Impressive SOPA blackout | Hacker News Reader

Impressive SOPA blackout

littlehart.net

139 pointsnicholasreed37 comments

Credit to Zachary Johnson: https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa

Thank you for posting this; my dev tools cut it off when I looked for attribution (terrible excuse, I just thought it was impressive).

No worries, nicholas. This is the second time the link has hit the ycomb news homepage, so I've gotten plenty of attention already. Today is about stopping SOPA!

I can't believe how far my template has spread. I'm just really happy to help fight against SOPA.

Phish.net is also using it. I saw your name in the source and was wondering if you were affiliated with that site or this was a widespread thing.

Anyway, great work.

I used it in http://qomun.com (shameless plug). Also it has been used by several high traffic spanish blogs and pirate parties (http://pirata.cat and http://www.partidopirata.es/). Kudos!

There are a lot of people using this, I am at http://jenius.me as well.

This was posted 3 days ago and rose to the top of hacker news when the original author released it, I don't understand why some other site is now getting credit for it or why a duplicate link is on the popular page of HN again...

Here's the link from 3 days ago, with over 170 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468386

We at http://www.osnews.com used it as well (we're back up after 24hrs in UTC time). You can still view our version at http://www.osnews.com/?sopa=1 (for posterity).

Great work by Zachary Johnson.

It certainly looks nice, except that the text flows right off the bottom of the page, and scrolling doesn't work. I had to shrink the text font to see the whole thing, and in particular the link that appears at the end.

Here's an HTML5 blackout that I found pretty impressive as well: http://acko.net/

Never saw the site before the blackout though, so I'm not sure if it is just a slight modification to their original homepage.

It is. All the elements are the same; they just changed the colors to black.

Thank you for making sure the site is readable even though javascript is disabled (I mean this sincerely).

Edit: I would also like to point out that disabling javascript on wikipedia's page does not display the blackout and lets you continue to use the site (apologies if this was mentioned before)

I did that just for you in particular. I did it so you would call your congress members and tell them you oppose SOPA. And you made those calls for me, right? :p

Not yet, been at work all day. But, I saved the numbers in my cell, and will call as soon as I'm out. :)

On a side note: should I leave a voicemail after hours or is it more effective to send a fax? Never had to do this, but since this law would affect our collective lifebloods even for those outside of USA, it's time for action.

Sometimes there is a voicemail box for after hours calls. Fax works. Phone call works. Email works. Make sure to let them know you are a constituent. It helps to tell them your address.

LibreOffice.org seems to be the one that started popularizing this script.

Even responds properly to touch gestures in iOS. Now that's impressive.

I love that while most people would remark "Oh, that's cool", I (and I imagine a majority of us here...) immediately hit Ctrl+Shift+I and tried to figure out how it was working... Hah. :)

Archived for future dissection.

I created the spotlight with a CSS3 radial gradient. I used pointer-events: none; on the element with the gradient so that mouse events would "go through" that element to the content below (the links). The lighting shadow casting effect is created via a box shadow and a text shadow. I'm adjusting the offset of the shadows based on the mouse position, and I'm also adjusting the blur on the shadows based on the distance of the "light source" for the content that is "casting" a shadow.

Thanks for the info.

Green Peace is also using this, not sure whether the German Pirate Party ripped it off from them or vice versa.

http://greenpeace.org

Well that's probably why they're called Pirate Party :P

Man, I wish there were a real Pirate Party, so I could get someone to issue me a Letter of Marque to attack all those stupid Spanish Galleons sailing up and down the coast.

It's actually public domain: https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa

So is this some kind of meta-pirate joke? The source is ripped directly from the German Pirate Party website.

http://www.piratenpartei.de

>ripped directly

Author of the code: "I place this code in the public domain. I require no attribution." : https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa

Your research-foo leaves much to be desired.

My bad. I thought the public domain code was just the mousehandler at the bottom, not all the CSS tricks above.

The javascript does all the parallax motion of the shadow and adjusts the box and text shadow blur based on distance of "light source" from content. So the CSS and JS are rather intimately linked for the full effect. This is just the web nerd in my jabbering away. ;)

Just a note about copyright law: You can't legally place something in the public domain (even saying you want it public domain is meaningless). The best you can do is license it permissively giving up your five rights to copyright with a clear, perpetual and irrevocable license. The Apache license is a good one to use.

This code as it stands is still fully copyrighted and copying it is technically a felony.

I've heard that's true in other countries, but I'm pretty sure the US allows you to place something in public domain.

That's not the case, you can't opt to enter things in the public domain in the US - the best you can do is license permissively.

Creative Commons have a pretty good piece on this under their CC0 info at http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0.

I'd be very interested if anyone knows of a genuine situation in which one can't disclaim the IP rights one is offering up in a CC0 license (some aspect of moral rights?). I'm thinking of the possibility of problems with heirs-in-title, or somesuch, choosing to assert a right that their successor (the work's creator) wished to give up ... but really I can't see why an heir should be allowed such a right.

Why am I being down voted? What I said is correct and shows some of the current absurdity of copyright. It's clear, relevant, and accurate.

I find it strange that a method of protest appears to be an opportunity to see who can make the nicest looking one.

Given the title of the thread, are some considering the blackout less of a political manoeuvre and more of a portfolio addition?

Obviously they need to be attention grabbing enough to highlight the cause, but as a metric surely effectiveness is better than impressiveness?

"I find it strange that a method of protest appears to be an opportunity to see who can make the nicest looking one."

Why not? Is a protest sign less credible if it's not made of cardboard and Sharpie™?

You should make everything you touch beautiful.

The more effort it takes to produce a protest, the more meaningful the protest is.

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