This website will be going dark to protest SOPA/PIPA on the 18th of January, in solidarity with other websites like reddit.com, boingboing.com and wikipedia.com.
SOPA and PIPA are efforts by the US House and Senate respectively to introduce legislation that will enable the US to authorize DNS blocking of websites. That was a geeky acronym, but if you are unfamiliar, the key point I think you need to know is that this is what China does as part of it’s great firewall to block “undesirable” information. It is internet breaking censorship, worthy of dictators, not the United States of America. SOPA and PIPA are legislation paid for by media corporations , in the guise of protecting intellectual property, that seriously threaten your freedom. To prevent you from maybe illegally streaming a copy of last week’s Modern Family, corporations are willing to install the same type of blocking system employed by dictators world-wide.
As a rule of thumb, whenever you are asked to grant a new power to the government, it is a good practice to imagine your worst political enemy now having that ability, and how you would feel about it. For my father, that would mean Ted Kennedy or Dianne Feinstein For me, it means George W. Bush and Dianne Feinstein. (Feinstein is a sponsor of PIPA).
Do you want a website to be “black holed” from the internet on the say-so of a corporation without due process?
Friends, family and readers, please join with me and write your congressperson:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/wyrfaqs.shtml
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm