EFF staffers with blacked out sites

Here's a great photo of the beaming staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posed with their laptops showing the sites that were blacked out yesterday. Visitors to EFF's site sent over one million emails to Congress yesterday.

Thank You, Internet! And the Fight Continues

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: censorship • eff • free speech • law • pipa • politics • protest • sopa • web theory

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The Snowden Principle

http://kylerconway.wordpress.com/ Kyle Reynolds Conway

It’s hard to not be proud of the internet [read: all of us].
jerryeast

I’m interested to know if the blacked out websites are considering this a victory for their side. According to the LA Times, somewhere around 10,000 websites participated in the SOPA “blackout” – considering there are upwards of 350 MILLION websites operating around the globe, those 10,000 blackout sites comprise a mere 0.002857142857142857 PERCENT of total potential websites that could have participated. But I guess a message was sent to Congress, and that’s what’s important.
- http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair
  
  Uh, one of those sites was Wikipedia. How does that fit into your calculations?
  - jerryeast
    
    Wikipedia was one of only 10,000 sites that “went black” out of 350 million sites in the world. That’s how Wikipedia “fits into” my calculations. 10,000 sites out of 350 million sites is not a whole lot, percentage-wise.
    - Holly Moore
      
      You have to weight the significance of the sites in question. If 300 wordpress accounts went dead today it wouldn’t have a fraction of the impact of a single day of wikipedia blacking out. Looking at just the numbers ignores presence and prominence - which is a key part of any protest – digital or otherwise.
      - jerryeast
        
        “You have to weight the significance of the sites in question”
        
        I do? – are you saying that one blacked out Wikipedia website is equivalent to 350 million non-blacked out sites?This is like saying 100 grains of sand are equivalent to one Mount Everest (mass-wise)
        
        10,000 websites making decisions for the other 350 million websites is almost more dangerous than anything Congress could do to the Internet. Then again, I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia
- Efemmeral
  
  Perhaps the important factor is the presence, or significance, of the participating sites rather than the number of them.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/HSGBQ2P4E23WHKAE4LEXJPA2FM i am b
  
  look at the websites though…..reddit,youtube,google,boingboing to name a few
- http://profile.yahoo.com/HSGBQ2P4E23WHKAE4LEXJPA2FM i am b
  
  reddit got 2 billion hits in december alone….come on dude, the biggest websites on the net went down…wake up and stop supporting sopa .
Amphigorey

Hooray for the Fightin’ EFFers!
http://twitter.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman

Pfft, fanbois.
Mitch_M

I figured out that I could still read Wikipedia articles during the blackout if I disabled Javascript. I support the protest but also can’t help tinkering with stuff.
Bernard Dubuisson

This photo has to be one of the greatest Apple promo material I’ve seen in years.
chgoliz

I had to be on the computer for work that day. What I found myself thinking, repeatedly, was: if only Google had done it too. 1o,000 sites is a fabulous bloc, and really made a difference, but disabling that one site for 24 hours would have made the point crystal clear to everyone. It’s too bad that wasn’t the thinking at Google.
nolandsman

Again, I just can’t understand the logic of protesting by participating in the effects of what the protest is against. Can someone help me with this? By the same logic, rather than occupying Wall Street, those protesters should have participated in predatory financial practices for 24hrs, the very same activity they were protesting. Wouldn’t the appropriate response have been for boing boing, google, etc., have posted as much illegal material as they possibly could have, broken as many censorship rules as they could think of? I guess it worked, but why “blackout”? Why wasn’t it a full spectrum “whiteout”? And by the way, don’t many of these sites, such as youtube, censor content and delete content based on infringement already? I’m really confused by the method of this protest. But, as I said, I guess it worked, so congrats everyone.
tvugly

Macbooks are boring.
Astragali

The intent of the website blackouts was to illustrate the result of what the passing of SOPA/PIPA would mean. So, to use your Wall Street analogy, protesters would have to take a large chunk of everyone’s money for a day.