This month, we protested SOPA and PIPA proposed Internet legislation by blacking out web pages, making calls, tweeting, and sending emails. All of this resulted in a huge success for those of us who value a free and open Internet. The news media even embraced our concerns, with Arizona’s Channel 3 TV reporter Jared Dillingham stopping by my office to interview me about it.
It goes without saying that the Internet has become a communication tool that far outweighs lobbying by large organizations. That’s an awesome thing and it’s one of the reasons we need to fight for our online freedoms.
Today, Frugal Dad released an infographic showing just how much happened on January 18, 2012, the day the internet stood still.
Earlier this week, thousands of sites, including JoeTech.com, blocked or hid their content as a symbolic gesture to protest the impending SOPA/PIPA legislation that threatened the integrity of free-flowing information on the Internet. While some sites displayed a pop-up message allowing users to move on to content by clicking a button and Google simply changed their logo to appear censored, sites like Wikipedia and Joe Tech completely blocked all content from users to truly emphasize the impact such legislation could cause. An example is seen below. This post will show you how we did it in just a few very easy steps.
Black Out Your Site Like Wikipedia
This site and Wikipedia both used a pretty harmless method to block our content for the protest. The method we used involved simply covering up the normal content with a layer of HTML that hides it and shows something else in its place. To accomplish this in an elegant way, you will need an image and/or content to display, the HTML shown below, and a small change to your site’s CSS. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Create your image and content. In my case, I made a couple very simple changes to a large version of my logo image to make it more protest-y.
2. Add the overlay code. In your site’s template (or your theme’s footer.php in WordPress), copy the code below and paste it right above the /body tag. Modify it as indicated to include your own image or message.
<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;
width:100%;height:100%;
background:url(/images/darken.png);text-align:center;">
<!-- Add your image and message below this line -->
<img src="/images/sopa.png" />
<!-- Add your image and message above this line -->
</div>
3. Stop the scroll. Update your site’s CSS file to stop the original content from being larger than the new overlay content. This may not always be necessary, but will be pretty obvious when it is. Just add the following code anywhere to the bottom of the CSS:
body{overflow:hidden;}
That’s it! Follow the three steps above and you’ll have your protest/maintenance/special message up in no time on every page on the site.
If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.
What Is S.O.P.A.?
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.
In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?
And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.
If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:
Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest
At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.
During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.
Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.
Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.
Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.
Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.
I know you guys love contests, so here’s an awesome one from my friend over at DragonBlogger.com, another tech site you should bookmark. He had a contest last month that went incredibly well, with thousands of entries, so he’s doing it again.
Here’s the deal. One winner chosen at the end of the month will be shipped a brand new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet for free and this will include a copy of uRex DVD Ripper Platinum which allows them to rip their favorite DVD’s and convert them to MP4 format they can transfer to the Kindle Fire. If that wasn’t awesome enough, he partnered with New Trent and will also be giving away a New Trent IMP78B Imperial Leather Case and a New Trent Fimir Anti-Glare Screen Protector to the winner of the Kindle Fire as well.
The Kindle Fire Giveaway contest hosted by Dragon Blogger technology blog is made possible in part by these awesome sponsors and you should pay them a visit and thank them!
Sponsors:
Aside from the Kindle Fire, if you could win anything on DragonBlogger.com or JoeTech.com, what would it be?
