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Jan 20 2012
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News, Media & Sport

SOPA strike: The aftermath

A couple of days ago I blogged about the SOPA strike that was occurring on the internet, including Wikipedia’s 24-hour take-down of its own site in protest. This did lead to a series of amusing things on social media such as the #FactsWithoutWikipedia hashtag whilst the Guardian did a liveblog (what else?) that asked its reader to ask any question in the hope that their writers would find the answers by traditional means – encyclopedias and copies of Who’s Who?

I guess now is a good time to take stock of how successful this protest has been and whether or not it will actually change anything. Fight for the Future, a team of five led by Tiffiniy Cheng put out a video to show what SOPA and PIPA would do – I linked to it in my post yesterday. It has gone viral to the tune of 3.6m views at the time of writing.

It also seems that those views have translated into people taking direct action and it seems like it’s starting to pay off. Senators including Marco Rubio of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas and Orrin Hatch of Utah have withdrawn their support for the bill after they received a barrage of e-mails and phone calls from people concerned over what effect the proposed bill would have on the internet. This infographic from Pro Publica shows the dramatic swing of support following the events of Wednesday:

Obviously, there’s still a lot of legs in this story if we’re to consider recent developments. Last night saw the closure of Megaupload, showing that the government doesn’t actually need SOPA to shut down things they don’t like, and this saw hacking collective Anonymous retaliate by hacking websites such as the RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music Group and the Department of Justice.

If anything, this can sum up the contradiction of the internet quite well; one day we’re persuading people to directly contact politicians, the next we’re audibly cheering on people hacking into websites. It’s a funny old e-world.

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Jan 18 2012
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News, Media & Sport

SOPA Strike

Boing Boing goes dark

Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Reddit and Not On The Wires have ‘gone dark’  or in the process of ‘going dark’ in protest of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). It is really strange to see websites that I use a lot out of action but imagine if that was the case for most websites on the internet.

If the bill is passed in US Congress, any website that infringes copyright law could be taken down by the copyright holder. So, for example, say a video that streams the U2 song Get On Your Boots was uploaded onto YouTube. Why would you? They’re not that great a band. Anyway, I digress. If you do that, the copyright holder could actually lodge a complaint and get the website shut down. All those videos of dogs chasing their tails and cats playing keyboards? Well, they go down with the sinking ship. It’s scary to think that a website as big as YouTube could be taken down and Google are, understandably, up in arms. That’s the main issue with SOPA but there are other issues such as ISPs having the power to block websites that are suspected of copyright infringement that are also fairly rotten.

Wikipedia’s page is asking its users to contact their local representative to vote against these bills but will it actually happen? It depends on how the users take these protests; either they will be merely annoyed that they can’t find out what genre the current Coldplay album is classified under or they will be encouraged to take action. That’s the thing with grandiose acts of protests – there’s no real middle ground position to take in response. You’re either for or against.

Hopefully though most sane people will be against this form of protest and against SOPA. Vist SOPA Strike for more details and for a full list of participants and watch this excellent video explaining PIPA in great detail and in a way that puts mine in the shade.

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Jan 13 2012
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Journalism

The Daily Blot: Does Twitter have its own running order?

Earlier this week, a Twitter rage erupted over comments made by David Cameron concerning the UK film industry. The Prime Minister wants film funding to focus on helping films that have mainstream potential. Film-makers, cinema-goers and film critics all lined up to take a swipe at Cameron and Twitter was awash with people protesting at the perceived arrogance of the PM to decide what is right for the UK film industry.

However, this isn’t a new idea from the PM. Way back in November 2010 Cameron hinted this grand plan in Prime Minister’s questions. It was in response to a question by Richard Harrington, the Tory MP for Watford, whose constituency is the home of Leavesden Studios – the home of the Harry Potter films, then recently bought by Warner Bros.

Read the rest of this over at The Daily Blot.

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Dec 14 2011
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News, Media & Sport

Are the government taking out their austerity too much on the disabled?

I’ve had my fair share of problems with the welfare system over the years. When I applied for Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) straight after leaving university I found out I couldn’t actually get any of it because they thought I could live off my girlfriend’s part-time income (which is almost an insult, to be frank) and then when we tried to get some housing benefit last winter we came unstuck because we had to keep sending document after document after document to prove our case. In the end, we gave up since it was causing so much stress.

Something needs to be fixed on those specific areas and that is what makes the coalition government’s decision to ‘re-haul’ it by cutting money out from disability benefits particular perplexing.

They’re hoping to pass the welfare reform bill before Christmas and instead of clamping down on benefit cheats they are removing certain forms of disability benefit like the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and announcing the introduction of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), which claimants may only be get for a year if they have a partner that earns £7,500 or more or there are limited savings.

Basically, instead of showing compassion, they’re trying to throw in as many loopholes to stop disabled people get the money that they actually need.

The other truly ridiculous thing about these proposed changes is that it’s basically saying to couples: “If you want to get benefits, split up!” Who knows what kind of damage that would do. For the disabled, it’s important that they have people around them to support them and make them stronger. It’s also crying out for benefit cheats to claim more money from the government that they don’t really need. Heck, if it’s easy enough already when it comes to the JSA and housing benefits then they’ll crack this one too eventually.

What angers me the most though is that this sends out the message that because we are broke it’s going to be the disadvantaged that have to pay. Has it really now come to this?

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Dec 07 2011
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News, Media & Sport

China’s attempts to create a “healthy internet”

In China, a battle has been waged for some time as the government try to clamp down on social networks. A senior official even went to the headquarters of Sina, the biggest social network in the country, to ask them to prevent the spread of “toxic rumours”. There was growing cynicism that the government’s attempts to crack down on ‘rumours’ might be a little bit more than creating a “healthy internet”. According to Reuters, one user said in August:

If this was really about quashing rumours, Internet users would surely welcome that, but I fear that this is not about mere rumours. It’s more about waving this banner as a pretext to cleanse so-called rumours and ban the people from telling the truth.

Despite these fears, Sina have just recently started to put into place some methods to try and cleanse the social network of information that could be a cause for concern. A ‘rumour control’ team has been set up recently and there’s, according to The Next Web, about ten members of that team watching activity on a round-the-clock basis. Their role is to issue warnings to users that they think have crossed the line and they also have the power to suspend and delete accounts. Tan Chao, director of the rumour control team, told China Daily:

The job is vital, as we want to protect the truth and maintain an unpolluted Web. There is a lot of information on Weibo, much of it eye-catching, which means it attracts a lot of people. Yet users are not always good at judging what is true and what is false. They can be easily misled.

Could you imagine Twitter implementing similar measures on their service based on the request of a UK government? Given that one of the ideas mentioned in the wake of the UK was a shutdown of social networks to stop people from communicating at times of social unrest, the answer probably isn’t clear-cut as you might think.

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