Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:56:00 PST Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120118/12072517457/gallery-sopa-blackout-protest-screens.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120118/12072517457/gallery-sopa-blackout-protest-screens.shtml SOPA STRIKE and SOPA Blackout disseminated code to allow sites to easily join the blackout, but many sites have actually decided to take the time to tailor their protests for their own sites, which is amazing to see. It is this creative energy that drives the Internet and makes it what it is (for better or worse), and it is this very energy that legislation like SOPA and PIPA threaten to extinguish.

I've created a gallery of SOPA blackout screencaps, but here are some of my favorite takes on the protest today:

Reddit's blackout is probably the most complete; all URLs, including deep links, on Reddit lead to the blackout page, which is very impressive for such a largely trafficked site. For Redditor's going through Reddit-withdrawal today, they feature a handy countdown timer on their blackout page.


Wikipedia's blackout encompasses all of the English site, and as evidenced by @herpderpedia (who is collecting various angry Tweets about the Wikipedia blackout), it is certainly causing some frustration (and hopefully some awareness). That said, Wikipedia's blackout is very, very, very easy to thwart (just hit the ESC key before the page fully loads), so there's an easy escape valve for those that are in dire need of its content. In that same vein, Craigslist's full blackout also has a release valve that gracefully loads after a few seconds.

Google promised that it would do "something," and followed suit with a Google Doodle, essentially blacking out its logo in protest. Several sites followed suit, including Hacker News, 4chan's /b/ (link to a SFW screenshot), and TwitPic.

Taking the "censor-style" protest to the next level are Wired's blackout and Daily Kos' blackout. Wired's coders decided to mark up the page itself with black censor boxes, so that the page looks like it's been through the hands of some very aggressive government censors. Very clever from the design-minded folks over at Wired.


Elegant as always, xkcd's blackout offers the simple message, "[don't censor the web]".

And, the most amusing blackout of the day comes from McSweeney's (of course), who has handily replaced its site today with "A DAY’S WORTH OF FACTS TO GET YOU THROUGH WIKIPEDIA’S 24-HOUR BLACKOUT."


Check out the full gallery here, and let me know if there are any awesome blackout implementations that I've missed.

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]]> mr-smith-takes-over-the-internet http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120118/12072517457 Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:19:14 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/0335558196.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/0335558196.shtml what a specialized tablet version of the magazine might look like. More recently, Wired Magazine demonstrated a working prototype of a tabletized version of the magazine. Both of these demos are certainly impressive -- but I'll say the same thing that I said about the SI demo on that panel discussion: why is the focus on the hardware? Nothing in either demo really requires a tablet. If this format is so compelling, why aren't these publications already offering it for use on regular computers? Certainly, the ability to use touchscreen controls is nice, but you could easily replicate the basics with a mouse. If the overall format is so compelling, then what does it have to do with a tablet/iPad, specifically? Now, perhaps Wired does intend for this to be useful on other platforms, as its version is just an Adobe AIR app, and so it could function just fine on a desktop/laptop, but again, the video seems to keep focusing on the tablet as if that's necessary. Yes, perhaps the form factor of a tablet computer makes this experience more enjoyable, but I think it's important in judging whether or not these apps actually make sense to separate the hardware from the software, to see if either makes sense without the other, or if they really are joined at the hip.

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]]> i'm-confused http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100217/0335558196 Wed, 9 Sep 2009 14:44:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090909/0111116137.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090909/0111116137.shtml lot of statistics classes -- and I did pretty well in them, but it wasn't until I was well into a pretty high level stats class that I finally started to understand statistics, and it had nothing to do with the class or the teacher. It had to do with the job I'd taken as a stats tutor for six different intro stats classes (and, eventually, that resulted in teaching a full class on stats to incoming freshmen). What I realized is that as useful as the book learning and problem sets and everything was, it wasn't until I had to actually explain something back to someone who really didn't understand it, that I finally started to really understand the more important aspects of statistics. I couldn't get away with "well, I understand this because it works." I had to so fully understand statistics that I could actually understand questions that came from way out in left field, and try to figure out how to fit them back into the framework that was being taught. It was a valuable lesson.

In talking about the future of journalism, one point I've made repeatedly, is that news organizations need to realize that their community is their best asset, and they need to cater to them more and involve them a lot more in the process. Today's news "consumer" isn't really a consumer, but a participant. I've talked about how they want to share the news, write the news and comment on the news, but what about actually experiencing the news in some manner?

Whether on purpose or not, it seems like that's what Wired just accomplished with its ambitious Vanish project. If you haven't paid attention to it, it started with an article last month in Wired, called Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?, written by reporter Evan Ratliff. The article itself was quite an enjoyable read, about people who have simply tried to disappear and start a new life (and the difficulty of actually vanishing from your old life). Despite the topic (and the fact that I love such stories), I probably would have skipped the article over. There's only so much time and so many things you can read in a daily basis -- and (as you might have guessed) I already read a lot.

But, Wired combined this with a contest. The reporter on the story, Evan Ratliff agreed to "vanish" himself for a month, and the contest was to see if anyone could find him. If someone found him and said the word "fluke" to him, Evan would respond with a codeword that would allow the "winner" to alert Wired's Nicholas Thompson and claim a $5,000 prize (including, I believe, Ratliff's own $3,000 for writing the article). That certainly made the story a lot more compelling. I have to admit that I didn't participate much in the "chase" which was tracked in a variety of places online from Facebook to Twitter to the Vanish blog on Wired, which dropped clues and tied together some of the findings.

On Tuesday, however, Ratliff was caught, down in New Orleans, by the operator of a pizza shop, who had been alerted to the whole thing just a day before by someone who had been very closely tracking Ratliff, and used some rather creative means to track him down -- including befriending some people who were alerted to Evan's whereabouts without even realizing it. You can read the full explanation from Jeff Reifman as to how he tracked down Ratliff, or Wired's shorter summary of the story. In the end, Ratliff left a lot of clues, but he did so purposely, to help illustrate typical mistakes made by those who do try to "vanish" for real.

However, what struck me, was just how involved the community got in this story. It reminded me of the revelation of learning statistics by teaching it -- and has me thinking more about "experiential" reporting on "reporting by game" to better involve a community in various projects. I am not suggesting that "this is the future of journalism." But I am saying it may be one potentially useful way that some stories could be told. For many people involved in this project, I'll bet they learned a hell of a lot more about this issue than they ever expected. And even those of use who were "casual observers" picked up a ton of interesting knowledge about how people try to vanish -- and (perhaps much more interesting) how others track them down. If I were looking to make journalism more interesting, I'd start looking at ways to more creatively involve a community, and Wired's Vanish experiment is one to keep in mind as an example.

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