That could certainly garner it some exposure, but not sure if it is really plugin material. That's just me though. Perhaps we could see something different now that Wordpress has officially come out against SOPA.
You don't need to edit the theme to add it. You just put the javascript in a Text widget in your sidebar or footer. It was actually very easy to add to my sites when I did it.
AmericanCensorship.org actually had one of those and it was used here on Techdirt for a while. I don't know if they are listing the code for it anymore, but I may have it still in my saved widgets on my wordpress site. It wasn't really a plugin, but rather some Javascript code that created the popup.
With a domain seizure, the actual domain registration is transferred to the seizing organization (eq the government) The person or entity which owned the domain no longer has control of the domain nor its DNS settings.
DNS blocking is something different. In DNS blocking, the domain stays registered to the person or entity that registered it, but its DNS registry is rerouted to a different IP than the actual site. I don't know if you are familiar with a man in the middle attack, but it is similar to that.
When it comes to DNS blocking for spam and malware, that is done on a voluntary basis by email service providers, and ISPs. If they want to, they will reference outgoing and incoming packets for IP addresses listed in the black list and block them if needed. While this is noble on the surface it can be overused and often abused. My last email service host had a tendency to over block and many emails I actually expected were blocked and I had no control over what was and wasn't blocked. I ended up leaving that email service provider for that reason. I just couldn't do business with them.
Under a federally mandated DNS blocking system, such black lists would become required and all ISPs would be forced to read them and apply them. While the security concerns most often expressed primarily deal with DNSSEC (which I honestly don't know a whole lot about) there are still plenty of security and privacy concerns for general DNS blocking. For one, ISPs will no longer be acting as a "dumb terminal" for your internet connection. They will need to actively scan all your requests and store that information. Which could lead to some very embarrassing and at times damaging results depending on the types of sites and services you use.
While there is a lot of jargon and technical details on DNS blocking at this wikipedia page, I think you would be able to learn a bit more about how it is currently used and what some of the problems might be.
E. Zachary Knight (profile), 10 Jan 2012 @ 10:26am
Re: Re: Re:
Ok... That seems to be a fringe event involving a specific worm. Additionally, there is no DNS blocking, only the registration (or rather preventing the registration of) specific domains to prevent their use by the worm. That is a far cry different than blocking the DNS registries for websites.
There is a false assumption in your argument. You seem to imply that we block malware and viruses at a DNS level, however you are wrong. We block viruses and malware at a packet level. When your virus scanning software scans your incoming packets, it looks for signatures related to known or suspected viruses and malware and blocks those for you.
It may seem like there is some kind of higher level blocking going on, but really there isn't. It is all done locally to you.
True you are. But you are only censoring to yourself. You are not forcing anyone else into the censorship. People do this all the time everyday whether they act as the personal censor or they listen to the views of other people.
This app is as much a censor as the various ratings boards such as the MPAA ratings or the ESRB ratings. They provide information and information only. You can argue all you want that they have some kind of pressure they can apply to "bad actors" but that comes with any act that exposes secrets and information.
Welcome to the world of cord cutting. I haven't watched Cable or Satellite television since I lived at my mom's house and have never missed it. Every time I go there or to my in-laws, I am reminded just why exactly I don't.
For example, I was at my in-laws over the Christmas holiday and I sat down to watch some tv. After flipping through the channels for the 3rd time looking for something, I switched over to Netflix and was watching something 1 minute later. Instant gratification beats spoon-fed crap any day.
I would like to ask how providing the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of an artist copyright control over a work they had no hand in creating fits the definition of this Constitutional clause:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I should also add to this after reading DHLC's comment, that the owners of the copyright actually have less of an incentive to preserve a work that is under a 95+ year copyright term as they will have moved on to additional work tht provides a higher ROI than the preservation of historical works.
Why spend $1million to preserve a film from the 1940s when the return on that effort might only net you half that or in a lucky situation break even? What is the point?
The work is often far more valuable culturally than it is monetarily and if the only motivation for restoration/preservation efforts is monetarily, then fewer works will benefit. Yet, culturally, works tend to lose value over time and with increased copyright terms, that culteral value is all but gone for the majority of works when they finally enter the public domain, if they ever do.
