
How to stop SOPA: Don't build it. - imgabe
http://greaterdebater.com/blog/gabe/post/27
======
pg
This is an intriguing idea. The majority of hackers hate this bill, and yet if
the lobbyists and politicians pass it, they are going to need us to implement
it for them. So maybe it would be some sort of solution, in the worst case, to
organize a boycott of any person or company that works on it.

~~~
mindstab
Hackers hate it, but there are more programmers than "hackers". Think about
middle aged family men, career men. They aren't all going to care as strongly
or be able to quit.

Also even if you could convince all american talent to boycott it, there's a
whole world of people out there who don't care at all, and just like America
has been happy to sell censorship tech to the rest of the world for years, I'm
sure the rest of the world would be happy to repay :) I don't think Indian or
Russian programmers are going to give a toss about it if it pays bills.

Ha or you could just buy back equipment already sent to Chian and Iran.

Which sort of raises the point that American talent has already built this
equipment and been selling it for years now. It is way past too late for this
boycott to work.

~~~
pg
I'm not suggesting we could prevent e.g. Cisco from finding enough people to
build this stuff. More that Cisco would steer clear of such projects if
working on them would put a black mark on their corporate reputation that
would make it harder for them, as a company, to hire good people.

~~~
mindstab
"good people" is a relative term. If we're talking the kind of ultra a level
hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them
work for a big slow company like Cisco now? It already to some extent has that
problem just by not being a small sexy startup.

I'm not willing to flat out say all the best hackers only want to do startups,
but even assuming so, there are still lots of really good career engineers who
also probably have no interest in working in a small sexy start up who Cisco
can hire. Convincing them all that a nice company job is bad is going to be
very hard.

And then there's the fact it's too late and this tech's already been built in
america with american talent. They already found the people.

And often these big company products aren't built by the best people. Big
government contracts like this have so much bureaucracy to choke the love out
of many people. They aren't well written, they are slowly and expensively and
they are ugly and horrible but they work. Does this sound like the working
conditions that anyone we know would want to work in? Probably not.

Big government projects don't need A* hackers to get out the door sadly and
never have.

~~~
pg
In my experience most organizations, however mediocre, have some smart people
who ended up there by various accidents.

But even in the unlikely event that e.g. Cisco is able to operate without any
smart people, it's even more unlikely the people running it see themselves
that way. So they would be worried by something that would make it hard to
recruit good people.

Good programmers are in such demand right now that it's hard to imagine any
company not worrying about something that would make it harder to hire. I
think they'd worry especially about the difficulty of hiring recent grads. To
undergrads all big companies look pretty similar; it would be a disaster if
there was something that made your company look distinctively worse. It's not
too hard to imagine a situation in which there was some sort of blacklist of
the worst SOPA collaborators, and undergrads knew and avoided them.

~~~
mindstab
That may even be too late. The military has its own programmers and I presume
it trains some of them in house, which means it gets then possibly at 18 out
of high school and trains them itself. They can be put to any use they are
ordered to.

The government in general is probably rarely thought of as sexy and it still
gets grads.

I guess I'm decrying this idea because I just do not see it as enough from
both sides. I don't see you ever getting 100% of people on board with you and
I don't see 100% of sources of software caring. This plan only works if 100%
of everyone buys in, as long as one lone group produces the code, SOPA will go
into effect. And then theres the fact the tools are already built and at least
10 years old.

This is simply not the solution and any time spent on it is a waste of what
little effort we do have that could be vastly better spent else where.

Exactly where? I don't know, I just feel strongly this is not the solution.

As for at least a direction? Look to Larwence Lessig. He's been fighting copy
right reform for ages. He was doing it in the 90s and it was getting old. Then
after Eldred was lost he kind vanished from that scene. He's now back and he's
stepped up a level and is working on Government reform. He realized after they
lost that you can't fight in a system that's so broken, so he's now working on
System reform instead. If you can spare 10 minutes check out his talk on the
Daily show from Dec 13, it does a decent job of summarizing what he's fighting
now. Then tell me this is how we can best spend our time :(

I supremely believe we need to step it up at least one level and fight
something bigger, this is just a symptom.

Also I believe the world is a sadder harsher and more depressing place and not
everyone clings to _our_ ideals like we do. We need a system to take that into
account. To be a little more strong handed than "All the hippie flower power
new talent won't work for you" because I'm pretty sure there is still more
than enough talent to go around to get these jobs done. :(

~~~
phaus
I'm not saying that the military has never done any programming by itself,
because that clearly would be wrong, but the Army doesn't even have an MOS(Job
Field) for it. I sincerely doubt that there is a mindless legion of Army
trained programmers out there.

