It appears as though half of the Internet is going dark tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PROTECT-IP. Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing, MoveOn (hopefully they stay dark), The Daily Paul, and even my own sister’s website are going to be unavailable. This move will certainly increase the productivity of the human race notably if nothing else.
So what about myself, is A Geek With Guns going dark? Not a chance. It’s going to take a lot more than PROTECT-IP (since SOAP is effectively dead) to shut me up. Even if PROTECT-IP passed and government were to accuse me of violating copyright causing my domain name service (DNS) records to be hijacked I’ll setup a new domain name, a Tor hidden service (which I’m planning on doing anyways), or some other workaround because I refuse to submit to censorship.
I can also tell you that the second PROTECT-IP passes I’m going to setup my own DNS server that will give the correct IP address to sites that have been blocked by those pricks in Washington. The IP address of this DNS server will be given out to all who want it so they can bypass the state’s censorship as well.
I think the blackout is more of an awareness thing that it is censoring. For example, I can tell you right now that pretty much all my coworkers don’t know about SOPA or PIPA. When they go to google something tomorrow (since Google’s on the confirmed blackout list), they’ll be running into the page about the blackout and the reasons why they’re down. Then, theoretically, they think about how often they need to use Google/any other blackout site and the effects these kinds of limitations will have on their basic internet usage.
That, and my website isn’t a political rantblog like yours, so I can see why you’d keep yours up anyways.
I do understand the reason behind the protest but it doesn’t really apply to me as I’ve been bitching about this legislation for ages. This post is mostly a “welcome to the party, cookies and punch are being served in back” statement.
In addition to that part of it is me being contrarian because everybody is in a tizzy over SOPA/PROTECT-IP but not nearly as many people gave a shit about the NDAA and nobody seems to care about the Enemy Expatriation Act, a piece of legislation that would actually allow the government to revoke your citizenship (which removes your citizenship protections and thus can lead to your ass being tossed into Gitmo along with other enemy combatants). Since no websites were willing to make a statement against those far worse pieces of legislation I find any desire to participate in this protest nonexistent.
Finally I wanted to announce my backup plan, a DNS server that will ignore the government’s attempt at censorship.
Yeah your site is actually a revenue stream and thus a productive use of your time, unlike mine. 😛
How is your DNS server going to get you around it unless you downloaded every name address mapping their was. Isn’t a personal DNS server just going to have to hit the top level .com or whatever which is where the blocking will occur? Or are you going to go with the OpenDNS system?
You can use more than one DNS server and give them precedence. For example you could use mine (we’ll say it has the non-routable IP address 10.10.10.10) and Googles (8.8.8.8). You would set 10.10.10.10 to be your primary DNS server and if the web address can’t be found (in other words it’s not one that has been shut down by the feds) your system will try finding it on 8.8.8.8.
Since 10.10.10.10 is always the first DNS server hit it’s results will take precedence over Google’s.