Unless you are living under a rock or outside the US :).. you probably heard about the crazy legislation that the US congress and senates are proposing to help protect content creators (AKA Hollywood) from privacy. While I personally don’t have any issues with giving protection to content creators, it should not be at the cost of freedom for the rest of the world. Go to http://americancensorship.org/ to get more information about why this proposed legislation are bad.
Today (1/18/2012) has been designated as “Protest SOPA/PIPA day” by the technology world. I believe in the old adage, put your money where your mouth is :).. so I checked on the top 25 US sites (according to Alexa) to see how many of them are supporting this protest in a visible manner. Only 4 out of the 25 sites, put visible content on their websites regarding the protest. I think Google’s message was the most effective, where they did not reduce the functionality of the website, but provided a lot of visibility to the protest. I know which companies I am going to support/use moving forward :). I was very happy to see that three of the sites that I use on a regular basis (google, amazon and wikipedia) are supporting this protest. Here are screenshots of the protest from the the 4 sites that are in the top 25 visited sites in the US
Screenshots of some other sites that I visit on a regular basis and are supporting the protest