Also, the Army does get some grads, but not that many. There are a lot of
people who join because they did a year or so in College and didn't like it.
There are also a lot of people who didn't even graduate from high school.
Bottom line, not many people join the Army under ideal circumstances. I
personally would consider having just graduated with a CS degree to be ideal.
Unfortunately I am one of the ones who didn't graduate from high school.

~~~
ams6110
You didn't graduate from high school and are in the US Army? It's my
understanding that the US military today does not (or almost never) takes high
school dropouts as enlistees. Even those with a GED or home-schooling would
have a very difficult time unless they had college credits as well. So I would
doubt your claim that there are "a lot" of people in the military who did not
graduate from high school.

~~~
phaus
In 2002 you could get in with a GED. From my 9 years' experience, there is a
disproportionate amount of people with a GED in the Army. It also helps when
you test in the top 1% on the ASVAB.

Also, the military has been increasing their requirements lately. As the war
draws to a close, and the economy remains in shambles, more people start
thinking about joining the military. This means that the Army can be more
selective about who they accept.

------
davidu
This is an idiotic post. I run OpenDNS. If SOPA passes and I don't implement
it, I will be sued out of existence.

The 60 jobs I provide now, and the 60 jobs I'm hiring for, will vaporize.

And there will be programmers who will do the work required to implement it.

This is not the right way to fight laws. In fact, this is one of the Brocard's
-- Dura lex, sed lex -- "The law is harsh, but it is the law." In other words,
you must obey the law, even if it is wrong. You must work to change the laws
if they are unjust.

~~~
jberryman
> In other words, you must obey the law, even if it is wrong. You must work to
> change the laws if they are unjust.

I appreciate your perspective, but your last paragraph is frankly absurd.
Pretty much every hard-won progressive reform in America was gained through
civil disobedience.

~~~
davidu
You'll find that perspective (of which I strongly support) will overwhelmingly
apply to individual criminal and constitutional matters, not laws like SOPA.

civil disobedience of these sorts is just asking to get your ass legally
handed to you.

~~~
ken
_All_ civil disobedience is "just asking to get your ass legally handed to
you". That's the whole point. You're intentionally breaking the law to show
the injustice. Civil disobedients like Gandhi and King spent a lot of time
incarcerated.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King wrote: "One who breaks an unjust
law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is
unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to
arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality
expressing the highest respect for law."

------
jpdoctor
I disagree: Somebody will build the thing, because there's always someone
desperate enough to take the job.

However, there is a better way to accomplish the goal imho: A truly shitty
implementation. Those who are already in the position to implement it would
not have to quit; they would instead commit to implementing it in the least-
efficient way possible.

As a nice side effect, we will open up whole new disciplines for inefficient
coding, and create all sorts of employment as people need big iron to run bad
code.

~~~
redthrowaway
The implementation would have to be shitty in a _very specific way_ in order
for it to not hurt the Internet at large. If this thing does get built, all
American Internet traffic will have to flow through it, so it has to be stable
and fast.

Maybe we could just make it block by default the websites of all the
politicians and corporations that support SOPA.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> If this thing does get built, all American Internet traffic will have to
> flow through it, so it has to be stable and fast.

Alternatively, it could be unstable and slow. How long would this law last one
Congress realizes that they've completely shut down their own email accounts,
their ability to shop online, their children and grandchildren's ability to do
their homework? How about when they realize that they've just put a sizable
portion of their constituents out of a job?

Fill those warheads full of pinball machine parts.

~~~
redthrowaway
>How long would this law last one Congress realizes that they've completely
shut down their own email accounts, their ability to shop online, their
children and grandchildren's ability to do their homework? How about when they
realize that they've just put a sizable portion of their constituents out of a
job?

 _Once_ they realize it? Probably a year. _Until_ they realize it? Who
knows...

------
mindstab
This is unfortunately a very American-centric and hacker/san-fransisco-centric
view.

All the tech for SOPA has been build and used for years in countries such as
China and Iran. They already have their great firewalls and have had them for
a long time.

What's more, a lot of the tech they used was built and sold to them by
american companies. This war was lost probably 10 to 15 years ago.

All this bill is about is dog-fooding your own censorship products. ;)

~~~
ktsmith
This is exactly correct. It should also be pointed out that while the nerd-
rage surrounding SOPA is all completely valid the same type of response was
seen during the build up to the votes on the DMCA and congress had no trouble
passing the DMCA. I think it's highly unlikely that SOPA or PIPA will be
modified in any meaningful way and will likely be passed.

