Daily Archives: January 17, 2012

Censorship Bandwagon

Internet Not Found

Sensationalism? Naaaah.....

 

So, while we wait for Dogwater Dick to finish dicking around with the audio (yeah, I’m throwing him under the bus – because he’s a fag) I thought I’d take a moment out to talk about censorship and the internet. I would like to preface these comments by stating that I am, in fact, an idiot. Next week Congress will be voting on the passage of two bills relating to internet security and censorship and piracy and e-anarchy and e-policestating and all that kind of stuff. I will not pretend that I am well versed on the topic; what I am well versed in is grandstanding and talking out of my ass.

“Internet censorship” is a scary word. SO scary that it is, in fact, two words. It’s being thrown about a lot and I don’t like that. But should I really be afraid? I am afraid that I won’t be able to look up when Wikpedia and Reddit and Boing-Boing and Mozilla and WordPress (who we couldn’t do this site without) go dark tomorrow. If the internets didn’t have cool shit like that – how would I find all the misinformation that I need to know? What would I do?  Like, be creative or something? Read a book?

The fact is that we live in a brave new reality where the constant flow of information is central to how we interact and have a global perspective, as many cultures. If services were forced to self police or face fines, I’m afraid that most of those services would simply go away – it’s way less of a headache to not have to fix something that never went wrong in the first place. Piracy, like on the high seas, is theft; I think we’d all agree. Unlike the high seas, however, it is less overtly homoerotic violent; I’d way rather my apartment was invaded by a bunch of guys who would leave updated OS and smoothly running pre-release movies in their wake.

But I digress. You should do yourself a favor and get more informed that I have led you to believe you might here,
Try out these links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16596577
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wikipedia-blackout-websites-wikipedia-reddit-dark-wednesday-protest/story?id=15373251

Maybe even do something:
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

But don’t try to look it up on Wikipedia – they’re not home.
WLP? Eh… we’ll have that post up as soon as we can.