Almost everyone who understands something about technology will have heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (
H.R.3261) currently being debated in the U.S. House. This is internet censorship legislation by any other name and anyone that doesn't have a vested interest in it like the big media cartels is against it. This is because it hands almost total control of the internet to powerful (read: money) special interest groups, allowing them to shut down websites at the mere whiff of an accusation of 'piracy', however small and however unfounded. This will easily ruin many legitimate businesses, all on the pretext of 'protecting copyright' from supposed 'financial losses' due to content 'theft'. It also does an awful lot of other things, all of them bad, which are fully detailed in the link above. Now, if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just look at how the
current 'darling' of the internet,
GoDaddy operates: they pulled the DNS records of
weebly.com, because of one little complaint against the site and without even contacting the domain owner first to advise of the situation. Disgraceful. Give them SOPA and a webmaster doesn't stand a chance, regardless of their size.
However, in a revelation that will surprise nobody, it turns out that members of Congress have been downloading illegally themselves -
shock! A little investigation by the good people at
TorrentFreak has demonstrated that these people are complete and total hypocrites. Yes,
hypocrites. So, how did they out this revelation? We'll let
DailyTech explain the fine details:
TorrentFreak used Hurricane Electric's handy list of assigned IP blocks (found here) to track down which IP addresses belong to the offices of members of Congress. And lo and behold, when those addresses were compared to results on YouHaveDownloaded, a torrent tracking site, they yielded over 800 hits.
Now to put this in context YouHaveDownloaded tracks only a tiny portion of torrent traffic, so it appears that Congress -- even as they look to punish lesser mortals for file sharing -- are themselves gleefully committing a "smash and grab" as Vice President Joe Biden (D) once put it.
Yes, that can only mean one thing: one rule for the rich and corrupt elite and another (much harsher and unreasonable) one for the rest of us. Here's a couple of screenshots of the many incriminating results obtained by TorrentFreak:
Pirate Windows! Throw them in jail!This is porn, the details of which you don't want to know
Hopefully, there will be enough of an outcry to eventually stop this abomination of a bill from ever becoming law.
There's lots more info on this kind of corruption reported daily, over at
techdirt.comPropaganda picture credit: Shepard Fairey
82 Comments on Congress Debates SOPA, Hypocritically Downloads Illegally Itself
edit: Oh, shush, Ford, nobody wants to hear logic.
most of the SOPA supporters are free masons
- It may or may not be the officials; it's not possible to tell, just like it isn't with private accounts
- Regardless of who it is, the whole organization is supposed to be against illegal downloads, so everyone working for it represents it. If one employee slips up, the whole organization is deemed to have failed
- When some poor schmuck account holder has a friend download something without his knowledge, or has his wi-fi hacked etc, these parasites still try to nail him as the 'responsible party'. Same shit applies here; it don't matter who's done it, the top guy is still liable. Double standards otherwise. Oh, wait...
I think if this act is inforced then we will see the following changes.
1) The war that is raged over the internet EVERYDAY will increase and become extremely (more so) violent.
*Speaking of war, Anonymous attacked Sony again (did anyone know?). Then Nintendo VERY quietly withdrew their support for SOPA. For full details go to > www.geek.com/articles/games/anonymous-targets-sony-over-sopa-nintendo-quietly-withdraws-support-20111230/.
2. Organized (on street) crime will make an extremely violent and unexpected come back.
3. All the people that currently download software will be left with nothing to do, will they consider doing something that will make them heard? Will they murder someone?
Anything bad you can think of is now becoming possible, or is possible once again.
WELCOME TO THE NEW AGE!
BRB after downloading Gangland:laugh:
Anyway, never mind that - Happy New Year!! :toast:
Happy new year. :) :toast:
I know it is a lot to believe that they could actually have alternative motives other than the "piracy" or "protection from terrorism" bs they are feeding the public but all of the evidence points towards that direction
"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
-J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director 1924-1972