A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens

by Stephan Kinsella on January 19, 2012

From Dennis Yang on Techdirt:

A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens.

from the mr-smith-takes-over-the-internet dept

Needless to say, there’s a pretty big protest going on right now against SOPA, with many sites either shuttering fully or making obvious changes in support of the protests. Leading the charge are Wikipedia, Reddit and Google. Sites like 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.”