Twitter.

See today's story in The Washington Post Business section 'SOPA: Twitter will not join Wikipedia, Reddit in blackout', found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/sopa-twitter-will-not-join-wikipedia-reddit-in-blackout/2012/01/17/gIQAvDta5P_story.html

Well, well, well, indeed.

http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/25523/SOPA_Not_Shelved_He...

(sorry if the formatting is messed up on desktops)

LT has been down since at least Friday or Saturday (by some weirdness Google and DuckDuckGo are still indexing new stories, but I have been unable to actually view ANYTHING at LT . Not even the site banner -- not even advertisements :-P .

{edit: Ooops -- correction, LT appears to be back up, today.}

Anyways, the LT situation clearly has nothing to do with protesting SOPA or PIPA.

@BernardSwiss,...... I see that infamous Craigslist has its first-appearing homepage blacked out too. Thsi is VERY noticeable publicity which clearly has EVERYTHING to do with protesting SOPA and PIPA!!

-fb

Gus, nicely worded, nicely done.

Linux Today is broken. As usual. As it has been for the past seven years. Its new overlords are just as dim as its old ones.