I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it.
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
The problem is that SOPA also introduces a whole bunch of HIGHY SCARY laws and procedures. Disney did not like that review of Cars that you wrote? Then can abuse SOPA to get you off the net, sue you, and kill your revenue streams.
DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
And then the government makes using all that fancy tech a criminal offense (if they could pass PATRIOT act and SOPA, why not), makes a few demonstrative cases, and suddenly no normal people want to be part of that, since for the most part, the internet is still working fairly okay for them.
Using that fancy tech is an end in itself as far as I am concerned.
When you think about it, public key cryptography is just plain awesome. We can generate a pair of numbers that let you hide and authenticate messages! Why would you not want to use that?
Much more recently I became aware of these other technologies that amount to a secure public title registry. Distributed currency and name resolution. Awesome! I want to learn about these things and put them to use, and soon. The hacker appeal of these is just staggering!
The very idea that a government would even consider saying I can't or shouldn't use these (shouldn't do a certian kind of math) is merely a reason to hurry up and do it faster. How dare they.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Sorry friend, but english has been modern since around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, depending on how you look at it. The language of shakespeare is literally the language of today. The changes since then have been minor when compared to the history of the language.
Slightly broken things stay slightly broken forever, things that don't work get replaced. Or at least that's what I learned from the "real world" business so far. That unfortunately also means that if you really want something fixed properly, sometimes it's easier to just break it completely than convince loads of people it needs replacing before it breaks...
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.