GO DARK. Blackout will be the color of the protest. Like an eclipse of the sun worldwide content will be offline to say what businesses, individuals, groups, strangers and friends all are in agreement about. Stopping Internet censorship and keeping information free. A simple enough request, but a battle that is drawing lines in the sand as America sleeps. GO DARK
On the day of January 18th, 2012 the largest online protest in history is being held to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA. You can join in by blacking out your site and urging everyone you can reach to contact Congress now.
Starting time for the blackout at 8AM EST and end at 8PM EST.
For Arizona residents that will be 11AM MST and end at 11 PM MST.
All the current information and ways to partake in the mass protest are available right now on the SOPA STRIKE website. There are various levels of involvement that are being requested and will help the protest.
As of Tuesday after noon the blackout was mainly being supported by Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing. Since then some dramatic shift in the playing field has happened. Within hours of the Wikipedia announcement, Google had decided to join the protest against SOPA and PIPA.
"Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet. So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page." This was said officially by Google in a written statement provided to the Huffington Post on Tuesday.
On Wednesday Google, Wikipedia, Modzilla, Reddit, Wordpress, and more than 7,000 other participating websites will "GO DARK". This will effectively block access to their content. Although Google will be changing its home page in support and solidarity for the protest, they stopped just short of agreeing to take down its search engine completely.
The worldwide Hactivist group Anonymous had made several formal declarations to participate fully in the "GO DARK" protest. This has some speculating what other activities maybe ready to happen during the Blackout. All such speculations are only that and not based on facts or statements. The AnonPress had this on their wall on Tuesday night :
this is what you will see if the government passes the bill SOPA.
██████████Black█████Out████Protest████Against█████████████████████SOPA█████████████████████Jan 18 2012█████████████████████ so stop the government from doing this
Additionally an anti-SOPA event is being organized NY Tech Meetup, a trade group representing all aspects of the New York technology community. The group is expecting more than 1,500 members and speakers from leading tech companies to show up at on Wednesday. All protests are to be peaceful and meaningful by access denial from the Internet community.
The Internet companies that are joining together in the SOPA STRIKE protest are allied in purpose. These same companies are known for never being able to agree about anything business wise, until now.
The White House announced on Saturday its formal opposition to SOPA and PIPA. This has caused a charged and mixed reaction amongst Congressional party members. The results of the protest remain to be seen, but there is sure to be some impact in the Blackout tomorrow.
Information is never free.
Good luck in Arizona.
Good luck America.
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