------
tibbon
With this theory, if we wanted to stop wars, we could encourage arms builders
to simply stop building weapons of war. Yet, there will always be some people
who view opportunity over everything else, and will be more than happy to
build the weapons of war, even if 99% of the population disagrees.

On the flip side, the government may see any organization to halt such as
illegal (I don't know what law it would violate, but I'm sure they could find
something appropriate to give the organizers a nice cell in Gitmo).

Best idea if asked, is to build it, but do it incompetently (but
intentionally). Poor UI, poor filters, bad tests, etc. Obfuscate the code as
much as possible. Claim that its for optimization. Write it in an esoteric
language that few will be able to audit properly. Pull out every trick in the
book. I suppose some could call this sabotage, but it seems one way to do it.
The US Government never seems to have a problem with hiring those with a
strong record of incompetence.

------
ktsmith
> Maybe some of these technologies can be bought off the shelf from, say,
> China or North Korea, but at the very least someone is going to have to
> administer the servers that make this all work.

Unfortunately much of the technology used for censorship in places like China
was developed in the US. Refusing to deploy it seems to be the only option. If
we already have engineers willing to build these technologies it seems very
likely there are going to be engineers willing to deploy it as well.

------
markbao
I find it doubtful that General Dynamics or some other massive government
contractor will get a contract for $x million, look at it for a minute, and
turn it down because of the _ethical ramifications_. Not only is that not a
factor, but it would mean giving business to a competing government
contractor. Everything about this would be against the contractor's
shareholders, so it won't happen.

Unfortunately, someone, somewhere, will be happy to take money to build it.

------
radicalbyte
Why don't we just build a new internet?

They're blocking DNS records and IP address? Then why don't we design and
build a new system. Using the knowledge we've gained from the Internet v1 we'd
be able to do a much better job with Internet v2.

We have to do a lot of work to switch over to IP6 anyhow, so why not just go
the whole hog and built a new infrastructure?

~~~
masonhensley
I honestly don't think the law would distinguish between the two. Maybe
implementation would be more difficult across two infrastructures; however, in
the eyes of representative X and Senator Y, communication from one electronic
device to another is the internet.

~~~
ComputerGuru
You're missing the point - his suggestion was for a decentralized internet
that isn't blockable in the first place. Cliche idea that won't actually
happen, but that aside...

------
raldi
I don't get this. SOPA has penalties for companies that don't comply. The
rallying cry has been, "If SOPA passes, {Wikipedia|reddit|YouTube|etc} could
not exist."

If their engineers don't build SOPA takedown tools and their organizations get
their pants sued off for the ensuing noncompliance, it's the same outcome. The
sites will cease to exist in their current form.

~~~
For_Iconoclasm
Or, if all of the engineers quit instead of building the tools, then those
websites cease to be for lack of workers.

------
kevinchen
Looks like they went down. Cached in Google:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://greaterdebater.com/blog/gabe/post/27&hl=en&safe=active&client=safari&rls=en&strip=1)

------
nextparadigms
SOPA would have a much harder time to pass if we had some kind of
Constitutional Amendment or at least some strong Human Rights regarding the
Internet. Because right now it seems that when something important to the
infrastructure of the Internet clashes with the ability to enforce copyright,
they say that the copyright side should win. This is possible because there
aren't that many defenses set-up for the Internet itself besides the 1st
Amendment.

------
robbrown451
While you are at it, please talk programmers out of writing programs that send
spam. Oh, and what the heck, if that works, please talk people out of being
greedy in general.

Thanks.

------
fleitz
Don't do that, just build better tech a little further out west. Read the
declaration of independence, act accordingly.

Recall what the net was like before the masses, perhaps something truly free
is worth more than whatever you're giving up by not being able to sell coupons
on it. Who cares if the masses never come. They just wanted to sell their
freedom for a pay cheque anyway.

~~~
Raphael
How do you go further west when you've reached the Pacific Ocean? Sail to
China?

------
cpeterso
I am reminded of Pigdog's 2002 open letter/rant to the Sony engineers who
wrote the DRM code that would brick iMacs that played certain Celene Dion CDs.

WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE! ;)

"d00d, Quit being a FUCKING ASS":
<http://www.pigdog.org/auto/software_jihad/link/2581.html>

------
toblender
The problem is not the engineers. If the executives of the companies are
obligated by law to build this system or go out of business/be fined, they
will pass that pressure down the chain.

I know this bill upsets people, but getting fired would be more upsetting to
those programmers/engineers.

------
polemic
Interesting that many people here think that software engineers, as a
population sample, have a 'moral disposition' spread fundamentally different
from any other profession. I think we all know that is not the case. Some
would even go as far to say that tend to be more morally ambiguous relative to
everyone else, purely as a function of the type of personality the profession
attracts (although it might just be a matter of perspective or priority).
There's a more than enough engineers in the long tail of people financially
desperate, intellectually interested or simply pro-SOPA to build it.

And then let's not forget the miserably misguided geniuses who created a
airborne H1N5 virus in the name of research. Evil comes in many forms.

------
tomelders
What would happen if all the ISP's simply switched off the internet for a day?
As a protest, a strike against SOPA if you will.

Or if Google simply shut down it's service for a day? And Youtube, and
Facebook et al.

It's an outlandish proposition, but not as outlandish as SOPA.

Governments need to understand that they don't control the internet. The
people that do could switch off their parts of it, and in these tricky
economic times, a co-ordinated strike by the major players would send a very
clear message.

"Back off, or we'll grind the country to a halt and it'll cost you billions".

These politicians are playing dirty tricks. Their mind was made up a long time
ago. They'll not be beaten by due process and fairness.

~~~
johngalt
Poetic, but trust me it wouldn't work. All it would do is push 90% of the
country to back the government more. The average Joe already fears the amount
of control computers systems have over his life. Both parties would play that
fear like a piano.

It's one thing to strike when you are the "poor downtrodden factory worker",
it's entirely another thing when you are a bunch of "rich white collar
smarties trying to control the world".

~~~
colinyoung
Then don't do a site like Google. Maybe wikipedia, or something educated
people use, that will make news in a more correct way: it's being done as a
statement, etc.

~~~
tomelders
Sadly, "educated" people aren't the people you need to make aware of this.

By "educated", I'm not inferring that that "un-educated" people are stupid or
ignorant, simply un-aware of the issue by virtue of not being part of "that
world". I would hazard a guess that people with a passion for Wikipedia are
probably the kind of people who already know what SOPA is and why it's a
batshit crazy idea.

------
johngalt
Don't bet on this. Too many people will build anything they are told to, and
won't pay attention to what it means. Or at least they will be able to
rationalize it. I've seen this in person with CALEA in the late 90s.

------
incomethax
Is there a cached version? The site seems to be down.

~~~
ktsmith
Here's the text

\---------------------

I've been following the news about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, for the
past couple of weeks. Yesterday there was an interesting development when 83
of the most prominent engineers responsible for creating the Internet signed
an open letter voicing their opposition to SOPA. This in and of itself is
hardly surprising. Since the law was introduced anyone with a shred of
technical acumen has stated that a.) It will not work. The law will not hinder
piracy. b.) It will be hugely detrimental to the normal operation of the
Internet.

But, this made me think. If a law like SOPA were to be passed, how would it be
implemented? How would it be enforced? I think it's safe to say that at some
point somebody is going to have to write some code or possibly build some
hardware. Maybe some of these technologies can be bought off the shelf from,
say, China or North Korea, but at the very least someone is going to have to
administer the servers that make this all work. Who's going to do that? The
politicians? The lawyers? Entertainment industry executives? No. The task is
going to fall to the very people who have been the most vocal opponents of the
law from the start. What if they refuse?

