18th Jan 2012 - Blackout Day
This new year, the US legislature brought two acts to be added into the law books - The STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT (SOPA) and The PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA). However these acts met with mighty opposition from internet users all around the world, with giants like
Wikipedia, Craigslist, Boing Boing, A Softer World, Cake Wrecks, Cyanide and Happiness, Destructoid, DeckTech.net, Free Press, Failblog, Newgrounds, Good.is, Good Old Games, Gamesradar, Internet Archive, Jay is Games, Mojang,MoveOn.org, Mozilla, MS Paint Adventures, Rate Your Music, Oh No They Didn't, Tucows, What Dat.net, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, Tumblr, TwitPic, VGMusic, Wikia, Wordpress, xkcd, Galobuzz as well as the corporate site of the Linux distribution openSUSE and the congressional websites of Silicon Valley representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren, and 115,000 other websites blacked themselves out for the day. Google did not black itself out, but did put a link out on its main search engine informing everyone about SOPA and the PIPA and their stand against it, with the reasons behind it.
Wikipedia, Craigslist, Boing Boing, A Softer World, Cake Wrecks, Cyanide and Happiness, Destructoid, DeckTech.net, Free Press, Failblog, Newgrounds, Good.is, Good Old Games, Gamesradar, Internet Archive, Jay is Games, Mojang,MoveOn.org, Mozilla, MS Paint Adventures, Rate Your Music, Oh No They Didn't, Tucows, What Dat.net, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, Tumblr, TwitPic, VGMusic, Wikia, Wordpress, xkcd, Galobuzz as well as the corporate site of the Linux distribution openSUSE and the congressional websites of Silicon Valley representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren, and 115,000 other websites blacked themselves out for the day. Google did not black itself out, but did put a link out on its main search engine informing everyone about SOPA and the PIPA and their stand against it, with the reasons behind it.
This website also blacked itself out for a day, even though we are not based in the US. This is because, most countries have cyber laws, tat echo those in the USA. With Mr Kapil Sibal already making his moves against privacy and the unrestricted usage in India in general, it would not be a long leap, before these laws hit us, For many, who do not understand how these acts were not apt, and caused more damage than help, can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative for why Wikipedia went after it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Wikipedia_blackout#Wikimedia_community.
Hope we could reach out to you, and you can reach out to others to help us stop these laws.
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