So, today was the “great blackout”.
I have to be honest, although I participated in the blackout [1], I’ve not really been much impacted by the blackout today. I tried to access wikipedia a couple of times, and drew a blank, well… ish. I tried to follow up a link to a profile on identi.ca, and got a black page. I tried to get a link to a podcast I listen to, and got a redirect to another site.
So, how do I feel it went? As a guy who lives in the UK, I think it was really interesting. I saw more comments about the loss of Wikipedia than I did about SOPA, I saw that the BBC did a news story on Wikipedia being down, and I had a really hard time explaining why it was an issue to my wife (to be fair she said “you always go into a long rambling explanation, why don’t you just summarize it in a sentence for me” – I said “It’ll might take down the blog site you spend a lot of time reading”, and she said “Oh, OK”).
I saw a lot of people posted a link to The Oatmeal’s SOPA blackout comic. I’d link to it, but it’s not exactly work safe, and you might be browsing this site, and don’t want to see a koala making sweet love to a donkey, or Oprah and Jesus on a jetski in space! Er, so anyway.
I don’t know. I hope it had much more of an impact in the US, but I think really, most people would have been going “WTF? Wikipedia is down… now how are we going to find out what the 23rd episode of the Transformers TV series was about” than about anything to actually do with SOPA, and I think people who did take an interest are going to be more like my wife (“how is this actually *really* going to impact me looking at lolcats” – not actual quote) than me (“OMG, The stinking AMERICAN GOVERNMENT are going to take down my podcast, my blog and all my code” – nearly actual quote).
[1] CCHits.net had a redirect on the main page to http://sopastrike.com/, and the daily exposure show was just Doris (actually the Festival voice “cmu_us_clb_arctic_clunits”) saying some stuff I programmed into her. The nearly-actual quote above was actually something like “This law, if enacted could take down not just cchits.net, but my personal blog, open source code I have written, my e-mail server, my authentication systems, and this is just my content. I use a shared web server, and every other customer on the same server could also be affected if any single user posts material they do not own the copyright to. Simply put, the law the American government wants to enact would destroy everything that is good about the internet.” There was more than that, but like my wife said, I waffle a lot. Sorry. See, I’m doing it again. BAH!
