Wikipedia Blackout in Protest Over SOPA & PIPA

Posted by Jeff in Internet

Wikipedia blackout in protest over SOPA & PIPA legislation proposals in the US.

Wikipedia is one of a number of high profile internet companies which has put up a holding page for 24 hours explaining a blackout and why people cannot access the site.

Reddit, the user generated news site and the blog Boing Boing have also pledged their support for the blackout.

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA is the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Both are currently being debated in Congress.

Wikipedia and others say the acts are so broad and badly constructed that they will have an impact way beyond the issue of piracy.

The legislation allows the sort of interference by Government agencies and courts that the Chinese government currently employs to block websites it deems inappropriate.

The idea behind the legislation is that it will allow content owners and the Justice Department the ability to order search engines to block results associated with piracy to therefore cut off their customer and money supply. To force advertisers, ISP’s and payment processors from doing business with those sites.

Supporters say that it is designed to stop the flow of money to to these ‘rogue sites’.

In reality it would mean that any website would have to monitor everything that anyone posted on their site to ensure that don’t get hit by SOPA or PIPA.

You can imagine how difficult this could be for many sites such as twitter, facebook, EBay, reddit or even a small business that has a small community or forum.

That is even before you get into the question of whether something is infringing copyright, intellectually property or not.

Wikipedia made a statement on their website,

“For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia”

Google maintain that SOPA and PIPA won’t even hit their intended target, the pirates. They state that piracy sites will just change their addresses and carry on as normal.

The protest is one of the first times that the internet and technology companies have effectively come together to form a lobbying group with enough power to take on the traditional lobbying groups of the media industry.

Google are running a petition against SOPA and PIPA where you can find out more. https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

The official SOPA and PIPA sites.

BBC Web Properties Go Down

Posted by Gary in Internet, Technology

The BBC website went offline tonight, including the iPlayer and other web properties.

Twitter has been all a buzz this evening with people shocked that the BBC’s web properties have become inaccessible all around the world.

There has been comment from the BBC’s various twitter users but nothing that indicates a reason, just comment that it has. Although the BBC also runs 24/7 TV news channels there has, at the time of writing, been no mention there either. In fact they are still heavily advertising the BBC website and email addresses.

The fact that such a large, important and stable web property is suffering downtime is leading many tweets to suggest that the end of the world must be close, that something is not quite right in the world.

It is going to be interesting to discover the cause, could it be a hack that some are suggesting or is there a more innocent reason?

I remember working for a company that suffered an outage in a similar vein and the reason?….. The cleaner had unplugged the equipment to plug in a vacuum cleaner.

[ UPDATE: BBC Website is back & accessible again. According to Richard Cooper, controller of the BBC's digital distribution, the infrastructure suffered multiple failures.

"This was a failure in the systems that perform two functions. The first is the aggregation of network traffic from the BBC's hosting centres to the internet. The second is the announcement of 'routes' onto the internet that allows BBC Online to be 'found.' With both of these having failed, we really were down!

We'll be taking a very hard look at what we need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again." ]

Internet Addresses Running Out Fast

Posted by Gary in Internet, Technology

The last addresses in the original pool of internet addresses (IP addresses) have now been allocated to local governing bodies. The cupboard is now bare.

These last blocks consisting of 80 million addresses are expected to be used up by September 2011 and the current system (designed in the 1970′s and called IPv4) will have come to an end many years ahead of schedule, thanks in large part to the massive growth of personal devices all wanting to connect up to the web.

It is important to note however that the internet won’t just stop working. All IPv4 addresses allocated will continue to work, it is just that there will be no more to be allocated to new devices.

A new addressing system has been designed and passed by the governing bodies but takeup has so far been slow. This new system is called IPv6, which has trillions of addresses rather than IPv4′s billions, and also contains efficiency and feature improvements.

But the new system will not run on many old pieces of hardware that were in existence before the new standard was ratified. This includes routers and other infrastructure devices that form the backbone of the web. Some will be compatible with an upgrade to their software but many will have to be replaced, and that replacement is happening very slowly.

In order to highlight the issue a world IPv6 day has been planned for 8th June with governments and companies are being encouraged to test out the new system. Some of the biggest companies have already signed up, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo and Google to name a few.

More information can be found at http://www.ipv6actnow.org/

Photo: nrkbeta

Happy Birthday Wikipedia

Posted by James in Internet, Technology

The default site for anyone looking for a definition or any kind of background information, Wikipedia, is celebrating it’s 10th birthday today.

Wikipedia has dominated the encyclopedia business for much of that time, signalling the end of some big name competitors such as Microsoft’s Encarta, which ran from 1993 but gave up the struggle in 2009.

In that time, according to the web ranking company Alexa, Wikipedia has grown to be the web’s 7th most popular site after Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Live and Baidu (the Chinese search engine).

Currently Wikipedia operates as a not-for-profit organisation running on donations from it’s own users and has raised approximately $16 million in the past year. For a site that has over 400 million users that money is a drop in the ocean when compared to other sites with profit models.

If you compare Wikipedia to Facebook, which has a user base roughly in the same ball park, Facebook has been reported as allegedly generating $800,000 a day.

All of the content on Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, some 17 million articles, and it has not been without controversy. The mere fact that any article can be written and edited by anyone has meant that many critics claim the entries are untrustworthy and can not be relied upon as truth.

In another study however, it was concluded that the main scientific pages were of comparable quality to the offline encyclopedias.