In an anti-SOPA protest, Reddit, the Web Archive, WordPress, Wikipedia and many, many others are going to go black tomorrow. Google is going to protest on their home page and OpenDNS is going to censor some results. I’ve considering blacking out my site, but am stupid busy at the moment (and have been for weeks) and would need to do some tweaks for things to not break. But you can easily black out your site by putting some JavaScript on your site from SOPA Strike or use the index.html file here or this WordPress plugin.
If you’re wondering what the fight is all about, from a technical standpoint, this is a great write-up that I’m hoping stays up tomorrow. If you need a simple explanation of why SOPA/PIPA is bad, here’s a good one:
Sopa is all encompassing enough to include almost any site capable of hosting user content, from Reddit to Dropbox. This means that the government can and will enforce the law very selectively, which is the entire danger of the bill: it’s a blank check.
They could remove wikileaks because some article they link to has copyrighted material, or take down the site of some political watchdog group because one of their videos has music playing in the background.
The lack of due process also allows the possibility that if a site hosts something the government doesn’t agree with, all it would take is an intern uploading a random mp3 to said site to shut it down.
Very dangerous s**t here.