Very soon Wikipedia will go dark for a day to protest something called SOPA. During this event — future historians will call it a “knowledge eclipse” — no one under the age of thirty will know how to confirm or disprove a statement of fact.
It’ll be awesome.
Tomorrow you should go up to a 20-something and tell them things like “the fern is the world’s most popular carnivorous plant” and “Henry VIII invented the internal combustion engine, but kept it secret to protect the environment” and they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a “reference book.”
Cats have gills, Larry Storch was the 37th president, the 48-53rd floors of the Empire State Building contain the real White House, the pre-internet Wikipedia took up 700,000 floppy disks, Al Gore was once the Vice President of the United States: True? False? It doesn’t matter. These are just a few things you can tell these kids today and they’ll have to believe you. What choice will they have?
I keep seeing things in the press like "students will be unable to do research papers". Uh, I'd give an F to anyone that used Wikipedia as a primary source, and I LOVE to read Wikipedia. It's a great place to start reading if you're curious, but never, ever rely on it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEveryone knows that wiki is a secondary source like all other encyclopedias. Even lazy students will use the citation list from the wiki article and not cite the article directly.
Does anyone get the humor in this article? That's not a rhetorical question. While I can sense the sarcasm, I have no idea who Mr. Goldberg is disagreeing with, why he is disagreeing with them, or why anyone would find his comments humorous. While I have trouble believing he is for SOPA or PIPA, he seems to be mocking those who oppose them.
I understand that we have entire generations for whom the illegality of downloading copywritten content makes about as much sense as calling the removal of a railway spike murder. But, our governments reponse is to try to lay the technical and legal foundations for nationwide internet censorship and allow yet more ability for federal law enforcement to demand private records from businesses. Seems like something an economic conservative would be against.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMaybe I'm projecting here, but I think the mockery is not for the position but for the tactic. Much like the Occupiers, one has to wonder what this sort of posturing is going to accomplish; the people who would support it already oppose SOPA and people who were on the fence, and even some who would otherwise agree with Wiki are going to see it as a self-righteous inconvenience to innocent bystanders.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis SOPA bill has an odd coalition of supporter and detractors.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTea-Party groups and Ron Wyden are against it.
Pat Leahy and Marco Rubio are for it.
Rubio is not for SOPA, which is a House bill. He's stated that he will oppose it if it gets to the Senate.
He is, however, a co-sponsor of the Protect IP Act.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUpdate: Rubio has withdrawn his sponsorship.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJonah: Only the English Wikipedia "will be blacked out" globally in this protest. So John Huntsman will not be deterred. Unless he logs in from Red China. Also, is "blacked out" racist? Wiki never did this under the white-guy presidents.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou know what would be nice? If Jonah actually mentioned what SOPA is in this article, and why so many people are opposing it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCongress should never get anywhere near DNS.
Nobody should. DNS is sacred.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBingo. I'm sympathetic to people who want to protect their intellectual property. But, I agree entirely: You let the federal government get their grubby little (enormous, more correctly) hands on DNS and that's the ballgame.
Think about the release and publication of those Climategate emails. Those emails were and are "intellectual property". Think about the tens-of-thousands of websites that the government could have then shutdown (this one for starters) had SOPA been in place at the time.
See the problem? History is littered with well-intentioned ideas that were eventually used to quell popular discontent. I have no reason to believe that SOPA would be any different.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is exactly the kind of silly slactivist tripe I hate about this "blackout". Sacred? Really? Do you have any inkling of what that word really means? How you've cheapened it? It would be accurate to say "Politicians messing with DNS is a bad, bad idea". But using religious terms is precisely the kind of too-full-of-themselves hubris that these slacktivists engage in. This isn't the Berlin Wall. This isn't Dachau or Bergen Belsen. People need to get some perspective here, stat.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUmm... because it's as poorly and vaguely written as Obamacare? Because sites like Vimeo could be blocked without due process? Because it breaks the nascent DNSSEC, which promises to reduce spoofing and phishing attacks? Because the sponsors likely can't program their DVR (or earlier, their VCR)?
How about because the head of DOJ is Eric Holder? Isn't that enough?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is Jonah Goldberg we're talking about. The waters are muddy enough without dealing with things like facts, information or journalism of any sort.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI suggest you look that up on Wikipedia.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJudas priest. This is a blog post, not an "article". If you want to know what SOPA is and why so many people are opposed to SOPA, read any one of the hundreds of pieces about it.
Jonah is making a humorous comment about the state of information, the general ineptitude at research shown by many kids these days, and a few other things.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe reason for the spit on support is that the *intention* of the bill is admirable.
However, the rules and authorities created can be used for other not so noble *intentions.*
I don't want this bill -- find another way to protect intellectual property.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSOPA is dead. These fancy pants internet dorks will be protesting nothing. How's that for cutting edge? Wikipedia is as nimble as the paper sloths it replaced.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd guess why SOPA is dead? Because sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and pretty much every significant website on the internet have been petitioning hard enough to get it killed. But even so, PIPA -- the senate alternative -- is largely unchanged, and most websites are protesting both.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI've got Boy Scouts in my troop getting worked up over this, 'cause they spend their time in the echo chamber of anti-SOPA, so I'm trying to make it a teaching moment. Show them how there are multiple sides to every story. Asking them "What is the problem they're trying to solve?" and "Why do you think companies want to protect copyrighted material?"
They're gonna tell me they can't research anything...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJust a polite question: do you know what a DNS server is? Do you know how to distinguish between a "foreign" and "domestic" domain? Are you aware of any mechanism by which the SOPA (or PIPA) would actually curtail *any* piracy currently taking place online? Do you know how to efficiently censor all links to a specific domain in response to a universal court order, given the following constraints: zero budget, three available man-hours, and an HTML/PHP frontend written in Notepad++ and uploaded via Filezilla (or similar FTP application)?
I think those are prerequisites to having an opinion -- or, indeed, asking pointed questions -- about these bills. Once you can give serious answers to those questions, THEN we can start discussing whether SOPA's massive vestment of internet regulatory power in the Attorney General, with its attendant vast compliance costs and its end run around due process is constitutional or, if so, wise public policy. As a one-man webmaster, I cannot imagine supporting those provisions once familiar with the technical implications, but I am willing to have the discussion with those who are competent to have it.
I mean no disrespect by this, as you phrased your post very politely and it sounds like you really are just trying to raise some questions with your Boy Scouts. But it strikes me as entirely possible that they do, in fact, have a better understanding of the issue than you do. The "anti-SOPA echo chamber" consists of everyone involved in internet architecture, from Vint Cerf down to Bugzilla contributors. They are smart people. The pro-SOPA echo chamber, by contrast, consists of Congressmen who have powerful financial reasons to listen to certain lobbyists and middle-aged moralists who are skilled at ethics but who, bless them, have only the vaguest idea what an IP address is.
Am I being unfair?
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