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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

This is an intriguing idea. The majority of hackers hate this bill, and yet if the lobbyists and politicians pass it, they are going to need us to implement it for them. So maybe it would be some sort of solution, in the worst case, to organize a boycott of any person or company that works on it.

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Hackers hate it, but there are more programmers than "hackers". Think about middle aged family men, career men. They aren't all going to care as strongly or be able to quit.

Also even if you could convince all american talent to boycott it, there's a whole world of people out there who don't care at all, and just like America has been happy to sell censorship tech to the rest of the world for years, I'm sure the rest of the world would be happy to repay :) I don't think Indian or Russian programmers are going to give a toss about it if it pays bills.

Ha or you could just buy back equipment already sent to Chian and Iran.

Which sort of raises the point that American talent has already built this equipment and been selling it for years now. It is way past too late for this boycott to work.

I'm not suggesting we could prevent e.g. Cisco from finding enough people to build this stuff. More that Cisco would steer clear of such projects if working on them would put a black mark on their corporate reputation that would make it harder for them, as a company, to hire good people.

The companies that are likely to a build a lot of this (large government contractors) already have trouble hiring quality developers, any engineering boycott is likely to get lost in the noise.

"good people" is a relative term. If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now? It already to some extent has that problem just by not being a small sexy startup.

I'm not willing to flat out say all the best hackers only want to do startups, but even assuming so, there are still lots of really good career engineers who also probably have no interest in working in a small sexy start up who Cisco can hire. Convincing them all that a nice company job is bad is going to be very hard.

And then there's the fact it's too late and this tech's already been built in america with american talent. They already found the people.

And often these big company products aren't built by the best people. Big government contracts like this have so much bureaucracy to choke the love out of many people. They aren't well written, they are slowly and expensively and they are ugly and horrible but they work. Does this sound like the working conditions that anyone we know would want to work in? Probably not.

Big government projects don't need A* hackers to get out the door sadly and never have.

In my experience most organizations, however mediocre, have some smart people who ended up there by various accidents.

But even in the unlikely event that e.g. Cisco is able to operate without any smart people, it's even more unlikely the people running it see themselves that way. So they would be worried by something that would make it hard to recruit good people.

Good programmers are in such demand right now that it's hard to imagine any company not worrying about something that would make it harder to hire. I think they'd worry especially about the difficulty of hiring recent grads. To undergrads all big companies look pretty similar; it would be a disaster if there was something that made your company look distinctively worse. It's not too hard to imagine a situation in which there was some sort of blacklist of the worst SOPA collaborators, and undergrads knew and avoided them.

That may even be too late. The military has its own programmers and I presume it trains some of them in house, which means it gets then possibly at 18 out of high school and trains them itself. They can be put to any use they are ordered to.

The government in general is probably rarely thought of as sexy and it still gets grads.

I guess I'm decrying this idea because I just do not see it as enough from both sides. I don't see you ever getting 100% of people on board with you and I don't see 100% of sources of software caring. This plan only works if 100% of everyone buys in, as long as one lone group produces the code, SOPA will go into effect. And then theres the fact the tools are already built and at least 10 years old.

This is simply not the solution and any time spent on it is a waste of what little effort we do have that could be vastly better spent else where.

Exactly where? I don't know, I just feel strongly this is not the solution.

As for at least a direction? Look to Larwence Lessig. He's been fighting copy right reform for ages. He was doing it in the 90s and it was getting old. Then after Eldred was lost he kind vanished from that scene. He's now back and he's stepped up a level and is working on Government reform. He realized after they lost that you can't fight in a system that's so broken, so he's now working on System reform instead. If you can spare 10 minutes check out his talk on the Daily show from Dec 13, it does a decent job of summarizing what he's fighting now. Then tell me this is how we can best spend our time :(

I supremely believe we need to step it up at least one level and fight something bigger, this is just a symptom.

Also I believe the world is a sadder harsher and more depressing place and not everyone clings to our ideals like we do. We need a system to take that into account. To be a little more strong handed than "All the hippie flower power new talent won't work for you" because I'm pretty sure there is still more than enough talent to go around to get these jobs done. :(

I'm not saying that the military has never done any programming by itself, because that clearly would be wrong, but the Army doesn't even have an MOS(Job Field) for it. I sincerely doubt that there is a mindless legion of Army trained programmers out there.

Also, the Army does get some grads, but not that many. There are a lot of people who join because they did a year or so in College and didn't like it. There are also a lot of people who didn't even graduate from high school. Bottom line, not many people join the Army under ideal circumstances. I personally would consider having just graduated with a CS degree to be ideal. Unfortunately I am one of the ones who didn't graduate from high school.

I think you're only talking about the enlisted. It's different for officers. A lot of memebers of the military went through a service academy or ROTC scholarship, and the military has been known to pay for furthering education for its officers as well. I know for a fact you can get a CS degree from West Point because my brother has done exactly that.

