Although it's working again now (11:00 on 13/2/12) my Internet connection has been blocked from certainly 15:00 yesterday (12/2/12) and possibly as far back as around 03:00 on 11/2/12. It would be nice to pretend that this was down to something important like Greece's crunch Parliamentary vote on austerity measures or the Arab League's meeting on Syria but it wasn't. It was due to celebrities.
Here in the west we are in the grips of awards seasons. Between early January and the Oscars in late February there is hardly a weekend that goes by without some sort of award ceremony for everything from films to condoms. This weekend it was the turn of the Grammy music awards in the United States and the BAFTA awards in Britain. In recent years these film awards have seen the cream of the US industry travel to London for a weekend of award ceremonies and parties. It is this group of people who have the most to gain from the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). So by keeping me off-line by interfering with the DNS registry Britain was hoping to find out what these key industry insiders think about SOPA. This follows on from the US approach of introducing SOPA at the start of awards season.
Of course the flaw in the plan is that as I was unable to tell anyone that I was being taken off-line how were people meant to know about it let alone discuss it? I think the idea was that I would panic and use Twitter on my cellphone. I was actually about to do that but then I got distracted trying to eat my own body weight in chocolate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment