Pages

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Wikipedia Going Black Wednesday

You may find yourself staring at a blank screen tomorrow when you try to look up some bit of essential information on Wikipedia.

Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, has announced that the online people's encyclopedia will "black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday protest against proposed legislation in the United States of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives (and the same bill called the PROTECTIP Act -- PIPA -- in the U.S. Senate).

Wikipedia and many other major online content providers say that the new bills would seriously damage the free and open Internet. Social media sites like Facebook or YouTube— or any site with user generated content—would have to police and preemptively censor their own sites, forcing huge liability costs onto countless Internet companies.

You can read more about SOPA and PIPA at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Go to McBrooklyn's HOME PAGE.

No comments:

Post a Comment