Friday, December 30th 2011
Congress Debates SOPA, Hypocritically Downloads Illegally Itself
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:
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
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.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:
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.
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
Where we disagree is where you place the blame on pirates. I don't expect to do jail time because other people are stealing, nor do I expect to have my rights restricted as a means of curbing piracy. If it wasn't piracy, there would simply be another excuse.
A Marxist might argue that nothing is apolitical, even RAM timings and silicon doping, and often what we choose to ignore tells us more about ourselves than the opinions we voice.
Nevertheless, I fully understand your wish for an entirely tech focused site; however, I feel that it is impossible to separate tech and politics in today's world, particularly in light of recent developments.
In Spain, the recently ousted government attempted to pass a similar law (ley Sinde), which fell flat on its face, but it is only a matter of time before the new executive attempts to pass comparable legislation and in this sense, Spain and the rest of the world are awaiting the outcome of the SOPA debate.
By the way, happy new year.
Just for informative reasons
you could just watch " The Arrivals " Series ... Just Google it
The more power someone has, inherently, the bigger the conspiracy. Probably not along the lines of lizard people. But there are conspiracies everywhere, from the mundanely small to the massive. Albeit the latter is less prolific but to deny they exist is to live under a rock.