There are buildings, filled with military research engineers, where the median rank is major and which are a lot like regular office buildings where all the engineers wear ACUs and salute each other in the halls.

EDIT:

Just ot be clear, these folks mostly aren't mindless, but I doubt that they would, on the whole, have any moral objections to implementing something like SOPA. A lot of them would see this as a reasonable way to deal with the Wikileaks of the world.

You didn't graduate from high school and are in the US Army? It's my understanding that the US military today does not (or almost never) takes high school dropouts as enlistees. Even those with a GED or home-schooling would have a very difficult time unless they had college credits as well. So I would doubt your claim that there are "a lot" of people in the military who did not graduate from high school.

In 2002 you could get in with a GED. From my 9 years' experience, there is a disproportionate amount of people with a GED in the Army. It also helps when you test in the top 1% on the ASVAB.

Also, the military has been increasing their requirements lately. As the war draws to a close, and the economy remains in shambles, more people start thinking about joining the military. This means that the Army can be more selective about who they accept.

Is there a shortage of bright minds flocking to work for the "financial services industry" now that they've got a distinctly bad reputation?

Psychopaths, sociopaths, and hackers.

I could draw you a venn diagram if you like.

I can't believe in all your experience, you haven't met extremely smart hackers who are also utterly immoral. A situation like this just means they will be worth more money.

> If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now?

You do a huge disservice to the many excellent hackers that work at Cisco. (Even if you have issues with the company's management, they still have some impressive tech.) You don't need to be all over Hacker News to be brilliant.

Comments like these really highlight the myopic perspective that pervades the valley/startup scene. There is a much bigger world out there than you realize.

Yes sorry, I did go a bit far there, but it does seem pg may feel this way and I was trying to prove even within his belief framework this plan was flawed. I didn't mean to endorse such beliefs and I don't hold them. I've seen enough organizations to know that even big lumbering ones with questionable management can have some incredibly talented people, which just furthers the point :)

I'm sorry, but this post is riddled with so much nonsense it's silly. To think that the hackers of the work, the YCombinator hackers, are somehow the cream of the crop when compared to people at a company like Cisco is incredibly shied sighted.

What is the stuff that needs building for SOPA to be effective? All the rights holders need to know is the name of the domain they want seized, and it gets removed from DNS. Pretty simple and sadly effective.

Edit: For people that think this is difficult - ICE is already doing it quite easily. They contact the company that controls the root domain. For .com, it is VeriSign.

So they know the name that they want removed. Who do they tell? How do they tell them? Do they call on the phone? Do they enter it in a web form? Who wrote that web app? Who maintains the server that runs it? Who edits the DNS record to remove the name or writes the software that does so?

There are a number of intermediate steps between "knowing the name" and "the DNS record gets removed". DNS servers are not yet controlled telepathically, to my knowledge.

Have you seen all the ICE FBI domain seizures over the last year? That part is already done and has been running along taking hundreds of domains in its first year of operations

Yes, they seized 150 domains. I would not be surprised if they printed the list out and handed it over, and someone had a very boring afternoon of banning them. What happens when a counterfeiter registers 1000 domains? or 10000? or 100000? That's all besides the point. The point is that somebody who knows this is a bad idea had to be involved in making it happen. I want that person to stand up and refuse to do it. There are thousands of engineers working at the companies that are advocating this law. How long would Sony stay in business if its engineering staff up and quit?

DNS could be circumvented or supplanted. The real horror scenario is language mandating dropping addresses from routing tables making it into a treaty.

and yet the likes of the nsa, fbi, etc have never lacked for good (in the technical sense) people to write surveillance software. heck, there are some pretty sophisticated spammers out there, and the spam industry is almost universally regarded as the cesspool of the tech world. if sopa does need to get implemented, i'm sure questionable small companies across the nation would flock to bid for the job.

We might be able to enlist the technical help of spammers like that. They may not like SOPA either? I wouldn't be surprised if all technical people, regardless of what they do as their job, are against SOPA and other things like it.

i'm pretty sure that the spammers are personally against spam too, as in they would not like to receive it. my point is that people are more than willing to implement something they would not like personally applied to them, for money, the challenge, job security or whatever.

Yeah. Look what we did to Visa and Mastercard after they screwed Wikileaks. Cisco's gonna be totally scared!

Since SOPA would result in various American internet companies being crippled (censoring those would result in the death of the company if a large portion of their users is American), there would be plenty of other countries affected negatively by the passing of SOPA.

Like what? In some of the countries I mentioned they already have replacements. You think google is big in china? Try Baidu. Somehow the Chinese economy has managed to struggle on :P

And Iran? Syria?

