Mozilla urges its users to raise their voice against SOPA | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla urges its users to raise their voice against SOPA

mozilla.org

699 pointsIndyan41 comments

If only Google or Facebook would use their homepage status to get the word out to the majority of the population. A blacked-out Google Doodle or a notification at the top of the Facebook newsfeed would go a very long way.

Indeed... I am from Brazil and I wish i could help in someway, because this are terrible news.

It's a sad day when Google apparently cares less about social justice than YouPorn.

edit: I withdraw my criticism, see below.

? Google is the largest company standing in public opposition to the SOPA bill, and has publicized its concerns at the hearings.

Fair enough, and I saw their newspaper ad also. That said, I think any real attempt at killing this bill needs to include a show of grassroots opposition, not merely trying to out-hollywood hollywood with money and public testimony.

Listening to Google right now at the hearing. They do a pretty good job educating the room with the problems with this bill.

Unfortunately I doubt Facebook will even mention the SOPA law. Google might put a small piece of text on the bottom of the home page about it, but even then that's a big "maybe."

I don't think Google should politicise its homepage, same goes for Facebook. Once you start opening the floodgates, you start to polarise your service to political persuasions.

Mozilla is rotating this call to action on its browser homepage (about:home), which is heavily trafficked.

Coincidentally, "Sopa" in Greek means "Silence!" [or "shut up!"]

In Portuguese, it's "soup", which also is a somewhat archaic slang for something that's very easy.

In Swedish, it's "piece of garbage".

To explain this to friends & family, tell them to watch this video: http://vimeo.com/31100268 - or just the part from 1:08-2:31

For all those who are interested, http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_11162011.html is the link to the hearing's webcast, which began at 10 a.m. EST.

Just watched for 30min. It looks they all agree the Internet needs to be controlled.

They who? Congress? If that's the case I'm not terribly surprised.

I haven't been able to get the stream to start all morning.

The House Judiciary committee. It hasn't been voted on yet.

When is it to be voted on?

If someone asks you what SOPA stands for, you can tell them it's the "Stop Online Privacy Act".

It's only a Hamming distance of 3 from the real name.

Do you mean Levenshtein distance :)

the more government oppression applied to the Internet - the sooner a government oppressure resistant alternative would emerge. The current Internet is a great thing, yet it is fundamentally flawed by being that vulnerable to any whimse of concentrated political and economical interest.

While it can't be presicely described how the future free Internet would look, it is possble to imagine some modern implementation of something like the old Fido network with a set of satellites and cables/floats in the international space and waters and the next generation WiFi that will have on the scale of couple orders of magnitude greater range.

Decentralization.

Imagine something like a mashup between bittorrent, usenet, and TOR (store & forward + P2P) integrated into a web browser client front-end.

This sort of thing has been on my mind for years now, but it never occurred to me that it could actually be a necessary invention for maintaining a free and open internet in the developed world.

Check out this project: https://freenetproject.org/

I can't wait for someone to post a link to the Pirate Bay in the comments, thereby providing legal justification for taking down sites that criticize SOPA.

whitehouse.gov needs a comment function.

Create a petition.

I wish they would've done the same thing for the Digital Economy Bill in the UK.

yeah we only had 20,000 letters sent in by consumer groups and a huge twitter campaign #debill.

All that meant was a discussion where the MP in charge of the bill thought that the IP address meant Intellectual Property address and all of Labour turning up for 5 mins to vote it through before the general election..

There's a few enquiries into the bill (Ofcom, parliamentary enquiry etc). I believe the current government is pretty opposed to it (Conservatives and Lib Dem both value the individuals freedom). Also since the majority of ISPs are completely opposed to it I doubt it'll ever get enforced.

Peter Mandleson is an evil evil person though.

https://supporters.eff.org/thanks/thank-you-opposing-interne...

"The service is not available. Please try again later."

Is it too late to do any sort of petition since the hearing is today?

No. The congressional hearing only just started, no voting yet. Now is a good time to call your US rep (if you live in the US) http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ . I was surprised that several of my IL reps did not have a stance on the issue! Calling is better than emailing. I know, it's a backwards system.

> several of my IL reps

Is that a Chicago politics thing?

Two Senators, one Congressman. If you live in one of the 50 states, you have three federal lawmakers who represent you.

If you have multiple residences or an office in another district, you might have more relevant congresscritters who you'd want to call, even if you can't directly vote for them.

Are there online petitions in the US?

If you're in the US, contact your representatives.

Email from EFF's site:

http://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?a...

Email from OpenCongress:

http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/new?bil...

Snailmail from SendWrite:

https://sendwrite.com/sopa/

Petition from DemandProgress:

http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/pipa_house/

And there's good, old-fashioned phone calls: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

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