Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/14/boing-boing-will-go-dark-on-ja.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

by llambda • 15 years ago

188 24 15 years ago

boingboing.net

waitwhat• 15 years ago

January 18 is shaping up to be my most productive day ever.

SageChara• 15 years ago

I agree!

jQueryIsAwesome• 15 years ago

You don't fool anyone, you are probably going to use Google cache to explore old threads on reddit and boingboing (or maybe i just gave you the idea... sorry?)

Tim-Boss• 15 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the latest list of websites taking action on the 18th?

kazoolist• 15 years ago

Mentioned at the end of the article: http://sopastrike.com/

Dejital• 15 years ago

Not reliable. There seems to be little if no policing of the submissions, so sites like Facebook and Google are on the list several times and likely submitted by jokers.

ErrantX• 15 years ago

Wikipedia is probably blacking out, so long as someone makes a decision somewhere :)

literalusername• 15 years ago

Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet

If it's war, then we ought to develop some kind of offensive strategy.

daniel-cussen• 15 years ago

Repeal DMCA!

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

And cancel the last 20 year copyright extension. Better yet, overhaul the copyright laws, leave copyright to 10-20 years only, just like it was originally, and strengthen the fair-use laws. Allow anyone to take any creative work and remix it however they want as long as it's for non-commercial purposes.

It's time to get pro-active rather than re-active every time they come out with a new bill. Let's change their laws before they change ours.

rradu• 15 years ago

By blacking out, do they mean actually removing all content for that one day, or just something symbolic like applying a dark theme on their site?

dangrossman• 15 years ago

The most they'd ever do is a stylesheet change or an overlay on top of the text. Actually removing their content, for even a day, would irreparably screw up their search traffic in the future. Any site that big is being constantly revisited by Googlebot.

beschizza• 15 years ago

Conceivably, we could serve the normal site to search engine spiders and black it for everyone else. However, we have a complex load balancing setup that may make this impossible.

An all-black theme would do the trick, but redirecting using Temporary Redirect shouldn't screw up search if we do it right.

hammock• 15 years ago

If Google wanted to show support against SOPA, have they considered telling their bots to grant everyone amnesty on Jan 18 for taking down their content? Merely blacking out the color scheme of your site is great for awareness, but it doesn't do much to put you in the experience of what it means when a website is taken down.

dk• 15 years ago

I wonder. I run a website that has ranked on Google page 1 for the relevant search terms just behind Wikipedia for years now. But it's been on the backburner for some time; I've basically been ignoring it. A couple months ago a server migration that escaped my notice took it completely offline. Totally dropped off Google. Well, I just updated the DNS record a few days ago and within a day or two it was back on page 1, right behind Wikipedia.

So in my experience Google is remarkably forgiving.

patrocles• 15 years ago

Reducing the usefulness of the Internet sucks as tactics go.

SOPA advocates are taking the war to the legislative process since they're losing elsewhere. Let's answer by raising the political stakes: organize instant protests, flashmob their buildings, name and vocally shame the supporters.

HistoryInAction• 15 years ago

http://nytm.org/sos/ has what you need: NYC protest at the offices of Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand for their PIPA endorsements.

We want more cities to come on board. Can you help?

jstsch2• 15 years ago

Simple piece of code to put in your .htaccess if you want to join in:

  # RewriteEngine on (enable if you don't have it yet)
  RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} ^20120118$
  RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR} >7
  RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR} <20
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sopastrike.com/ [L]

This will redirect any request, to your protest site of choice on Jan 18th, between 08:00 and 20:00 (local webserver time). Assuming Apache of course!

GigabyteCoin• 15 years ago

I have a feeling sopastrike.com will go down that day. What about you?

jstsch2• 15 years ago

If everyone would redirect to sopastrike.com, yeah :) would be good to set up a generic black page with simple explanatory text somewhere, hosted on something nice 'n scalable.

tete• 15 years ago

"Send your visitors on the 18th to this link [http://americancensorship.org/] to contact congress and ask them to tweet #SOPASTRIKE all day."

So maybe:

  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://americancensorship.org/ [L]

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

We need a StartupPAC

Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA

Related Stories