Wikipedia, Craigslist, Other Sites Black out Against SOPA at Midnight

[shahrukh619]

Wikipedia and some other Internet companies blacked out their websites in one way or the other early Wednesday in protest against controversial legislation in the U.S.


More websites are expected to register their protest by 8:00 am Eastern Time on Wednesday.

Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, which runs humor websites, for example, said in a Twitter message that his company sites would have a blackout from 8.00 am.

Wikimedia Foundation said on Monday that the Wikipedia community had decided to black out its English version to users worldwide to protest against SOPA and PIPA.

In a message titled, "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge", the online encyclopedia said on its English site after the black out at midnight that the U.S. Congress is considering legislation "that could fatally damage the free and open internet". It said it was blacking out Wikipedia for 24 hours to raise awareness.

On Saturday, three officials with U.S. President Barack Obama's administration issued a statement that appeared to oppose SOPA and PIPA. The officials said that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, but the administration would not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.


Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, warned on Twitter on Monday that rumors of the death of SOPA may be premature, and PIPA is still going strong.

U.S. Representative Lamar Smith, the lead sponsor of SOPA and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday he intends to resume the markup session next month. In a markup hearing, a committee votes on amendments to a bill and votes on whether to approve the bill and send it to the full House for action.

Activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation on Wednesday superimposed a banner "Stop Censorship" on its logo and blacked out the background of its website.

Some websites did not shut down access to other pages like Wikipedia did, and only displayed a splash screen on the home page.

Craigslist appeared to have blacked out only its U.S. sites. "Imagine a world without craigslist, Wikipedia, Google, [your favorite sites here]...." it said in a splash screen on its website, while claiming that media companies like Sony and News Corp. want to make "that world your reality". It warned "corporate paymasters" to keep their "clammy hands" off the Internet.

Hacker group Anonymous also joined in the protest by posting messages against SOPA on its websites.

Social news site Reddit said on its website that it would be closing down the site for 12 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA. It had said earlier that it would be closing down the site from 8:00 am Eastern time.

Twitter has however not participated in the protests. "Not shutting down a service doesn't equal not taking the proper stance on an issue", said Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, who in an earlier Twitter message had said that "closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics" was foolish.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente..._midnight.html

[shahrukh619]

Feel sorry for the students who left there assigments till the last day, and were relying on Wiki copy and paste.

Would be funny if some students tell there teachesr that Wikipedia black out there website so they couldn't complete tehre assignment.

[Liberty]

Dinosaur business models lobbying the govt to take on the new era of decentralization and instantaneous access to information: - Fail.

The internet is evolving and I'm no expert in the internet but I guess there will be ways around this. The internet has provided the most amount of information to the most amount of people in history and hopefully what it provides to all of us here will continue into the future.

[IgnitedMind]

Originally Posted by shahrukh619 Feel sorry for the students who left there assigments till the last day, and were relying on Wiki copy and paste. Would be funny if some students tell there teachesr that Wikipedia black out there website so they couldn't complete tehre assignment.

Wikipedia did not close down..if you check their learn more page they gave you the way you can go around....and also its available in mobile devices..

[msd89]

Originally Posted by navroks123 Wikipedia did not close down..if you check their learn more page they gave you the way you can go around....and also its available in mobile devices..

All you gotta do is press escape before the black out page appears.

[IgnitedMind]

Originally Posted by msd89 All you gotta do is press escape before the black out page appears.

yes or google cached!!

[ahamedirshad123]

5 ways to access Wikipedia on Internet Blackout day

1. This is the simplest of all. You just have to tweak a single browser setting. As Wikipedia's blackout implementation uses JavaScript, all you need to do is turn off JavaScript support on your Web browser.

If you are using Firefox, go to Tools > Options > Content. Uncheck the JavaScript option to disable JavaScript.

If you are using IE, go to Tools > Internet Options > Security. Select Internet and then the Custom level option. Under the Scripting section, disable "Active scripting".

On Google Chrome, go to Setting > Options > Under the hood > COntent Settings under Privacy > Choose the "Do not allow any site to run JavaScript" radio button.

But disabling JavaScript on your browser means that you may be unable to access many features on many websites. Therefore remember to turn on JavaScript on your browser when you resume your normal surfing.

2. If you, like most people, reach an Wikipedia article via Google search, instead of clicking on the link to the webpage click on the cached link to see the Google cache of the page.

The link to the Google cache appears when you hover over the link to the page in the Google search engine results and then click on the arrow icon that appears on the right.

3. You can also find the contents of the English Wikipedia replicated at encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, also a search on Reference.com or Answers.com will throw up results with content sourced from Wikipedia.

4. Whether you need to access Wikipedia from your desktop, browser, or phone, there are some offline Wikipedia solutions, which will help you access the site, offline. An open-source offline reader Kiwix lets users acess Wikipedia content offline.

To use Kiwix, you require to download a copy of Wikipedia to your computer. Just download the file and open it on Kiwix.

5. You may also access Wikipedia using mobile apps. By installing any Wikipedia app, like the Wiki Encyclopedia app available on the Android market, on your smartphone or tablet, you will be able to access all Wikipedia content even when the main site is observing a blackout.

[shahrukh619]

thx for telling us the ways to access wiki

[pakistani_banda]

Originally Posted by Liberty Dinosaur business models lobbying the govt to take on the new era of decentralization and instantaneous access to information: - Fail. The internet is evolving and I'm no expert in the internet but I guess there will be ways around this. The internet has provided the most amount of information to the most amount of people in history and hopefully what it provides to all of us here will continue into the future.

if God forbid the laws are passed, then the current Internet may die out and people may stop using it all together. also the law will allow the us govt to force the companies to change the DNS records of the websites, which will make those websites inaccessible to every one who accesses the website, and not just american users. the us govt will basically be controlling the internet as they wish.

the basic structure of the internet will not be harmed. it is just that you will not be able to access by using the domain names that we use. if we know their ip addresses then i am sure we will be able to connect to them.

who knows maybe then dns servers will be instead be hosted by people in their houses. this is a difficult task as alot of space is needed, but it is not impossible.

[jeetu]

I hope this will lead to de-centralized internet taking control way from Americans.

[Arcturus]

Apparently Pippa Middleton was in tears after learning that netizens across the world were opposing her.

Lame I know but couldnt resist

[pakistani_banda]

This app is currently for users who are using Linux based operating systems. To protect yourself against the event if SOPA and/or PIPA get passed and you use loose access to your favorite websites, you should be able to access them if the servers of the websites are still live via their IP-Addresses. I have built a program which gets the IP-Addresses of the domain names that have been saved in an input file and then gets the IP-Addresses and writes them back to another file.

I have uploaded the app on git and you may use it and change it as i have released it as open source software. Also add new domain names which you know to the input file.

In order to know how to modify the app, you will need to know socket programming, especially Berkely Sockets.

The project also contains the executable file. Run the file in the terminal.

Read the README file for more instructions given on the page pointed by the link.

Download the project files from the following link:

Get IP Addresses From-Domain Names