The Daily WTF goes white to "support" SOPA
thedailywtf.com
thedailywtf.com
It's like applying a bandaid to a severed head and then suing Band-Aid brand because their product didn't save the life.
If I remember correctly, the argument was that since Google is effective at taking down child pornography, detecting something as simple copyright infringement should be a breeze.
When a Google spokesperson explained why that made absolutely no sense given that often not even the copyright holder can tell what's infringement and what's not, legislators scoffed, ignored what was said, summarized it as "we have the technology", and for lack of time pushed to move to other issues so that the bill could be passed ASAP.
It would only lead to "government sanctioned search engines".
See: China + Baidu.
Makes it harder for the average person (who doesn't know the difference between a domain name and what you type into the google search bar) to get to pirate sites.
I constantly hear my non-techincal peers, who otherwise claim to know nothing about computers, always talking about the latest program they've installed to get free media. It's all over my head, but they get along just fine.
The same would happen under SOPA. The non-technical folks will just install "DNS Extender Pro" to get their media fix, and full DNS access is restored. They won't know how or why it works, but that doesn't matter.
Let's assume that the only way to pirate content was to install a built from scratch version of Linux and use some command line tools to download what you want, you would have millions of visitors to kernel.org in a fairly short time (in fact I successfully compiled my own kernel years ago knowing almost nothing about Linux).
A good example of this was when I worked for an IT outsourcing company that hired allot of not very technical people to work on it's technical support desk. There were various fixes for common problems that in fact required quite complex solutions, however most of the staff were still able to carry these out because there was either a script available that simply did the action or there was a set of precise written guides on how to do said actions. So if customer calls with problem X then do steps A , B , C. Whether or not you understand these steps only becomes important when there is a problem or when you need to do something non-standard. Plus most non technical people will know at lest one semi technical person who they can enlist to help them.
From the point of view of finding a website there isn't really a lot of perceived difference between typing "amazon.com" into google or typing it into the address bar. There is however a large difference perceived between paying for something and not.
That's how much of a joke this bill is, which implies that the bill creators are either this clueless, or SOPA is really just "Anti-piracy Bill v0.1" to make people accept it, with more "improvements" planned for later.
The only people it will actually affect, are actual American sites and companies that will have to enforce this bill, like the search engines, the ISP's, and the financial services. So the "bad actors" will be almost unaffected by it, while in the same time it will put many burdens on the American companies.
Don't worry, legislation can be changed so this "problem" will be "solved" in due course.
I'm afraid you've got that backwards. SOPA's DNS-blocking domain-seizure provisions apply to all domains except US-based ones like .com, .org and .net. (Those are considered to be under US jurisdiction and can already be seized under current law [0].) Hence the talking-point that it will only affect "rogue foreign sites".
[0] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/130763-h...
What's worse is that SOPA's motivation is primarily for Hollywood to continue milking Americans for entertainment content. Just because these studios can't adapt to rapidly growing technology, they decided to slow it down.
Every country that has implemented anti-gun laws has seen a massive reduction in gun related crimes.
Countries that never had full legalisation of guns also experience a lot less gun related crimes than countries with full legalisation.
Off topic I know, but bad example. :)
Nicely done :)
e.g. http://forums.110.120/forums/thread/277238.aspx
Simpler days indeed. Anyone else attend the 1BBSConn in Denver hosted by Boardwatch magazine? Those were the days, oh yeah baby!
And of course I did this on a 40mb ST251- RLL encoded seagate hard drive, on 2 Tandy 286's running 1 full mb of memory using QEMM to get that pesky extra 384k of memory to load instances of Wildcat.
Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Thank you DWTF for a lovely memory lane flashback!
Personally I think it's only a matter of time until there's a "hacker" DNS servers for people to completely bypass all this shit.
If it does happen where everything is based on an IP, the web, ecommerce, all of it, will die. You can't advertise a business as an IP address. In a couple days millions won't be able to find any websites anywhere.
Ad revenue will be GONE, nobody will be paying for ANYTHING online and every one of the sites you've written down will surely close their doors because there is no way for them to stay in business.
Small businesses everywhere will fail. Websites like Reddit, HN, Digg, etc, will not be able to survive.
Google will become useless. Since their search results can only return a handful of sites, you might as well go right to them, bypass Google.
Hosting companies will fail left and right as their sites are slowly shut down and their customers leave. There won't even be anywhere to keep websites online anymore, IP or not.
And so on.
I think the people of the USA should be happy there needs to be a law around it at least. Here it was blocked with no legislative backing, only because a judge deemed it illegal. It's interesting to see you at least have a semblance of democratic process.