BLACKOUT
TORONTO, JANUARY 20, 2012 (PHNO @ SITE5) Graham McMillan (photo) - In an effort to
combat online piracy, new legislation is being introduced in the U.S. Congress
that will ultimately stifle future innovation and effectively lead to censorship
of the Internet.
The most recent bill introduced this October is called SOPA (Stop Online
Piracy Act) and it seeks to increase the powers available to fight piracy.
Although we believe that intellectual property should be protected, this
specific bill is misguided and will ultimately have little to no effect on
stopping piracy at a severe cost to Internet freedom.
SOPA would grant the U.S. government the ability to block almost any website
on the Internet if the site is perceived to be an "infringing site."
Search engines would be required to remove the site from their search
listings and payment processors and advertisement networks would be forbidden
from doing business with the site.
The bill provides little detail about what would constitute an infringing
site, which makes the potential for abuse far greater.
We have already seen how these kind of systems can be abused. In 2010, ICE
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) mistakenly seized a domain name belonging
to a music blog and labeled it as a "rogue site" — the domain name was not
returned until a year later (source: http://nyti.ms/uF73mZ).
As any online business owner knows, the loss of their domain name is the loss
of their online brand. Pirates will simply relocate their website to a domain
outside the control of the United States, but a legitimate business would not
survive being mistakenly added to this blacklist. This bill also calls into
question the legality of many websites that exist today which are based largely
around user-generated content.
You can help stop this legislation!
Please take a moment to call your representative in Congress to let them know
how you feel about the Internet and how SOPA threatens the future of the
Internet.
You can find contact information for your specific representatives here: http://www.contactingthecongress.org
Wikipedia traffic surged during SOPA blackout
By Athima Chansanchai
Despite a self-imposed blackout yesterday to protest SOPA/PIPA, Wikipedia's
English language website attracted more traffic on Wednesday than the previous
day, and millions learned about the proposed legislation.
In the 24 hours Wikipedia blacked out its content (though, as we told you
yesterday, there were ways of getting around that), more than 162 million viewed
the Wikipedia home page, through which more than eight million looked up their
elected representatives' contact information via the tool provided there. (You
can also find out via this U.S. House of Representatives link.)
As a result of Wikipedia and other efforts pointing voters to state reps,
congressional websites were overwhelmed with traffic — enough to shut them down
temporarily. By the end of the day, 18 senators defected to the other side of
PIPA, no longer supporting it.
Wikipedia also found that, "At one point,#wikipediablackout constituted 1% of
all tweets, and SOPA accounted for a quarter-million tweets hourly during the
blackout."
In its post mortem of the blackout's effects, Wikipedia offers a FAQ for
those interested in following the progress of SOPA and PIPA, which it says is
not dead, "not at all."
One answer sums up Wikipedia's position on the proposed legislation: "These
bills are presented as efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by
foreign web sites, but in our opinion, they do so in a way that would disrupt
free expression and harm the Internet."
More than 12,700 have commented on Wikipedia's blog post announcing the
blackout.
Security company Zscaler tracked a "noticeable" uptick in unique visitors to
the online encyclopedia in the first 8 hours of the Jan. 18, though "these
additional visitors are not incurring that much more bandwidth for Wikipedia" in
that there was "only a slight percentage increase in Wikipedia web transactions
today."
So, people weren't going to Wikipedia to dilly dally — they spent time on
fewer entries. At least in the first half of the day. (I'm sure news accounts
like ours helped fill in the missing pieces.)
The top visited pages yesterday, besides the home page, was — wait for it —
the SOPA initiative, as people were probably trying to figure out why they were
being blocked from easy access to Wikipedia.
Zscaler dubbed such behavior as "online rubber necking." (I call it normal
curiosity.)
Another set of statistics shows the dramatic interest in SOPA that culminated
in yesterday's online stampede to find out more about it.
A Lithuania-based database engineer at Facebook, Domas Mituzas, who also does
software development for Wikipedia, "put together a system to gather access
statistics from Wikipedia's squid cluster" and a visualization of that data
appears on this site.
There, you can search for any article in Wikipediaand find out how many page
views it had in whatever month you choose in the drop down menu. For Jan. 2012,
searches for SOPA on Wikipedia led to the article being viewed 653,058 times
this month. On Jan. 18, it was viewed nearly 463,000 times, so that one day
accounted for most of the views so far this month.
