It wasn’t a good day for the file sharing site The Pirate Bay. According to the BBC, The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK Internet Service Providers from a ruling by the High Court in the United Kingdom.
Last night after hours the House decided to vote on CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act which has been widely criticized for privacy rights violations because the government and private companies can monitor your private information (emails for example) and pass that information to government agencies completely bypassing Internet privacy laws with little to no probable cause needed.
As opposition mounts on the newest piece of legislation that Congress is trying to put through which may violate Internet users rights; one of it’s biggest supporters, Facebook, is speaking out on why they support CISPA.
I’m kind of at a loss of words on this. Here is yet another piece of legislation that is trying to be passed by Congress that violates our basic rights as Internet users. Congress seems hell bent on getting something passed as of late, where some ulterior motive is behind it, which usually means someone other than the congress person is pushing for the legislation because they have a hidden agenda.
The entertainment industry are some sneaky bastards - yeah, I am looking at you RIAA. So, remember the whole SOPA thing where we came together as one Internet to stop the evils of Hollywood bribing lawmakers to track our online activities and shut down sites like Tumblr, Reddit and YouTube?
Piracy is a big problem. So much so that recent times on the web have become turbulent from national online strikes to combat legislation that impedes innovation and Internet freedoms in the name of protecting copyright laws, to the shut down of websites that contribute to piracy and many others closing their virtual doors in fear of what may happen to them.
Hawaii may be known as the “Big Island” and the go-to place for the best vacations around, but if you plan on visiting Hawaii and are bringing your laptop or mobile device, you may want to think again. It will be worse for residents of Hawaii if state officials get their way with a new proposed Internet bill which will make living in the Aloha state tougher for Internet users.
News about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is starting to gain a lot of traction. I talked about it earlier today, pointing out major concerns expressed by the global community on how harmful this agreement is, on an International scope affecting many countries who have signed on to it, including the United States.
You may have never heard of ACTA before, I know I haven’t. ACTA stands for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and due to the recent events and publicity of SOPA and PIPA, attention has been drawn to ACTA, which after reading about it appears to be just as bad if not worse than SOPA.
This past week during the height of the Internet and Congress coming to a head on the SOPA and PIPA bills, the deep pockets of Hollywood spoke out. Those in Hollywood, specifically the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) made their point clear to Congress that if they aren’t going to support their controversial anti-piracy bills that they won’t support them in return.
I have great news! House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who is the author and sponsor of SOPA, made a statement this afternoon that he is pulling SOPA from the House “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”
Klout, the website that measures online social influence released their Most Influential SOPA Voices on Twitter, for the SOPA strike earlier this week. According to Klout, there were twice as many retweets about #sopa, #pipa, #blackoutsopa, #stopsopa, #blackout, and #factswithoutwikipedia on January 18 than in the past 30 days combined. In total, the amount of SOPA-related retweets alone were 765,924. In total, there were 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets on Twitter.
It’s been a crazy week for the Internet to say the least. First there were nationwide protests and blackouts against SOPA, with citizens of the web uniting as one to keep an open and free Internet. Then yesterday, things really popped off after major file sharing website MegaUpload was shut down by the FBI, after a 2-yr long investigation.
Holy cow, is this really happening? After hearing about the MegaUpload shut down, the hacker or ‘hactivist’ group Anonymous is already taking a stance on the situation, and fighting back. They have already taken down Justice.gov and UniversalMusic.com and shot off a tweet saying “justice.gov & universalmusic.com TANGO DOWN! You should have EXPECT US! #Megaupload.”
When I first went on SOPA Strike it was just after midnight on Wednesday, with the intention on striking with my custom message up to stop SOPA for 24 hours. I ended up keeping the message up all last night as well, so all in all, it was well over 24 hours of striking the horrible SOPA and PIPA bills. I am happy I did too.
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