as you may have heard, many websites are "blacking out" to protest the bills in U.S. Congress called "SOPA" [Stop Online Privacy Act] and PIPA [PROTECT IP Act, actually standing for something else; see below]. my personal website, which currently resides at anon126.net78.net, is a participant.
let's get down to it. what are SOPA and PIPA? and how/why are they so bad?
- well, they are bills currently in Congress that will require websites to be essentially blocked (as well as removed from ad serving, etc.) if they are found to be engaging or facilitating copyright infringement.
- the main issue is that they could potentially allow an entire site to be blocked even for some illegal content that constitutes a small part of the whole. (this is unlike the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], under which sites would only be required to remove certain content that was deemed illegal.) in addition, it could threaten services such as proxy servers, which are are so far legal and have legitimate and legal purposes, simply because they can be used for illegal purposes. okay, so what's a proxy server again?
- a proxy server, or simply a proxy, is a system that allows a computer to connect to it to exchange data between it and a certain destination, such as a website. instead of the computer connecting directly to the destination, it connects indirectly, through the proxy. this way, the computer can avoid being tracked or monitored directly, given that the proxy server is good enough to prevent different measures used to monitor
