While I understand your sentiments towards SOPA, are you really going to distance yourself from all of these companies?
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...
Funding a company that supports a company that supports SOPA is just one step away from supporting a company that supports SOPA...which in turn is just one step away from supporting SOPA. Scary, isn't it?
Remember when Glenn Beck was still on Fox and people were crying continuously? Nothing worked until they started boycotting the companies advertising for him.
I had only heard of 5 of those companies, but this one stood out. Tasc.com
Checkout one of their services:
Cyberwarrior training
http://www.tasc.com/capabilities/cyberwarrior_training/
"Cyber security requirements have changed: hackers have started working full time for criminal syndicates; spammers and adware/spyware developers are now using the same code as worm writers; and organizations are increasingly on the front page news for losing customer data. You need to protect your information now.
The sheer complexity of the Internet makes it difficult to understand and defend against attacks. You may be unaware of vulnerabilities that affect your network.
Modern day computer systems, comprised of millions of lines of software code, are wrought with bugs and exploitable weaknesses. Education is your best defense. While understanding how computers and networks operate is important, to defend your network from attack you need to understand how attackers exploit weakness in your system.
TASC is a leader in IT security for the U.S. Government, Intelligence Agencies, and the Department of Defense. TASC offers the CyberWarrior Course Series to teach you about the latest computer network threats, tactics, defensive measures, and certification and accreditation processes.
The CyberWarrior Course Series will give you the skills you need to ensure you are practic"
While the brochure makes it sound like standard netsec training... I find the wording of a "Cyberwarrior Training" program to be... surreal. Further, I think it is pretty sick to market such services to a government that clearly is clueless about the internet in general. (not the defense industries - the political arms of the government)
The reason is that it is probably easy to market this service to politicians who want to appear savvy:
"Look, we need more cyberwarriors on the net - we need to block the firewalls of the cyber criminals. This is the next fronteir in protecting our nation!" --- *For the low cost of $150,000 per cyber warrior. No guarantees apply. Check you state for local restrictions.
THey would not be the ones taking the training - but the ones spending tax dollars on a service they really don't understand - thus the likelihood for abuse is higher.
I err on the side of corruption when anything pertaining to governments is concerned. Call me paranoid.
Alternatively, you could suggest Ron Wyden's OPEN bill. OPEN nixes the the DNS filtering, but keeps some of the follow-the-money measures in SOPA. More importantly, it also requires a full court hearing before any action can be taken.
Stop removing DNS entries; that's attempting to censor things that aren't in the US for non-US citizens.
Require a full court proceeding to stop advertisements and payment processing in the US - ie, no "court order", it has to be a full lawsuit with the ability to defend.
Require the removal of access to only affect a specific, listed set of companies.
Require the company requesting the blocking to pay reasonable costs of blocking.
Remove the making of copyright infringement into a felony; each of these things can easily happen by mistake.
Unless, of course, the fragrance company Coty Inc has been seeing a lot of their fragrances being pirated online.
I did another thread on here regarding this as well and I'm curious how far people are willing to go to prove a point or are they only singling out whatever makes sense. The above three have some strong strong monopolies or close to it so it makes things much harder. GoDaddy just happens to be one of the easy ones people can choose to switch from.
I only have dealings with GoDaddy and Comcast; and while I can't get away from Comcast, I'm going to do my damnedest to get away from GoDaddy.
I love how you can pick nearly any topic in almost any subject(especially computer science) and find an amazing book for free, or for about $60, yet every textbook my school uses gets < 2 stars on amazon and costs $150.
My "favorite" was a biology book written by a guy with a B.S. in journalism. He published the book years ago and every year he releases a new edition with the chapters out of order.
Be a proud pirate.
(Edit: found a bank that offers Amex, but there's no debit corporate cards, plus I'm not allowed to get a credit card here because I'm not a citizen).
Ah, duopoly.
1. I think it is usually free to all EU countries too as long as you use IBAN.