On January 18th, 2012... one year ago today... something incredible happened. The internet went dark. There wasn't any power outage or system failure, no it was bigger than that. The internet chose to go dark in protest of a bill in congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Major websites like Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and many more altered their websites to sensor it in some way to show what legislation such as SOPA could do if passed. And it worked. The internet rallied, and rose up in great numbers to fight for our internet freedom. That day will be immortalized in the history of the internet as a bright beacon of strength and unity.
Below is a video of a speech from Aaron Swartz, one of the front line fighters against SOPA. If you haven't seen Aaron Swartz's name lately, do a quick search for him. His story is fantastic in his accomplishments, yet tragically short in time. This video is his recollection of how we defeated an internet censorship bill, and showed congress that we will fight for what we believe in.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way others talk about them. After Aaron's passing, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the internet, by the way) took to Twitter:
Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.
No comments:
Post a Comment