Hacker News Reader

Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to look up Eternal September - but hit the Wikipedia anti-SOPA page for about the 8th time today. If nothing else, I bet a lot of people have learned how much they depend on Wikipedia today.

View on HN

What the others said. Or, append ?banner=none to the URL.

As some haskell-cafe folk put it: because censorship only affects the innocent. Everybody else knows how to get around it.

If you (or someone else) hasn't managed to look it up, it refers to the days when the internet was primarily used by universities (i.e. home users were not a thing). Every September there'd be a bunch of freshmen who didn't understand the culture or etiquette, who would quickly dissipate as they got bored or figured out the rules. The spread of the internet into homes via AOL in the 90s brought about the same phenomenon previously only observed in September with frosh in that now there are continuously new/ignorant users on the internet who really don't get the "rules".

If I remember correctly the eternal september refer to usenet and AOLs decision in September to let their users access it.

I use Wikipedia as basically an extension of my brain. I'm in a history program at university, and so many of the names and dates that are essential to it I don't actually know. I realized this when I was writing something last night. I was writing about the English Civil War, and the Restoration, and I wanted to comment on the relationship between Charles I and Charles II, and I went to Wikipedia...and it was down!I had to go to my shelf and get a book. Who does that?

Do you have encyclopedia? how old?

"I use Wikipedia as basically an extension of my brain."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

If you hit ESC just as the page loads, you can get to Wikipedia content.

Enjoy :)

I don't think that's quite the point: I'm sure most people here know how to access the content, but clicking a link and having the anti-SOPA popup appear jarringly reminds us of how frequently we use Wikipedia for information.

Turn off JavaScript to read Wikipedia, if you didn't already.

Search on Google with javascript/instant enabled and view the cached version from the panel that pops up, when you click on the double arrows that come up to the right of the link.

Wow, you guys are much classier than I am. I've just been hitting Google's "cached" links for Wikipedia today.

Append ?banner=no to the url.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com