Sunday, January 15, 2012
Stumbleupon
Stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) is an outfit which finds interesting snippets from the Internet for you, making clever use of your preferences and viewing history. As far as I can make out, Stumbleupon is a fast growing corporation which makes its living from advertisements in one form or another, while providing its services free of direct charge. And if you work for them, amongst other benefits, you get free breakfast & lunch and reimbursement for your wellness. Clearly a very go-ahead outfit.
The reason for mentioning them is that they came up with an interesting link this morning, telling me all about something called SOPA, a bit of legislation presently before the US Congress, but which is alleged to be the subject of oddly little comment in the media, perhaps because all the big media companies are all for it. Big fat article in Wikipedia though.
SOPA is all about bearing down on online theft, mainly of other peoples' information, like downloading and watching a new movie without contributing to its profit and loss account. Which does not sound too bad, but SOPA also seems to be about stopping people in the US, mainly poorer, older people for whom the medicine bill looms large in the budget, from buying their medicines cheap from Canada - a rather more murky business.
But what seems even more murky is that copyright holders will be able to put blocking orders on websites which they believe to be infringing their rights by an administrative process, not involving public hearings in courts or anything like that. That implementing such blocking orders might disturb the domain name system which underpins the Internet as we know it and might provide the US government with all its needs to implement the sort of censorship it is so censorious about it others, should it see fit so to do. With the best possible motives of course: so they might block sites which ran against their latest concern for our welfare, sites which promoted, for example, the excessive consumption of unsuitable & unhealthy foods. Does one trust them not to see fit?
There is also much disquiet about the potential impact on various internet service providers - the host for this blog for example - who might be held responsible for the misdeeds of their users.
If you care about the Internet, maybe you had better join the debate! Write to your local MP!
The reason for mentioning them is that they came up with an interesting link this morning, telling me all about something called SOPA, a bit of legislation presently before the US Congress, but which is alleged to be the subject of oddly little comment in the media, perhaps because all the big media companies are all for it. Big fat article in Wikipedia though.
SOPA is all about bearing down on online theft, mainly of other peoples' information, like downloading and watching a new movie without contributing to its profit and loss account. Which does not sound too bad, but SOPA also seems to be about stopping people in the US, mainly poorer, older people for whom the medicine bill looms large in the budget, from buying their medicines cheap from Canada - a rather more murky business.
But what seems even more murky is that copyright holders will be able to put blocking orders on websites which they believe to be infringing their rights by an administrative process, not involving public hearings in courts or anything like that. That implementing such blocking orders might disturb the domain name system which underpins the Internet as we know it and might provide the US government with all its needs to implement the sort of censorship it is so censorious about it others, should it see fit so to do. With the best possible motives of course: so they might block sites which ran against their latest concern for our welfare, sites which promoted, for example, the excessive consumption of unsuitable & unhealthy foods. Does one trust them not to see fit?
There is also much disquiet about the potential impact on various internet service providers - the host for this blog for example - who might be held responsible for the misdeeds of their users.
If you care about the Internet, maybe you had better join the debate! Write to your local MP!
# posted by Jim @ 2:40 AM 