There are already lots of countries out there with tougher laws that have also gotten rid of this companies influences and are able to carry on. And some of them also have successful tech industries despite it.

We need a better solution then revolt of the entitled well off white nerds.

How about instead we pour all our money into counter lobby or governmental reform groups, like what Larwence Lessig is up to these days. That may be the only way to change things.

This idea of a protest is at least a decade too late.

Please restrain yourself from swipe generalizations about Indian or Russian programmers.

Those were merely used as examples since both countries have a large pool of programmers. The same would apply to any developer anywhere

There will always be those who prostitute themselves out to build the software to support the bill. Some companies, those most likely to be be the victim of litigation by those in favor of the bill will have no choice but to implement the software due to the threat of litigation damages.

However, the best way to combat litigation damages would be a threat to those same companies from every network that connects to them. i.e. an internet embargo against any company that implements the filtering and changes to the DNS.

At the end of the day networks need to connect to other networks. If a company implements software that filters it, every network that doesn't have the same obligation can embargo those businesses so that those businesses have no choice but to fight the MPAA and RIAA.

Treat those that implement the technology like a cancer and "excise" them from the network.

Following the money is the only way to prevent the technological implementation of SOPA from spreading. There needs to be an equally or more costly financial threat from the anti-SOPA companies.

It doesn't even need to be at the network level. The browser level is sufficient. Chrome, Firefox and Internet explorer (built by 3 organizations that are against SOPA) could all embargo sites at the browser level in the default installations of the browsers. The majority of Internet dollars travel through the browser. The browsers could sniff for DNS systems implementing SOPA and blacklist them. If your DNS implements SOPA then you aren't part of the internet. If they want a browser that supports networks that implement SOPA, let them build it themselves and spend time and money trying to get their browser adopted.

The search engine level is another approach. Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo could reduce the search rank of every site on networks that implements SOPA.

SOPA uses legislation to break the technological contract that keeps the internet together. Break the technological contract and you should no longer part of the Internet.

> There will always be those who prostitute themselves out to build the software to support the bill.

I think I'm opposed to the term "prostitute" in this context. What if I need to keep my job to purchase medication to keep my wife and children alive, and that medication is prohibitively expensive without insurance?

At that point, I wouldn't be a prostitute - arguably I would be a hostage.

If you have the right to quit and find another job it's still prostitution regardless of your personal circumstances. Prostitutes have bills to pay too. The only prostitutes that qualify as hostages would be those that end up in that profession due to human trafficking. If you were human trafficked into building software to support the bill, I could see your point.

No, your wife and children would be hostages. You would still be a prostitute.

You don't suppose a lot of actual, real-life prostitutes are in situations more desperate than that?

there's no funnier distraction than being horny

not your personal army, nancy. get back to work, backboner wont code itself.

Very smart people have built nuclear bombs, nerve gas bombs, and weapons of plague.

People with the same ethics will be hired to build censorship and be happy to take home the paycheck.

I would definitely have participated in the Manhattan Project if asked - it was necessary to stop the Nazis. On the other hand, I would definitely not work on SOPA.

Don't confuse what is necessary with what is merely expedient.

People have different ideas about what is necessary. Calling the Manhattan Project "necessary" without thinking much about it is reckless. I've heard accounts from many of the scientists and workers, and many were quite horrified about the results (incidentally, against the Japanese, not Nazis). Presumably many do conclude that developing a nuclear weapon was "necessary," but not without considerably ethical debate.

It would be again much different if the Manhattan Project was something to be used against your fellow countrymen.

A number of other weapons of great destruction have been created outside of the Manhattan Project.

Accenture will be thrilled to build The Great Firewall of America, and they're sufficiently capable of doing it, especially since they'll have an effectively unlimited budget. And sadly, there's more than one Accenture in the world.

The main enforcement mechanism is domain seizure, which already works quite well already, unfortunately. It's pretty likely that there will be a darknet DNS system or DNS alternative, but that's not a great outcome for anyone - more confusion, more malware.

Maybe a general strike would work better. Everyone should just stop writing code for their employers on Monday.

EDIT:

I made a submission about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3361689

text

''' The world depends on software. We, the world's programmers, write the software. SOPA threatens many things we believe in and care about. Letter writing and traditional means have not worked to stop SOPA. The only alternative is direct action.

In the 1960's direction was sitting on buses and swimming in pools. During the industrial revolution it was strikes in front of factories and rail roads. Occupying may get a lot of news coverage but protesters can be removed by force. No one can make us write code. If we stop, no one can do it for us.

I call for a General Programmer strike. We should set a day. '''

Good luck with that one.

While the world does depend on software, it does not depend on the code you are writing today. If programmers went on strike the world would continue to turn with very, very few problems. In time, of course, things would unravel, but you'd have to be willing to sit through an incredibly long strike.

Also your job would probably be outsourced within a week.

