Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time on reddit looking at pictures of baby hedgehogs, reading a Q&A with a theoretical physicist, and catching up on the intended blackouts protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill, Protect IP Act (PIPA). Haven’t heard about SOPA? It’s no wonder, since the mainstream media has been curiously silent on the issue. Maybe it’s because most of the big news outlets are owned by companies supporting SOPA. Nonetheless, reddit and others, such as Tucows, Cheezburger, game developer Red 5 Studios, and hacktivist group Anonymous, hope to make the issue broadly known with a coordinated internet blackout scheduled for January 18th. Things will really get interesting if the “nuclear option” is implemented where the likes of Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Mozilla, Twitter, and PayPal “go simultaneously dark” to join them in protest of the bill. You may have heard a blip of a news story during the
