I know it's rhetorical, but since I feel like answering.. politicians don't care about their constituents. So what are they doing getting voted in?

Wikipedia is actually having trouble loading the main page sometimes because of all the extra attention it is getting. That's not the intended blackout!

Well, mine uses xenomorphs. Much betterz than yourz hamsturz.

Gaha, I can still access Wikipedia by going straight to the page I want and clicking the "stop loading page" button before the SOPA message pops up.

Kudos It does indeed work, now I can work See if this bill with SOPA and PIPA passes and it does indeed kill the majority of the internet, supress everyones freedom of speech and whatever else....why doesn't the American puplic start a riot to over throw their goverment since they are no longer listening to the people and seem to have shunned "democracy"? Seems about right with all the countries america has been getting involved with over suppression of the people

Wiki

We are not allow to say

could somebody explain to me the differences and similarities between sopa, pipa and ndaa?

I know this is a political thread, but it appears it has been allowed.

SOPA is a treachery to people around the world, to make the U.S. much like, even worse, than communist China concerning internet RIGHTS. The government does not have the right to take this down. America is becoming more big monitoring, fast. If this [censored] passes, I'm getting the [censored] out of this country in two years and going to damn Canada, or Switzerland.

The US Government is run by people with the money, big government people. Doesn't matter if you are right or left wing. You can be a right or left libertarian or a right or left Ultitarian. This is Ultitarianism!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm a bit confused about how it would be enforced though. People are saying that it would affect sites outside the USA, but surely ones in the US can host their sites on offshore servers, use mirrored sites etc.? I'm no IT expert but trying to shut down websites completely is surely impossible?

As I understand it they would remove the entry of the infringing website from US based DNS servers. Meaning that people in the US would be unable to access the websites that are deemed to be infringing, except in the case in which the users happen to know the IP address or use an alternative DNS. This could cut off a large number of hits per day for sites, thus cutting off funding via advertising. Also US companies that handle financial transactions (Paypal?) would probably be banned from providing payments to the infringing websites.

Which is technically impossible with DNSSEC, easily bypassed, DNS blocking was also removed from SOPA. Instead IP filtering and deep packet inspection would be used....

Let's be honest, the people behind SOPA/PIPA are smart, very smart. They know without a doubt the bill will not put a dent in piracy. The kind of people who pirate and run piracy services are far too smart to be brought to heel by mere legislation and have continued to elude the best efforts of the US and it's lackeys. SOPA/PIPA exists for one reason, to protect an aging and crooked business model, dominated by large corporations who are slowly but surely being eroded by people like you and me. These corporations want to stifle the internet because the internet is the biggest threat to their dominance that has ever existed. For decades, through control of radio stations and television channels, corporations have made bank, but now, all the money in the world can't save them from guys in their bedrooms and home-made studios creating content that is more relevant to the current generation. The variety the big media corporations refused to provide because it "wasn't profitable", is now being provided by hundreds of thousands of amateur, semi-pro and professional independent creators and directors and we're all competing for the most important currency of all, time. The time you spend watching our material is time you don't spend watching theirs. It's money directly out of their pocket that they could have been earning before the internet came along and that's the hilarious thing about this whole deal. Piracy is not what's killing their profits, completely legitimate competition from the internet is. They use the cause of "fighting piracy" as a trojan horse to force through bought and paid for legislation to kill independent content creation for good because they can see the end is nigh for their aging and increasingly irrelevant business model. They know they cannot win legitimately, so they do what they've always done, exploit a corrupt political system to bully and extort their way to what they want.

This is what SOPA/PIPA are really about and that is why you should oppose them. You are standing up for what your generation represents, just as previous generations have done the same on a slew of different issues. As much as those in power would like us to believe we are the apathetic, lazy generation. The truth is we are anything but and that scares the [censored] out of them.