If SOPA were to pass and your job would require you to enforce its provisions,
you should quit. If you currently work in IT or software development for a
company advocating for the law, for a lobbying firm that is promoting the law,
for the campaign of one of the representatives sponsoring or supporting it,
you should quit. The organization paying you is actively trying to use your
skills make people less free. There's a perpetual shortage of talent in the
industry, right? Surely, you can find another job that does not require you to
be an instrument of government oppression, that does not ask you to dismantle
the infrastructure you've spent your career building and maintaining. I know
it may seem like a drastic measure, but freedom, as we are so often reminded,
is not free. If a free Internet is important to you, you have to be willing to
make sacrifices to defend it, or it will cease to exist. Be happy that you can
fight for freedom on economic terms instead of having to put your life on the
line. If your current position would not be involved in complying with SOPA,
but you're in charge of hiring people, you could let it be known that any
experience that included building or making technology for the enforcement of
SOPA would immediately disqualify an applicant from getting a job at your
company. (Assuming, of course that they participated willingly, not the folks
I just told to quit their jobs in the previous paragraph.) I don't think this
would be unreasonable or unfair. Deliberately building something that nearly
every expert in the field has condemned as a detriment to the Internet
represents such a staggering lack of professional judgement that it should
disqualify you from ever working again in this profession. As engineers we
spend most of our education and careers focusing on what we can build, and
very little time thinking about what we should built. Unlike doctors or
lawyers we (mostly _) do not have professional licenses or ethics boards to
report to. This does not mean we cannot act unethically, or that we should not
consider the social ramifications of the things we make. An engineer who would
build the infrastructure to make SOPA a reality should be treated exactly like
a doctor who would willingly commit malpractice. He should be blacklisted from
the profession.

I know this isn't a foolproof plan. If there's enough money on the table,
someone will come out of the woodwork to take the job. If the task receives
enough scorn from the rest of the industry, though, you can be sure that it
won't be the best and the brightest working on this. Anything that results
will be that much less effective for it. Remember politicians and lawyers can
bloviate and scheme all they like, but ultimately it is engineers who have to
bring their plans into existence. We are the gatekeepers between dreams and
reality, and when it comes to the politicians and executives, they need us far
more than we need them.

_ Of course, there are Professional Engineer (P.E.) licenses. But for the
majority of Internet related work I believe they are not required. For what
it's worth, I do happen to have a PE and work in a field where it's required.
It is expected and understood that you would refuse to design something for a
client that would be harmful or unsafe for the people using it. Indeed, you
would lose your license (and thus your livelihood) if you did so.

------
trout
A lot of what SOPA is black holing US internet traffic. All it takes is one
person at one service provider to do this. India and China have done this on
accident before. (They create a black hole route and accidentally advertised
it)

Sure there are some more specific details to make it smooth to the end user,
but from a technical level it is 3 commands on a service provider router to
bring down a public network.

------
vital_sol
Ok, so let's say SOPA is implemented and my Internet provider is blocking some
sites through their DNS server. Who would stop me from using another DNS
server (located perhaps in Russia or China) that is not blocking those
websites? This is pretty much the same way that people in China use when they
want to see blocked content. It works both ways, I suppose.

~~~
Kell
Huh ? No. People in China are not facing just DNS blocking. There's DPI going
on there (not for everyone), and they're nating a lot of people. And, in US,
what if using some other thing than your ISP DNS server gets forbidden ?

Anyway, most of the people in America and in the world do not have a single
clue about changing dnsservers... Heck, most of the times they do not even
imagine that a website domain relates to an IP address.

~~~
xolox
For those who are not familiar with DPI:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection>

As an example, HTTP uses the "Host:" header which contains the domain name of
the website in question. Deep packet inspection could work by recognizing HTTP
communication, inspecting the "Host:" header and simply dropping traffic to
censored websites.

------
jrockway
An even better idea is to do a really bad job implementing it. If all the
smart people quit, that will take care of it. If the smart people want to stay
on, though, perhaps they could be a bit more lax about their coding standards
for this project. Widely-deployed bugs are hard to fix. Look at Windows.

------
vlasta2
I do not think this has any chance to be effective. There only need to be few
people, who decide the money for implementing SOPA is too good.

A better response will be building a technology that cannot be controlled like
this. Why not just let the DNS die and replace it with something better? It is
a dinosaur anyway.

------
ahi
This won't work, but we should do it anyway. Just because _someone_ is going
to do it, doesn't mean that someone should be me or any of the people I am
responsible for hiring. Unethical is unethical. I won't be responsible for it
and I don't want to work with any of the assholes that are.

------
fatjokes
Don't boycott it---just do a half-ass job. Take the government's money and
make it super-easy to get around.

------
dbattaglia
The part here about not hiring anyone who has worked on SOPA-compliance
software feels a bit absurd to me, unless you take the same line with every
personal belief. Does that mean you should never hire any engineers that have
worked on software for a predator drone? Or even just things that annoy you
like telemarketing call center systems? I use that example because I'm guilty
of it myself at my first programming gig. I'm against this bill as much as
most are on here, but I think we need to be realistic about people's need to
feed themselves and even the percentage of computer programmers that would
qualify as the hacker types who would even give a rats ass (I don't know too
many personally).

