Up In Time To Protest

While I wish I could claim I took my site down for a week in protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills, the actual cause was way crappier. My provider did a kernel update that killed every Xen server on the host. User data had to be migrated off, the host reimaged, then all data migrated back over an apparently very small wire. The total downtime was about 5 full days.

Ironically the server was accessible just in time for me to black out my site (redirect) in protest of SOPA...

I was also a part of the anti-SOPA petition. I thought I'd post excerpts from the email I got on it, in case anyone was curious. Here's what I got:

01/18/12
Fight For The Future: Unreal
Today was nuts, right?

Google launched a petition. Wikipedia voted to shut itself off. Senators' websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them. NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.

You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before. Tech companies and users teamed up. Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms. The free network defended itself.  Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.

The really crazy part? We might even win.

Approaching Monday's crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA. Last week there were 5.
[.....]
P.S. Huge credit goes to participants in the 11/16 American Censorship Day protest: Mozilla, 4chan, BoingBoing, Tumblr, TGWTG, and thousands of others. That's what got this ball rolling! Reddit, both the community and the team behind it, you're amazing. And of course, thanks to the Wikimedians whose patient and inexorable pursuit of the right answer brought them to take world-changing action. Thanks to David S, David K, Cory D, and E Stark for bold action at critical times.

And the follow up:

01/20/12
Fight For The Future: Woohooo!
A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.
[.....]
P.S. China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:
In the New Yorker: "Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know).

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:
"We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics."

Posted: Sat 1/21/12
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Morpheus

Ooo, great snews work... theme is best...

Jeremy

Hey Morpheus!

Yep - sNews is awesome.. and thank you for the theme compliment! However, I'm working on making my own CMS so the back-end will likely change soon...

Theme wise.. I'm into ultra-lightweight or at least unbloated MDO - so that and theme design don't mix - you end up with very usable but simple themes.

While I can make heavier themes - it's blah to do - so the plan is to use open source or free themes made for WP and similar CMSs - then adapt them (change the php tags) to match the one I'm building - in case others want to use it / them.

I seem to be always busy - and trail season is almost here - but I do work regularly on the new CMS and theme style project - so it should be here soon!!

Your welcome to use this theme if you like - just copy fearelise.com/css.css - you may have to adjust your index.

Thanks again!

Up In Time To Protest

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