Internet Community Shut Out of Stop Online Piracy Act Hearing - Again | Hacker News Reader

Internet Community Shut Out of Stop Online Piracy Act Hearing - Again

eff.org

110 pointssrl13 comments

I have a enormous amount of respect for the EFF and I am very concerned about SOPA, however I am a little troubled by the tone of the article:

    "Many of the online watchers took to Twitter 
    to voice their concerns about being shut out 
    of the hearing by the poor quality webcast. 
    But the Internet community was shut out 
    of the hearing in a more fundamental way"

I think that the lack of representation in the hearing is appalling. I can certainly imagine that the lack of representation is attributable to malice. But the poor video streaming? I really doubt that the video quality is part of a two pronged plan to shut out the opposition. Given the subject matter I bet that this video stream has attracted more attention than any in the past.

I agree, EFF should have applied Hanlon's razor[1], but it wouldn't have made for as good link bait. :/

[1] "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

How about Grey's Law^? It doesn't really matter why it's wrong, it matters that it's wrong.

^ "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Munroe's Law: It only matters that it's wrong - on the internet.

Source: http://xkcd.com/386/.

I thought the article was pretty clear in attributing the poor streaming to extreme incompetence. The poor quality is concerning not because it's part of a "two-pronged plan" but because it's indicative of Congress's poor grasp of internet technology which is particularly jarring in this context.

Additionally, just because the poor quality wasn't necessarily malicious does not exonerate the committee entirely; the tone of the article is still warranted because the end result is the same regardless of intent and because expecting a watchable stream in this day and age is more than reasonable.

It's almost as if the government doesn't understand how the internet works.

The fact that they can't even stream the video from the hearings properly would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

I'm pretty sure they've got the "series of tubes" part down.

This is just another illustration of how a group of people are trying to change the internet at its core while obviously knowing nothing about it. SOPA is ridiculous.

FWIW, I caught the tail end of the stream and the quality was fine.

I'm looking forward to being able to watch the entire recorded session when it's available. If you're at all interested in the issue, I recommend that you watch this and make up your own mind on it.

Edit:

The recorded video is at http://infodocket.com/2011/11/16/live-video-stream-sopa-stop... I used VLC to view it.

The recorded stream is also up on the house.gov[1] page. I am listening to it now but its slow. Any serious analysis is going to come from reading the transcripts.

[1] http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/wmedia/judiciary/full/full1116...

mplayer -nocache -dumpstream -dumpfile file mms://a1869.v657641.c65764.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1869/65764/v0001/sos1473-1.streamos.download.akamai.com/65768/full/full11162011.wmv

ffmpeg -i file file.someformat

Surely there are some mplayer/ffmpeg experts here. I'm not one of them. There are no doubt more precise and efficient ways to do this but something like the above might work if the streaming is slow going.

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