------
Apreche
General nerd strike. We run the world. If we actually unite, we can get
everything we want. Not just stopping SOPA, but complete copyright and patent
reform, net neutrality, and everything else we care about.

The problem is we are a bunch of sissies. If there was actually a general
strike, would you seriously refuse to go to work until SOPA was stopped? Could
you do it? Are you willing to fight for what you believe? If enough of us do
it, we will get our way. We have to be willing to refuse to go to work and to
cause serious suffering on the part of others until we get our way.

I'll do it, but unless enough people join me it won't matter.

------
pithic
It is painful for me to see this effete hand waving be taken as seriously
this. A trivially simply thought experiment is all that is needed to grasp the
obvious futility of this strategy.

I'm not saying, "Go ahead and work on SOPA." But if we really want to stop it
(or any act of Congress), we must do better than such passive-aggressive smoke
blowing.

------
JDulin
This essay admits the fact that there will always be someone willing to "come
out of the woodwork" to implement the SOPA. However, the reason this idea
could work is that the programmers you have building the law will never be as
smart as the hackers not. Or even actively working against it.

------
EdSkrillex
So if SOPA passes and "regulates the Internet" to the point where the current
internet becomes useless, why not get all the "programmers" together to build
a new internet that functions just like the one the U.S Government wants to
control?

~~~
cbs
Because this internet does function like the one they want to control. If
there is New Thing X that makes the internet not-useless, new legislation will
expand SOPA to cover that too.

------
peterwwillis
SOPA is going to get challenged on first amendment grounds at a minimum.
There's still a chance that if it takes a really long time to implement the
provisions of SOPA, they can get it struck down before it does any real
damage.

Stall. Stall. Stall.

------
rbanffy
There is always someone who will consider something like SOPA a shining beacon
of progress compared to whatever lawless state they live in. At least SOPA
does not propose stoning movie pirates to death... yet.

------
ken
It's not quite like a Professional Engineering license, but the ACM does have
a Code of Ethics: <http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics>

------
psawaya
Just out of curiosity, has anyone here applied the same refusal to work
with/hire someone who was affiliated with building DRM? Or any other example
of Big Content trying to cripple technology.

------
foxylad
Another idea: if the MPAA and RIAA break the internet, let's break them. How
about a petition of people who pledge not to go to the movies or buy
mainstream music if SOPA passes?

~~~
CamperBob
Sites like www.riaaradar.com have been around for years. No effect.

Edit: just checked, and riaaradar.com is, in fact, gone. And www.riaa.org is
still up and running five-nines, thank you.

------
grecy
An interesting idea, but as the article and others have mentioned, our society
already has an excellent motivator that is used to make people do things they
would rather not do.

Money.

------
JWLong
Heh... for all the hating on Ayn Rand that goes on around here, you seem to
have found the idea behind her magnum opus quite useful...

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praptak
Boycott never works, for all practical values of never, sorry. If you're
thinking of a boycott, you've already lost.

~~~
ahi
Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers would strongly disagree.

~~~
CamperBob
And how are those farmworkers doing these days?

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superpanic
Atlas Shrugged

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quellhorst
If Americans don't build it, they'll find some coders in India to do it

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EmilENewton
I think Onymous may have already thought of this ;-)

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ctdonath
"Your terms are acceptable."

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sunils34
scalability fail

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maeon3
People who are unable to comprehend the internet want to tax and regulate and
censor every bit and byte. As the programmers and engineers who built the
thing. Lets give them what they want. When it turns out what we built actually
makes censorship harder and the imbeciles become angry, shrug and apologize
then promise you will do it right if you get another chance. Knowledge is
power, they cant take away our superiority there. They can only ASK us to tie
ourselves up and put ourselves in the oven and serve ourselves up for lunch.
You want root on the global net? War on freedom begins now.

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funkah
Well, that's a nice thought. But there's a depression on and people need
money, so someone will do it. The US government will find a way, I'm sure.

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cmillllllls
Someone will do it when they offer a ton of our taxpayer money to fund it. Its
sad, but some people will do anything for a buck :/

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atc
Ain't gonna work. Noble, yes, but it'll just push the salary up 'til someone
who doesn't care takes the job.