I would think that restoration projects would have been far more successful if copyrights had been consistently at 28 years. Film would have been far more likely to survive a 20 year stay in a vault versus a 80 year stay in a vault. Plus, the desire to preserve a film would have been higher at the time as the people who enjoyed it when it was released would have still been alive and would want to preserve it.
With a life+70 or a 95+ year copyright term, the people who enjoyed a work at release would have been long dead or beyond means to do any preservation effort when it finally went into the public domain.
People care more for the work released in their own lifetime and rarely have the time or means necessary for the preservation of work from years prior to their life, except in rare cases of extremely popular work.
I would honestly, for the life of me, would want to say that I don't agree with the other people who have responded to you and that they are wrong. That there is a rational explanation, but I can't.
The reason that copyrights last for life+70 years for an artist is because corporations wanted a 95+ year copyright but couldn't do it without making it look like they were doing it "for the artists". So they made up some bogus reason for why life+70 years made sense under copyright.
However, we know from history and the present that such a term is beyond its merit. The fact that an author's grandchildren hold a copyright for something they did not create is a complete farce. Tolkien's estate has turned into nothing but a copyright troll. Sure the movies they licensed were awesome, but how awesome would have been for those movies to have been made 30 years ago with a remake in the last decade? So many people could be profiting off an expanded public domain right now, but we are handicapped by the greedy estates and corporations that want perpetual control over copyright.
The difference is that people who use this app voluntarily downloaded and installed it. The people using this app have a choice to buy or not buy said product when given the information.
With the government, only the government gets the choice on what all citizens of the US gets to see/hear/buy.
Actually, that is not true. Rental services get the DVDs direct from the studios at a larger cost than retail. So buying the disks retail would actually be a money saver for them. The only reason the rental services pay the extra cost to the studios is to make them happier and prevent needless and pointless lawsuits.
No he isn't. Copyright terms are a very valid complaint. A term that lasts beyond the artist's life is not doing its job of incentivising the creation of new work. A term that lasts longer than the shelf life of the work is not doing its job of incintivising the creation of new work.
As for the idea that only new stuff gets pirated, you may well be right. But as we have said millions of times, that is a business model problem. If people can't get the content they want in an easy and cheap manner that they want, that is a problem the content creator/distributor needs to solve. They can do that by making that content available in the formats and areas the customers want.
Come on Capcom. This is all simple mathematics. In Mathematics, it is possible to draw a single line through two points. Take the following statements:
1) The ESA supports SOPA.
2) Capcom refers queries to the ESA for its stance on SOPA.
With that simple rule of Mathematics, what possible outcome were they expecting? The only outcome people could take from those two statements is that Capcom supports SOPA.
Dance around the issue all they want, but Mathematics never lies.
On the post: WordPress The Latest Tech Company To Come Out Strongly Against SOPA/PIPA
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Scalable Messages
On the post: WordPress The Latest Tech Company To Come Out Strongly Against SOPA/PIPA
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Scalable Messages
On the post: WordPress The Latest Tech Company To Come Out Strongly Against SOPA/PIPA
Re: Re: Re: Scalable Messages
On the post: WordPress The Latest Tech Company To Come Out Strongly Against SOPA/PIPA
Re: Scalable Messages
On the post: Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
DNS blocking is something different. In DNS blocking, the domain stays registered to the person or entity that registered it, but its DNS registry is rerouted to a different IP than the actual site. I don't know if you are familiar with a man in the middle attack, but it is similar to that.
When it comes to DNS blocking for spam and malware, that is done on a voluntary basis by email service providers, and ISPs. If they want to, they will reference outgoing and incoming packets for IP addresses listed in the black list and block them if needed. While this is noble on the surface it can be overused and often abused. My last email service host had a tendency to over block and many emails I actually expected were blocked and I had no control over what was and wasn't blocked. I ended up leaving that email service provider for that reason. I just couldn't do business with them.
Under a federally mandated DNS blocking system, such black lists would become required and all ISPs would be forced to read them and apply them. While the security concerns most often expressed primarily deal with DNSSEC (which I honestly don't know a whole lot about) there are still plenty of security and privacy concerns for general DNS blocking. For one, ISPs will no longer be acting as a "dumb terminal" for your internet connection. They will need to actively scan all your requests and store that information. Which could lead to some very embarrassing and at times damaging results depending on the types of sites and services you use.
