Help protect the web!

[THe Floating Brain]

Disclaimer: This is mainly only applicable if you are a U.S citizen.

Fellow people of the internet/web developers, the United States congress is considering a new law to censor the web. In my opinion this goes against many basic U.S principles. Besides the point you can help oppose this law by going here and e-mailing your local congressman:

https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/9042/ ... n_KEY=8173

Thank you for reading.

[dandymcgee]

If that passes, the Internet as we know it will literally tear itself apart.

[Light-Dark]

Thank god i live in Canada, Seriously i gotta wonder what the fuck the U.S government is thinking , are they trying to set off riot bombs? if you censor the internet people aren't going to be happy, i know i wouldn't be.

[ismetteren]

So as I understand it, they want to control the domain name system.

So they are going to force DNS servers to follow their specifications? But what prevents people from using DNS servers outside of America?

Generally, i think that many of these anti-piracy laws we see are, seen from a technical standpoint, completely bizarre. A DNS server is, AFAIK, basically just a list of hostnames and ip-addresses, and a set of rules for distributing them. The scenario where someone becomes a criminal for distributing a set of non-copyrighted strings and integers, because they contain information about how to get to a web-site, which contains information about how to connect to computers where you can download material that may or may not be illegal kinda freaks me out.

Also, my technically minded brain cant help but think that things like DNS and BitTorrent in reality are very high level abstractions and in the end it is just about sending electrical signals through a copper (or fiber optic) wire. This point of view tells us something about why geeks don't make laws, but it also shows that what they are banning is essentially just an exchange of (non copyrighted) information.

[THe Floating Brain]

I pretty much agree with everyone here. In addition I would like to add the fact that this can easily be abused.

[Light-Dark]

Has some great points on this idiotic bill.

[dandymcgee]

This bill is seriously fucking stupid. The laws we already have regarding copyrighted material allow authorities to do what they're trying to do with this new bill, to a lesser degree of punishment. How many illegally streamed videos / illegal music is actually being hosted in the United States right now? The problem is that most of the content is in other countries, outside of our government's jurisdiction, and they can't do jack shit about it. Increasing the penalty for something that is not even well defined to a FELONY FEDERAL OFFENSE is absurd. There needs to be some serious discussion taking place before this, or any minutely related bill, is allowed to go through.

[M_D_K]

Got a link to an e-petition (on whitehouse.gov) here.
I hope all you yanks sign it.

[short]

mdk (or anyone): I'm not a web expert, but im curious, what is the wwws used mean? (as opposed to just www)

[dandymcgee]

mdk (or anyone): I'm not a web expert, but im curious, what is the wwws used mean? (as opposed to just www)

I think in the case of wwws.whitehouse.gov is means www secure (the https protocol is used vs standard http). It's probably hosted on a different server altogether, hence they needed to come up with an alternative sub-domain for the secure site.

[szdarkhack]

mdk (or anyone): I'm not a web expert, but im curious, what is the wwws used mean? (as opposed to just www)

I think in the case of wwws.whitehouse.gov is means www secure (the https protocol is used vs standard http). It's probably hosted on a different server altogether, hence they needed to come up with an alternative sub-domain for the secure site.

Yeah, i'm pretty sure that's what it means. After all, "www" or "wwws" is just a subdomain name, it doesn't signify anything. They probably used it to indicate that this portion of the domain uses https instead of http.

[pritam]

[dandymcgee]

Haha Pritam, yeah.. I noticed that too.

[Light-Dark]

Cant wait for the riots!

[DStudios]

Glad I live in Canada.