sopa

The Stop Online Piracy Act has officially been put on hold.

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) announced today that the House Judiciary Committee, which he heads, "will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution." Smith added that he has taken critics' concerns "seriously."

"It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products," Smith said in today's statement.

The statement from the House Judiciary Committee does not mention … Read more

All four Republican presidential candidates today denounced a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills, lending a sharp partisan edge to yesterday's protest against the legislation by Wikipedia, Google, and thousands of other Web sites.

The bills are "far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening (to) the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet," former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said during tonight's CNN debate in South Carolina.

Romney's rivals offered similar criticisms of the Senate measure, Protect IP--scheduled for a floor vote next week--and the House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, … Read more

Although Wikipedia completely blacked out its English language Web site yesterday in protest of potential U.S. antipiracy legislation, traffic on the Web encyclopedia was higher than usual, according to research and analysis company Zscaler.

"If you want a quick way of increasing traffic to your website--change or take down portions of your website in protest," Zscaler wrote on its blog yesterday. "At least that is what we have gleaned from today's (1/18) Wikipedia protest against SOPA."

Graphs on the Zscaler blog show that unique Wikipedia visits during the blackout were higher than surrounding … Read more

In the aftermath of Wednesday's SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, the Internet community amassed quite a bit of goodwill, flexed its muscles in a friendly, humorous, civil-disobedience kind of way, and, remarkably, even managed to change quite a few minds.

Just 24 short hours later, Anonymous legions nuked that goodwill and took cyber security into thermonuclear territory. The real question now is: were they played?

As I write this, #OpMegaUpload is in full effect. The Internet is seemingly coming down all around me. Global Internet traffic is fluctuating between 13 percent and 14 percent above normal, and, as you can … Read more

During yesterday's Web protest against antipiracy legislation, Firefox blacked out its start page and redirected users to Mozilla's anti-SOPA and PIPA action page. It also posted 9 million messages about the two pending bills on Facebook, Twitter, and in its Firefox + You newsletter.

As a result, more than 40 million people were reached, announced Mozilla News today.

"All these steps were aimed at informing and mobilizing millions of people on the poorly drafted anti-piracy legislation--SOPA and PIPA--pending in Congress," Alex Fowler wrote in The Mozilla Blog.

According to Fowler, around 30 million people in the U.… Read more

The Internet flexed its power with this week's SOPA/PIPA blackouts, but make no mistake: this battle isn't over yet, and will only intensify--it might get a lot more sneaky, in fact. But this week? The Internet wins. Will students lose out with Apple's new plan to revamp the textbook industry? Or just the students (and schools) who can't can't afford iPads?

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Online activists angered over antipiracy legislation in Congress as well as today's indictment of operators of popular file-hosting site MegaUpload attacked the sites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America, shutting them down at least temporarily, and were targeting many others.

"The Largest Attack Ever by Anonymous - 5,635 People Confirmed Using #LOIC Bring Down Sites!" the AnonDaily Twitter account read, referring to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) tool Anonymous supporters use to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on sites.

Apparently Anonymous tried a … Read more

commentary There's talk that the online protests against the cybersiblings SOPA and PIPA constituted some sort of political coming of age moment for the tech industry. As if the tech moguls had "largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington" until now. Really? I love The New York Times but c'mon. This is the sort of fairy tale that sounds sweet but fails the smell test.

Silicon Valley has been looking to buy influence in Washington ever since tech companies started making serious money. Witness the sundry battles waged in the last couple … Read more

Google's homepage today shows a thick black censorship stamp across its colorful logo.

And, if clicked on, it leads users to a "End Piracy, Not Liberty" petition that asks people to sign-on to protest the two anti-piracy laws to be voted on by Senate and Congress.

"Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late."

Over the course of the … Read more