While there is a lot of jargon and technical details on DNS blocking at this wikipedia page, I think you would be able to learn a bit more about how it is currently used and what some of the problems might be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL
On the post: Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies
Re:
It may seem like there is some kind of higher level blocking going on, but really there isn't. It is all done locally to you.
On the post: Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies
Re: Re: I disagree
This app is as much a censor as the various ratings boards such as the MPAA ratings or the ESRB ratings. They provide information and information only. You can argue all you want that they have some kind of pressure they can apply to "bad actors" but that comes with any act that exposes secrets and information.
On the post: Lamar Smith's Head-In-Sand Approach To SOPA Critics Inspires 'Lamar Smith Can't Hear You' Anti-Campaign Poster
Re: Re:
For example, I was at my in-laws over the Christmas holiday and I sat down to watch some tv. After flipping through the channels for the 3rd time looking for something, I switched over to Netflix and was watching something 1 minute later. Instant gratification beats spoon-fed crap any day.
On the post: Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late
Re:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
On the post: Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late
Re: Re:
Why spend $1million to preserve a film from the 1940s when the return on that effort might only net you half that or in a lucky situation break even? What is the point?
The work is often far more valuable culturally than it is monetarily and if the only motivation for restoration/preservation efforts is monetarily, then fewer works will benefit. Yet, culturally, works tend to lose value over time and with increased copyright terms, that culteral value is all but gone for the majority of works when they finally enter the public domain, if they ever do.
On the post: Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late
Re:
With a life+70 or a 95+ year copyright term, the people who enjoyed a work at release would have been long dead or beyond means to do any preservation effort when it finally went into the public domain.
People care more for the work released in their own lifetime and rarely have the time or means necessary for the preservation of work from years prior to their life, except in rare cases of extremely popular work.
On the post: Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late
Re:
The reason that copyrights last for life+70 years for an artist is because corporations wanted a 95+ year copyright but couldn't do it without making it look like they were doing it "for the artists". So they made up some bogus reason for why life+70 years made sense under copyright.
However, we know from history and the present that such a term is beyond its merit. The fact that an author's grandchildren hold a copyright for something they did not create is a complete farce. Tolkien's estate has turned into nothing but a copyright troll. Sure the movies they licensed were awesome, but how awesome would have been for those movies to have been made 30 years ago with a remake in the last decade? So many people could be profiting off an expanded public domain right now, but we are handicapped by the greedy estates and corporations that want perpetual control over copyright.
On the post: Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies
Re:
With the government, only the government gets the choice on what all citizens of the US gets to see/hear/buy.
Huge difference when it comes to these actions.
On the post: WB, HBO Continue To Suck At Economics; New Policies Encourage Piracy
Re: Re:
On the post: Has Hollywood Hubris Awakened Silicon Valley To The Importance Of Telling DC To Knock It Off On Bad Laws?
Re: Re:
As for the idea that only new stuff gets pirated, you may well be right. But as we have said millions of times, that is a business model problem. If people can't get the content they want in an easy and cheap manner that they want, that is a problem the content creator/distributor needs to solve. They can do that by making that content available in the formats and areas the customers want.
On the post: Capcom Tries To Tapdance Out Of Its SOPA Support, Blames 'Bad Journalism' For Its Own Statements
Re: Re: Re: Boycott this list
As I told AC, Blizzard for the same on SC2 and Diablo 3.
On the post: Capcom Tries To Tapdance Out Of Its SOPA Support, Blames 'Bad Journalism' For Its Own Statements
Re: Re: Re: Boycott this list
On the post: Capcom Tries To Tapdance Out Of Its SOPA Support, Blames 'Bad Journalism' For Its Own Statements
Re: Boycott this list
I also have Ubisoft and Activision/Blizzard now as well.
On the post: Capcom Tries To Tapdance Out Of Its SOPA Support, Blames 'Bad Journalism' For Its Own Statements
Simple Mathematics
1) The ESA supports SOPA.
2) Capcom refers queries to the ESA for its stance on SOPA.
With that simple rule of Mathematics, what possible outcome were they expecting? The only outcome people could take from those two statements is that Capcom supports SOPA.
Dance around the issue all they want, but Mathematics never lies.
Next >>