Your post reminds me very strongly of this aphorism: http://www.despair.com/worth.html "Just because you're necessary, doesn't mean you're important."

It would only take a small minority of hackers to actually build it though. SOPA backers would probably put up the, upper limit, 100 million it would take to pay 10 brillant but selfish engineers to build the thing.

you are correct so you have to low-ball your bid and say you can do it for less, say 50 million. A total steal. Then you delay. Delay delay delay. When they fire you, get your friend to promise the same thing you promised. Incompetence is not a failing, but merely a tool in need to the right time.

I don't think Raytheon or SAIC would feel very threatened by a consumer boycott.

I'm not sure you read the article or pg's post. Consumers aren't boycotting. Programmers and those building SOPA would quit, so Raytheon and SAIC wouldn't have an employees to build it.

I've known lots of contractors for companies such as SAIC (I was one myself for a few years, not for SAIC, but for another much smaller company in Indianapolis) and they will have no such compunctions.

Sorry, pg - I know you talk with a lot of smart people, but you don't have to be too smart to break something. You just have to be venal, and there's never a shortage of venality.

This boycott is doomed to failure from the get-go.

Not a consumer boycott; an employee boycott. It might make a company think twice before touching this type of work if they knew it would make it impossible to hire or retain good programmers.

A boycott might have worked in a better economy, but there are far too many unemployed workers capable of implementing SOPA restrictions that would love a job, regardless the moral implications.

Also, the employees that work at SAIC/Raytheon/federal contracting are already more used to working on things that are morally questionable. Sometimes they're black-box implemented (where each party makes only a small part of it, and it is then pieced together later,) but usually it isn't.

I like the idea, but so far the attempts to make that happen with companies that work on the Great Firewall of China have been, I think, pretty unsuccessful. Cisco's gotten some bad press at times, but programmers still go work for them.

Many of employees have mouths to feed, and they might become unemployable if the company they're applying needs references and comes to know of this. Not to mention guest workers on H1 visas who have to pack up and leave the country along with children the day after they quit the job.

It's worked before and I would use stronger words than boycott; like blockade and strike. Doing economic damage by refusing to work on it or by refusing to buy their products or anything else is a damn fine idea and it's worked in the past for various trade unions.

The only thing is that we need a support network for people who refuse to work on it. Like say an employee and Cisco wants to blow the whistle on all the invasive tech they work on or wants to stop working on SOPA-related tech. They need to be able to do that without fearing that their family will go hungry because they wont get a paycheck anymore.

Union dues and donations were used for supporting striking workers. We have things like Kickstarter, Paypal, Bitcoin, etc. I don't see why we can't pitch in and donate to support any hackers who refuse to work on SOPA-related tech.

they are going to need us to implement it for them

Its a nice idea, but that is flat-out not true.

While I would love to see this happen, it won't be very hard to convince many people, developers included, that the entire purpose is to stop knock-off handbag sites, scummy download sites, and shady online gambling operations, and I'm sure they can provide enough glaring examples of piracy that the argument will seem reasonable. Coupled with the fact that it would be somebody's job on the line, I'm afraid that the boycott would be doomed to failure, behind the aegis of corporate anonymity for any individuals involved.

Alternatively one could boycott the entertainment companies lobbying for the bill. Which really is not much of a sacrifice.

Raiding the people at the company that gets the contract might be a more ethical and effective action, especially if some of those people feel stuck working there.

The company may be able to replace those workers, but churn could really hurt them.

> organize a boycott of any person or company that works on it.

This is dangerously like a witch hunt. This tool is theirs, not ours.

But I agree we may need better tools to protect the things we hold dear.

Actually now that you've said it, we could start a boycott right now of the companies who are supporting the bill.

Agreed - likely low effect, but we should all do this anyway if we haven't already begun (I've blackholed a few of them already in /etc/hosts just because their sites do things like auto-play video that you can't stop).

Here's a list of supporters for reference:

http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/12/who-wants-to-break-t...

Good info here, too, on the money trail:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/money

It only takes one.

A union of global programmers. Has a nice ring to it. Needs to have an incentive to join and keep the lobbyists out. Same problem that stackoverflow has to keep out trolls and idiots. In this case the trolls are riaa, mpaa, national interests to take over the internet and those who wish not to contribute, but to be armchair dictators of the most powerful tool ever made by mankind.

A union of global "programmers/activists" already exists. It's called Anonymous. Honestly, we as programmers have to fight this evil with a greater evil -- create a new internet and/or get Anonymous intimately involved in this current affair.

dura lex, sed lex.

Hey Paul, I'm trying to raise a seed round for my startup. Our organization will match any offer made to any engineer to design or implement any system for censorship of the Internet, and employ that engineer building tools to resist censorship.

I figure we only need a few hundred million to get off the ground... How much can I put you down for?

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