Internet Sites Blacked Out In Protest of SOPA For January 18, 2012

SOPA protests shut down Web sites

The idea is to cut off the channels that deliver American customers, and their money, to potential pirates. But tech companies see the laws as a dangerous overreach, objecting because, they say, the laws would add burdensome costs and new rules that would destroy the freewheeling soul of the Internet.

“The voice of the Internet community has been heard,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who sided with the tech companies, said in a statement. Issa said he had already been told of a victory: GOP leaders told him that the House would not vote on a version of the bill that those companies oppose. “Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential.”

The biggest impact of Wednesday’s blackout may be in the shutdown of the English-language version of Wikipedia, which gets 2.7 billion U.S. visitors per month.

“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web,” said a statement  signed by three of the free encyclopedia’s administrators, with the handles “NuclearWarfare,” “Risker” and “Billinghurst.” They said the decision to shut down the English-language portion of the site, starting at midnight Eastern time, had been made after a virtual discussion that involved 1,800 users.

This is a great thing that so many are protesting the US Government by blacking out their web sites.  Let's hope this works and in all honesty I think it should have been a World Wide protest not an 'English portion of a site taken down', due to the fact that so many of the WWW sites rely on American site hits, information and purchases.


The picture below was taken from the story:

These Websites Are Going Dark to Protest SOPA Wednesday at mashable.com

Sites Going Dark on Jan. 18 to Protest SOPA

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• Imgur
• Tor Project
• Miro
• iSchool at Syracuse University
• Oreilly.com
• Wikipedia
• Reddit
• Mozilla
• WordPress.org
• icanhazCheezburger Network
• MoveOn.org
• Good Old Games
• TwitPic
• Minecraft
• Free Press
• Mojang
• XDA Developers
• Destructoid

This doesn't make sense when I saw this list of 'CONFIRMED  PARTICIPANTS'/SITES, That Would Black Out'  I'm glad it's still up so that I can write this but you know what I mean.

GOOGLE being the top site.  Awesome, but that is not true because if it was I wouldn't be writing this blog on www.blogger.com, or able to check my email, or do 'GOOGLE searches' which I can.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Supports Bilingual Ballots

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said on Tuesday that she supports the Department of Justice in its efforts to get a bilingual ballot in Cuyahoga County.
Brunner said the DOJ contacted county officials in July, telling them they would need to have ballots in English and Spanish,
The order came after studies showed the county was home to more than 6,300 Puerto Rican voters with limited English proficiency.
Brunner said the Voting Rights Act has special exceptions for certain groups of U.S. citizens.

“The act recognizes that there are groups of Americans who are educated in languages other than English, such as Native Americans or Eskimos or Puerto Ricans and, under that act, if there’s difficulty understanding English then they’re to be accommodated under federal law,” Brunner said on Tuesday.
“What’s difficult for people to understand is that the federal law recognizes that Puerto Rico, even though the schools are American schools, the children there are taught in Spanish,” Brunner said. “So the law recognizes if they were educated in Spanish and they move to the mainland, if the have limited English proficiency, we need to accommodate them.”
Brunner said there is no specific number of voters a county must have in order to require a bilingual ballot, Hirsch reported.more