
The Daily WTF goes white to "support" SOPA - anthuswilliams
http://thedailywtf.com/
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sp332
Then write down the IPs, take a photo of the page on a wooden table, and share
the photo on 68.142.214.24 (flickr.com)!

~~~
randomdata
Being a non-American, maybe I'm just a little out of the loop, but what is
blocking domains supposed to solve, exactly? Pirates will just jump on an
alternate name resolution services in minutes, as will the rest of the people
in time, as word spreads.

It's like applying a bandaid to a severed head and then suing Band-Aid brand
because their product didn't save the life.

~~~
nextparadigms
It's worse than that. Under SOPA they can only go after .com, .org and .net
sites. So ALL those foreign "rogue" websites that use other domains and aren't
hosted in US will be able to work merrily and be unaffected by SOPA, at least
according to the bill itself. Plus, if it does pass, all those rogue sites
will be redirecting immediately to a new domain name, and make sure all of
their users remember the new domain name by the time SOPA gets enforced
against them.

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.

~~~
skymt
> Under SOPA they can only go after .com, .org and .net sites.

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...](http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-
valley/technology/130763-homeland-security-dept-seizes-domain-names-)

~~~
rmc
Wow that even more crazy, because if they make an order blocking a .fr domain
then that only applies in USA, so that domain will probably still resolve in
France and other places. But the isps could never block all .fr domains. It
would be a pain in the hole to implement.

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wisty
Note, if you just go to their IP, you don't get the white-out.

~~~
sukuriant
... that's suddenly so much more brilliant. Thanks for sharing :D

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sdoering
I love great satire. This just made my day.

~~~
phalasz
Really good. They just take the piss out of this whole thing.

Nicely done :)

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detay
LOL bringing back the Gopher... Brilliant protest.

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mmmooo
tsk-tsk for using the host header value to calculate links in the left side
bar to the forums..

e.g. <http://forums.110.120/forums/thread/277238.aspx>

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catfish
Wildcat BBS - I ran 8, 1200 baud modems - 9 phone lines - Earth Station 1
BBS...

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!

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bdg
Still waiting for one site to go to plaid.

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siculars
They should have linked to gopher...

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1436.txt>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29>

~~~
mkopinsky
Wikipedia link doesn't work today... those crazy hackers who opposed SOPA have
already taken it down. ;-)

~~~
inexplicable
To thats more of a reason to link to have more and more people go to Wikipedia
today. Wouldn't change anything by linking here though as most of HN traffic
is already aware of this.

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chernevik
I bet a bill to this effect would get more than a few sponsors in Congress,
and probably an MPAA endorsement.

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kruhft
I started filling out my hosts file with my most common sites a while
ago...just in case.

~~~
dpcan
Why?

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.

~~~
kmm
Mine contains 194.71.107.15 (thepiratebay.org) because a judge had it blocked
here in Belgium. I could just as well use depiraatbaai.be but it's a matter of
principle, I like my world wide web to be "complete".

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.

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vlasta2
Actually, part of me wishes that SOPA or another similar bill gets approved.
That may be the push I need to actually join and contribute to one of the
movements that aim to make the internet less controllable, like freenet...

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jameskilton
BRILLANT!

~~~
resnamen
Paula Bean approves of this post.

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rickyconnolly
Not sure if troll...

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milurally
I am happy to see that most of the giants of the web protest to this censors

