Coping with the Great Internet Blackout of 2012

How to get through The Day The (Best Parts of The) Internet Died.

Update the Third: Well, we're more than halfway through this thing, and we've somehow managed to get by without Wikipedia. ( Why don't YOU try to write a little article on meteorites from Mars without Wikipedia? Eh? Eh?) Anyhow, there are all sorts of updates, including news that two Republican senators, Marco Rubio (Florida) and John Cornyn (Texas), are withdrawing their support for the bill. Two GOP congressmen, Ben Quayle (son of former vice-president Dan Qualye) and Lee Terry, have also jumped ship. Says Cornyn on his Facebook page:

SOPA: better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong. Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time.

So, even politicians in the highest realms of power are occasionally capable of making sensible decisions. There is hope for this internet thing, after all.

And speaking of powerful, wealthy white dudes on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg took to his little baby this afternoon to explain his opposition to SOPA/PIPA:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

The folks at Mashable have also published ways to get by Wikipedia's blackout if you really can't go another 10 hours without the free encyclopedia. (Hint: use your smartphone, or disable Javascript.)

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Update the Second: And winning all the Internet Blackout marbles today is The Oatmeal, one of the web's premier web comics. No one has distilled why SOPA and PIPA make so little sense quite as well as this. Koalas. Goats. Oprah and Jesus on a jet ski.

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Update: So, the blackout is upon us, interrupting our morning routine of browsing through Reddit, Fark, and Wikipedia. Google hasn't shut down for the day, but its U.S. homepage is linking to sites informing why PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) are so misguided. Plus, the Google doodle has been blacked out, and given the slavish attention paid to the logo's quirky changes, we'll consider this a Big Deal. And as much as we'd like to take the day off as well (one colleague wondered if today could just be a "snow day for journalists"), well, we don't get paid to not work, even if it's in support for a wholly worthwhile cause.

Beyond Fark, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Google, there are a host of other sites joining in the blackout, including:

Wordpress, the popular blogging platform;

BoingBoing, the great tech, news, and, well, pretty much everything site;

Mohang, the developers of Minecraft and Cobalt;

Imgur, an image-hosting site;

Mozilla, the developers of the ubiquitous Firefox browser;

Identi.ca, a micro-blogging site;

Wired, the world's leading tech magazine;

and many, many more. You can check out the full list of participants right here.

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Tuesday At the stroke of midnight tonight, some of the most popular websites on the "Internet" will be voluntarily taken down by their administrators to protest two bills in the U.S. Congress – the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House of Representative's Stop Online Piracy Act. The two biggest sites taking part in the blackout are Reddit and Wikipedia, which comprise about 98 per cent of a certain news editor's leisure web-browsing. (Point made, guys.) Those two, along with the Cheezburger Network, BoingBoing.net, and others, will be down tomorrow with the hope that lawmakers and entertainment industry lobbyists in Washington take note. (One site, link-aggregator Fark.com, has decided to "go white" in support of PIPA/SOPA, jokingly saying that the bills give them a perfect excuse to quit after 12 years in the game.) The protests are aimed provisions in the bills that would give U.S. authorities the power to order any website that they find to be in violation of copyright laws to be taken down – even if that site is just linking to said material. A person found to have illegally hosted copyrighted material more than 10 times in six months could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Needless to say, much of the online community has been up in arms over the bills, criticizing the legislation as being basically drawn up by Hollywood and music labels to protect their dying industries.

ANYway, with the blackout set for tomorrow, how are you going to go about your life without Reddit and Wikipedia, especially if those two resources are integral to your line of work? (We mean, beside exercise, reading, conversation, etc. Come on.)

As far as other online troves of information such as Wikipedia goes, well, you can try Googling stuff. Or, you can check out the oft-overlooked Encyclopedia.com, which contains info from a number of different encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like, but you definitely won't find stuff such as who Tim Tebow is or a list of common misconceptions. Or, you could download each and every one of Wikipedia's 3,847,673 English-language articles via The Pirate Bay. Alternatively, you can head to a local library. (Ha! Right...)

As for Reddit, well, there's always Digg, but you might never be welcomed back into Reddit if you head over there. There's also the boards at 4chan, but be forewarned – it's, umm... slightly more risque. Between StumbleUpon and Tumblr's many, many, bits of micro-bloggy goodness you can probably kill a couple of hours.

But let's face it – nothing else on the Internet can provide the community, expertise, and entertainment found on Reddit, and nothing can provide the sheer amount of information (and in such a tidily organized manner!) as Wikipedia, which is kind of the point of this whole exercise. Anyhow, hopefully this helps you get through the blackout. If it doesn't, at least the liquor stores are still open.