Wikapedia shutting down at midnight
 

Go to Wikipedia at midnight, and you won't find any of the usual encyclopedia articles.

Instead, you'll be greeted with a message about anti-piracy bills that are topics of heated debate in the U.S. Congress -- stirring opposition from tech companies in Silicon Valley and support from media companies in Hollywood.

And still I bet some people will think it's smart to give power to huge corporations to take over any website they want for questionable anti-piracy laws.

It is already midnight somewhere.

The website says in less then 2 hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

At least that's 24 hours hours that they wont be begging for money/donations.

Boy the ego they think if they are down . it will effect the web.the web is a big place.

Bunch of twats! Shutting a site down worldwide for a law thats only relevant in one country.

you must think SOPA/PIPA will only affect the US?

assholes, where i will go for porn tonight

But what if I want to find out what high school Daniel Tosh attended?

.

It's gonna be just a blackout.

What's the fucking drama?

Sort of ironic. Protesting the government having too much power by flexing their own power to disrupt the internet.

Protest are done by individuals, not by corporations, although the idiot internet generation thinks that these huge websites are their "buddies" despite the fact the they will all sell you out and all your information in a second if the money is right.

But yeah, buddy up with with multimillion dollar websites, they will never abuse their power or sell you out, only evil governments do that..lol

I don't understand how being a martyr and shutting down your own business is "making a statement".

6bot :upsidedow

Hm... If the big tubes would follow suit the people might storm congress....

So wikipedia.org, a non-profit site with no advertising, is evil?

Now Google is on board, check out their logo.

Nice to know we have some big players fighting corporate greed.

A lot of for profit companies have been threatening to do the same. Facebook, Google, etc.

Political Super Pacs are non-profit. Being non-profit doesn't automatically make you some saintly, only-do-good organization.

It's like Google and Facebook, they want to have this friendly image despite the fact they sell everyone's information 10X over, not to mention working with law enforcement in ways that violate privacy. Any group with power will eventually abuse it, but for some reason people think all these internet companies are different.

BTW, from Wikipedia's own mission statement:

oh its down with this message on it

Imagine a World
Without Free Knowledge

For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia. Learn more.


Reddit is shutting down in 4 hours time as well lol

reddit is going down for 12 hours in
04h 51m 49s to protest SOPA and PIPA.

Pretty gnarly stuff, makes you realize how serious this is if they actually passed this bogus excuse to censor the internet.

I personally think this piracy bit is just a front for what they have been doing since AOL and that give corporations control over the internet.

My next question is how hard would it be to create another internet?

At least the have the balls to actually shut their site down. Sites like Google and The Pirate Bay are just putting black over their logos, but they are continuing to stay open for business. If they really wanted to send a message they would deprive their users of their service for 24 hours.

LOL, where the fuck did you get that dumbass idea??

Your post are truly insightful. You are so right.

We all know the best way to get people on your side is to deprive them of service.

every mass media outlet is reporting on this today. if joe and jane sixpack weren't educated about sopa they will be today. #winning

They didn't seem to care when the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 were passed, and those are REAL threats to freedom.

Fuck the internet and all the pansy ass pro-piracy twats on it.

Why is it bogus?

Do people who own intellectual property not have a right to it once it hits the internet?

How about stop buying into the hype that this is only about censorship. If the US gov wanted to censor the internet, they don't need SOPA to do it. They would just do it, and do so wrapped under a current law and say it is due to "national security." If any of you think otherwise, you have no idea what has taken place in the past decade and what powers the government already has.

Looks up for me: WiccanPedia ...

I'm just saying if you really believe that SOPA will shut down innocent sites then you should shut your site down and put a page up that simply explains that if SOPA passes this is what could happen to many innocent sites including many of your favorite sites.

Blacking out your logo might make a few people look, but for the most part most people won't care. This is a country where half the eligible people can't even be bothered to vote every four years, you really think a blacked out logo is call them to action?

will not be made comfortable with pigs, fuck your diet.

that was passed when the country believed it was under attack and in immediate danger. For it or against it that has ZERO to do with this and is completely irrelevant.

I think this is a charade they have been trying to give power to the major corporations over the internet for decades. Sure they want to stop piracy but this much much bigger then that, this ultimately will give the right to stop any website with no legal proof or process and on top of that these huge companies will have the power to take your domain with no legal process.

The are spending lots of money to try and get this power over the internet. Since before 2000 huge companies have tried this over and over.

The bottom line is the internet is chaos and cannot be controlled. We have people duplicate our domains all the time. It's just part of internet business, if you really have a problem with someone stealing then take them to court (small claims) it's not as hard as you think and you might learn something interesting in the process.

We do not want to give huge corporations power over the internet that would be the dumbest thing the people have ever dumb to hurt themselves.

We do need a way to stop tube piracy but not even close to this process.

It need to be more unbiased people managed not ran by a huge corporations.