Free Talk Live

Users of the social news and community site Reddit don’t like the way the government seems to be muscling in on the Internet. So they plan to build a new one.

Major Internet companies have formed a united front in their opposition to the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. Well, almost. One exception has been the domain registrar GoDaddy. In a op-ed published in Politico shortly after SOPA was introduced in the House, GoDaddy applauded the bill and called opponents "myopic."Now furious Internet users at reddit (owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast) have organized a boycott of the registrar.

Imagine surfing the internet without being able to watch videos on YouTube, share with your friends on FaceBook, look at pictures of your best friend's new baby on Flickr or read news headlines from reddit. Luckily this is not reality, though it could be if the Congress passes H.R. 3261 the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Essentially, SOPA would claim the federal government “owns” the internet and will have the ability shut-down any website that commits a copyright infringement, whether willfully or not.

Corporate Political Spending Report Could Signal New Trend

The Center for Political Accountability analyzed a study this month revealing a slight decrease in shareholder support for greater transparency regarding corporate political spending. Though support remains just below the all time high of 35 percent, the slight trend reversal could signal a shift in the near decade-long trend.

Mass action on January 18, 2012 won a small victory for opponents of the internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA. Many websites “blacked out” in protest and asked visitors to sign an online petition. Google reports that 4.5 million people added their name to an online petition to Congress to oppose internet censorship. Possibly in response to these actions, Lamar Smith, the main sponsor of SOPA, announced on Friday that he would delay further action on the bill.

"A group of Internet activists calling themselves Operation Payback have taken credit for shutting down the website of a bank that earlier Monday froze funds belonging to WikiLeaks."

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It's time people begin treating computer code the way we do the alphabet or arithmetic. Code is the stuff that makes computer programs work -- the list of commands that tells a word processor, a website, a video game, or an airplane navigation system what to do. That's all software is: lines of code, written by people. We are socializing, working, consuming, and living in a world increasingly defined by programs. Learning to code is the best way to understand what all those programs do, or even to recognize that they are there in the first place.

Website hosting company GoDaddy has officially voiced its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Bill in 2012, which is designed to thwart movie and music piracy on the Internet by empowering copyright holders to effectively shut down websites or online services found with infringing material. If passed, the U.S. government could blacklist any website it deems in violation of copyright, which could range from a few posts in a Web forum to a few links sent in an e-mail.