As you can see from the chart below, the page views on the day before, the
17th, was only 112,170.
Based on our informal poll from yesterday, the overwhelming majority of you
weren't annoyed with the lack of easy access to Wikipedia yesterday (81 percent
of 1,355 votes).
Obviously, those who wanted to get to it got to it yesterday, one way or
another.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.
Microsoft publicly opposes SOPA in its current form, while Comcast/NBC Universal
is listed as a supporter of SOPA on the House Judiciary Committee website.)
How to access Wikipedia during the SOPA blackout
By Athima Chansanchai
Those wondering how to get around the Wikipedia SOPA blackout can breathe a
little easier: the crowd-sourced encyclopedia is still available through mobile
versions, disabling Javascript or translating another language's version of it.
So really folks, there's no need to panic. You can still look up every little
curiosity that crosses your mind if you try to following options (it helps if
you have a smartphone or tablet):
•Download an app that can access Wikipedia, such as Wikidroid for Android, or
Wikipedia Mobile for the iOS devices. I have Wikidroid on my Samsung Droid
Charge and it was working fine this morning. (The apps also work while offline,
too.)
•You can pull up the mobile version of the site, that seems to be functioning
normally as well.
•For those who really want to see it on their laptops and desktops, you can
disable Javascript. (Thanks to NewScientist for that resource.) You can pull up
the main Wikipedia page and choose a different country to access, because only
the English version is doing the blackout in protest today. If you are on the
Chrome browser, it will ask you if you want the page translated. Answer oui.
(Yes.) and voila (here), you have Wikipedia again. (I picked the French version
because it's the second largest repository of articles, about 1.2 million, next
to the English version, which has 3.8 million.)
•If this ever happens again, you can also go to the cached version on Google.
(Open the preview and click on the cached link.) But let's hope Google isn't
going through a blackout at the same time. (Heaven forbid.)
Some people, though, have become even more creative in the wake of the one
day that people can't seem to live without Wikipedia. Just look at former
"Jeopardy" champ and human encyclopedia @KenJennings and what he is willing to
do to help people out:
Ok, ok, maybe that's not the way to go, but you've got to applaud the guy for
some effort, right?
You can also turn to Twitter for help. The
Guardian says it'll try to answer questions posted with the #altwiki
hashtag, conscripting journalists from the Washington Post and National Public
Radio to help, too.
The Guardian is going old school as well via Guardipedia,
with editor Patrick Kingsley using Encyclopaedia Britannica and Who's Who to
help folks who long ago ditched their volumes (or never had them).
Of course, you can go the old school route too, locally, and call your public
library for help. Librarians are amazing resources and I'm sure they'd be glad
to be of service since sites like Wikipedia have largely eliminated the
questions that used to go their way.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.
Microsoft publicly opposes SOPA in its current form, while Comcast/NBC Universal
is listed as a supporter of SOPA on the House
Judiciary Committee website.)
My mistake — the German version is the second biggest, not the
French!
SITE 5, PHNO'S DOMAIN SITE HOST WILL STAGE
PROTEST BLACKOUT VS SOPA
Many of you read my previous post about SOPA, The Stop Online Piracy
Act, and how it poses a real threat to future freedom and innovation on the
Internet.
Websites built around user-generated content, like Twitter or Reddit, simply
could not exist if SOPA was law.
In order to increase awareness about the dangers of SOPA, many websites will
be staging "blackouts" to show their opposition to SOPA and educating their
visitors on this misguided legislation.
Site5 will be staging a blackout of our website on the 18th and 23rd of
January and if you operate a website we encourage you to do the same!
If you are using WordPress there is a plugin that we are hosting which will
allow you to easily display a message about SOPA to your visitors and customize
the dates it will be shown.
You can view a preview of that message and the plugin can be downloaded
directly from the WordPress website below:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sopa-blackout-plugin
Chief News Editor: Sol
Jose Vanzi
© Copyright, 2012 by PHILIPPINE HEADLINE
NEWS ONLINE
All rights reserved
PHILIPPINE HEADLINE NEWS
ONLINE [PHNO] WEBSITE
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