Stop SOPA and PIPA: blackout tips for webmasters
January 17th, 2012 by Michael Zimmermann

Tomorrow, many sites are taking a stand against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, January 18th, sites like Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and even the entire ICanHasCheezburger Network will protest these proposals in some way. Many of them, like Wikipedia, will be “blacking out” their site — effectively removing their content from the internet for the duration.
Taking down a website is no light matter. No matter how important the cause, many sites are a source of income and the return to business after a protest blackout should be considered.

Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK) has posted a good bit of information on how to temporarily remove your site from the internet while keeping the consequences in check.

Other methods

An alternative to this is an interstitial blackout, that still allows the site to be accessed, but only after the user sees a blackout message.

There is a handy SOPA Blackout JavaScript Utility for sites that wish to go this route — no content is then pulled from the site, but awareness is still created. There are also plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and others.

No matter your method, please consider the future of the internet, and help keep it open for all.

Tags: censorship, internet, internet blackout, PIPA, protest, SOPA, webmasters

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 3:20 pm and is filed under newsBytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Fight to keep Canadian internet usage open for progress and innovation
January 31st, 2011 by Michael Zimmermann

Recently, the CRTC issued a challenge to all free-thinking citizens. Please don’t sit by and let the government impose usage-based-billing on your information. More than anything else in a free society, the access to information and communication should be kept free — not necessarily free as in no cost, but free for us to choose. Free for competing companies to provide alternatives. Free for people, not the content-providers, to decide what their usage should be.

The CRTC, the organization that is supposed to ensure our access to information is representative of the people, is doing the exact opposite, by allowing content-providers like Bell and Rogers control the distribution and communication resources. Take action and get behind the thousands of Canadians who are already making their voice heard.

The internet is a resource. This infrastructure of communication has stepped in to augment and in many ways surpass libraries, textbooks, newspapers, and has provided a way to share and communicate in ways that were unheard of a mere handful of years ago.

I’ve signed the petition below, and encourage every Canadian to do the same.

Tags: bandwidth, censor, censorship, crtc, telcom, usage cap, usage fees

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 6:39 pm and is filed under newsBytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

New Zealand Judge bans online publishing of accused’s names
August 25th, 2008 by Michael Zimmermann

You heard it. Judge David Harvey ruled today that online media, and only online media was banned from publishing the names of two men accused of murder. His reasoning behind it was to stop online searches from turning up their names in the future, should the pair be found innocent.

Television and print are fine to name names, it’s only ‘online’ being singled out here, so questions come to mind as to how a scan of the newspaper would be treated, or a stream of the nightly news?

Read about the story online at the New Zealand Herald’s website. Apparently, you’ll have to go out and buy the dead-tree version, or tune into TV land to get the full story.

Tags: censorship, internet, new zealand, politics

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under newsBytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.