Another Day, Another Petition

Here we go again.

http://wh.gov/KxA

I'll have a "real" post up later today.

Two Articles About Technology

I have two worthwhile articles I found today that I'd like to share.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/17/confessions-of-a-publisher-were-in-amazons-sights-and-theyre-going-to-kill-us/

The printed book is in trouble. It has been for a while, but I expect things to speed up in the next few years. I posted yesterday about how technology marches on, and that's happening in the world of books right now. Above is a link to an article that includes an email from an anonymous insider in the publishing industry. Their failure to innovate or adapt to new technology has cost them big time, and the company set to steamroll the industry is none other than Amazon, the most popular shopping website in existence.

http://torrentfreak.com/white-house-petitioned-to-investigate-mpaa-bribery-120122/

Some of you may be sick and tired of all the posts I've been making about internet censorship and I apologize if I sound like a broken record, but it's been a very hot topic this week and it's one near and dear to me. If you read the above article you'll find a link to the very cool White House petition site, We The People. One of Barack Obama's neatest ideas, We The People allows users to make petitions that are reviewed directly by White House staff and given public responses. It's a great way to bring issues to national attention, and it played a big part in the fight against SOPA and PIPA. This petition seeks to strike back at Hollywood by getting the MPAA looked into for bribery charges. With the Internet blackout still fresh, it's a good time to get the pendulum swinging the other way and seeing if the Internet can pull off a counterattack. I signed the petition (this whole SOPA mess made me a bit of an advocate, as you may have noticed), and they need just 548 more signatures to meet the minimum 25,000 required to force a response from the White House. The more signatures, the more power the petition has, so feel free to join in!

Help Stop Torture in Syria!

While I was helping out in the big Internet censorship protests, I became aware of another, very different issue thanks to Avaaz, an advocacy website. Since I joined their site to protest SOPA and PIPA, I got an email alert about another issue they're fighting for. Avaaz brings the worrying story of a despot in Syria torturing and oppressing innocents.

If you'd like to help, please take a minute to join Avaaz and sign their petition. Help arrest these criminals and make them pay for their crimes!

http://www.avaaz.org/en/arrest_syrias_torturers/?tta

SOPA and PIPA both KOed (For Now)

Splendid news today from the front lines of the Internet - both SOPA and PIPA have been knocked off the current Congress schedule. Both bills have been tabled indefinitely. The Internet has won.

I will most definitely post additional updates on this very important topic should the need rise again - and because the entertainment industry is likely to try some other way in the future of stifling new technology, this is a good possibility.

Here is part of an email I received from Fight For The Future, one of the sites whose petitions I signed on Wednesday. Tiffiniy Cheng, you have the floor...

---------

Hi everyone!

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“'This is altogether a new effect,' Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing 'an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically' in the last four decades, he added." We're indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement -- you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November -- Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups -- Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

SOPA and PIPA will likely return in some form.  But when they do, we'll be ready. We changed the game this fall, and we're not gonna stop.

P.S. China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

"Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know)."

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marveled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’"

 ---------

Again, my thanks to anyone who helped out these last few days, and I hope that we can repeat the performance if needed somewhere down the line. This is what freedom is all about.

All right, enough talk about Internet freedom for now - next post I make is the story of how I found my pet snake!

Update on the Internet Censorship Bills

Yesterday I joined millions of people in the biggest Internet protest in the history of the world. I hope you did too. By working together, we managed to take what seemed to be a sure-to-pass bill and severely crippled it. Over 4.5 million people signed the petition Google offered yesterday, and millions more signatures came in from Avaaz, PopVox, and other sites. Thanks to the blackouts of sites like Wikipedia, this movement finally hit the mainstream. The situation is clear: The American people overwhelmingly reject the censorship of the Internet, and the entertainment industry is going to have to try something else if they want to rake in more cash.

And Congress is listening. At least 18 politicians have done an about-face on their opinion of the bills, including several who co-sponsored PIPA. And while Lamar Smith of Texas is still standing by SOPA, Patrick Leahy of Vermont is getting wary of his bill, PIPA. And most importantly, just before the protests, an official statement from the White House made it clear that Barack Obama would not support Internet censorship.

If you haven't yet done your part to help, or if you'd like to do more, it's not too late! PIPA is scheduled for a vote on January 24, while SOPA is due for some additional reworking in February. If you haven't yet, please contact your congressmen and let them know that you prefer a free and open Internet.

Here's an article on the effects of the protest.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71562.html

This website shows who stands where on the SOPA and PIPA bills. If your congressman is still supporting this dangerous legislation (or is undecided), it's not too late to contact them and voice your disapproval!
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/

Help Stop Internet Censorship!

Did you want to look up something on Wikipedia today and notice you couldn't?

Did you notice that Google's logo has been censored by a big black box?

Across the Internet, dozens of websites are going offline or changing their front pages today to spread the word about two controversial bills in Congress. The first is SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. The second is PIPA, the Protect IP Act. Both of these bills are supposed to fight Internet piracy, but in reality they wouldn't be able to stop piracy and would only harm law-abiding citizens by censoring websites and content and placing the power of what can stay on the Internet to giant corporations.

Fortunately, the big names of the Internet are aware of how dangerous these bills would be if they passed, and are staging a protest today to fight it. If you care about the Internet you're using right now, please take a moment to sign a few petitions and shoot an email to your state representatives and senators. These bills cannot be allowed to pass, and the message that the Internet will not tolerate censorship must be made clear.

A partial list of today's protestors includes the following websites:

Google - The search engine giant has censored its logo and put up a petition you can sign. As the most popular website in the world, Google will undoubtedly be a huge help in spreading the word of these bills.
Wikipedia - Wikipedia has shut down its entire English-language website today. Wikipedia is by far the largest site to shut down entirely in protest, and some consider it the "leader" of today's fight.
Imgur - This online picture-hosting service has an anti-SOPA message on its front page.
Reddit - A social news website, Reddit has been vocally anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA for quite some time. It's offline until this evening.
Fark - An irreverent site that spreads around links to the latest news, Fark simultaneously parodies and joins the movement by claiming they support SOPA because if it passed they'd get shut down and they wouldn't have to do any more work.
Cheezburger Network - This collection of humor sites is the official site for "LOLCats" - the captioned cat photos that have spread across the Internet. A number of other comedy websites are hosted here as well, including "Oh Internet" and "LOLCelebs".
Mozilla - The official website of the creators of Firefox has gotten in on the act.
Tumblr - This blog network allows every individual blogger to decide for themselves if they'd like to censor their blog today.
Twitpic - Twitpic, which is a special picture-hosting service for Twitter, is against the bills as well.
MoveOn - Of course an advocacy website would join in.
Dozens of other websites - WordPress, Miro, TV Tropes, Newgrounds, Good.is, XKCD, DeviantArt, Destructoid, and more.

And although they aren't joining today's protest, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, and Twitter have also spoken out against the bill, meaning that all five of the most popular English-language websites (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, and Wikipedia) are vocally against the bill.

Visit Google for more information and a petition. Keep the Internet free!

List of petitions to sign:
Google
Avaaz
PopVox

This petition on We the People has already finished with an official response from the White House:
We the People