Tag Archives: internet

Don’t break our internet {important info on SOPA and PIPA}

I like megandowntherabbithole to revolve around art and design, not to be a soapbox for my personal political views. However, there’s an important issue out there that should matter to you no matter where on the political spectrum you fall.

Did you notice something yesterday? Wikipedia was blacked out. Popular sites like WordPress, Mozilla, Reddit, icanhascheezburger, Pinterest and most impressively Google were either fully or partially blacked out and had links to contact your local representatives and demand they vote NO on SOPA/PIPA. Maybe you saw the many posts and shares on Facebook and Twitter of people who had already signed a petition, urging you to do the same. Even some small independent bloggers had their sites blacked out for the day in protest (this one included). But what is everyone so up in arms about?

SOPA and PIPA are two pieces of legislation making their way through Congress that you should educate yourself on. Backed mostly by the entertainment industry, these bills would give the American government the right to shut down any site accused of hosting, or even linking to, sites than infringe on copyrighted content. Do you have a blog? Well, if someone commented on your blog and included a link to copyrighted content, your site could be immediately shut down, and you would face heavy fines. Faced with the burden of policing their own content, many sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and more would have to shut down. Sites like Google would be banned from listing offending sites, or face penalties themselves. While the entertainment industry and the bill’s supporters claim that these fears are overblown, most internet companies and people who actually understand how the internet operates know that we’d be opening Pandora’s box for censorship, giving the government the freedom to shut down any site they want without due process, placing the burden and cost of proving your innocence on YOU.

I’m not condoning piracy at all. As an artist and designer, the last thing I want is for my work to get stolen. BUT giving just a few people the power to police the entire internet is terrifying and a little too 1984 for my liking. In ten years do we want to be looking back and reminiscing “remember how cool the internet USED to be?”

You DO have a voice. Over 4.5 MILLION people signed Google’s petition yesterday. Several of SOPA’s supporters in Congress have already backed down because of the backlash. If you enjoy a free, open, and unsensored internet as we know it, please contact your local representative and let them know you’re against these bills.

Watch this video

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Sign a petition here

Click here for companies you can contact that support SOPA/PIPA

Click here for companies who participated in yesterday internet blackout

Great scott! {who’s up for some time travel?}

Have you ever heard of the Wayback Machine? Someone told me about it in school, but I never actually bothered to check it out. I played with it the other day and it’s very cool, like a little time capsule of the web. Here’s an explanation, in their own words:

The Wayback Machine is an historical archive of preserved web pages.  Type in a URL and start surfing through time!

Most societies agree that it is important to preserve artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. Internet Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.

The archive of pages goes back to 1996.  The original Wayback Machine interface was released in 2001 with about 10 billion pages.

The gist of this, is that you can type in the url for a website, and see what it looked like years ago. I thought it might be fun to show you my first version of this site that I built in school. According to the site, my page has only been archived once, in January of 2011, but the version it shows was built in May 2010. If you take a look at the screenshot, you’ll see a bar at the top with a timeline. If your site was archived more than once, you can go back and click along different points of the bar to see what all of the old versions looked like.

I forgot how much I liked the original design of the site. The main reason I abandoned it was that it was built in Flash, and I’ve heard horrible things about how Flash isn’t searchable by search engines, or viewable on mobile devices. In class as we were learning Flash, our teacher was telling us how it was a horrible buggy program, and that Steve Jobs said it would never be viewable on iphones of ipads. Why were they having us build a portfolio site in Flash then? For the “experience.” Huh. Yeah, the “experience” of only sleeping four hours in the span of two days.

Maybe someday when my web building skills are up for the challenge I’ll try to incorporate some of this look back into my current site. I especially like the setup of the homepage. Anyways, I thought it would be fun to share.