SOPA - The axe that will cut the head off the Internet

It's the end of the Internet world as we know it.


For those wondering "What the fuck is SOPA?" or "What's this got to do with me?" I'll explain the idiot's guide.


SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act - literally, from the name it means it will stop online-piracy - "Great!" I hear you say. Actually, it's not. Here's why:
Everyone uses YouTube, Wikipedia, torrent sites etc where intellectual property such as music videos, articles on things and file-sharing are shown to other people. What happens at the moment is that if the company that hosts the servers finds that copyright has been breached, then the user account gets banned and the video taken down. That's fair, right? That's the way we want to keep it. (For file-sharing sites the site can sometimes be taken down depending on what the courts decide).


What SOPA will do is take it to a much higher level, so that the servers in the USA become property of the US government, and the companies are just merely users. Now you're thinking "err, what?". Put simply, it removes the end user (ourselves) becoming liable for copyright infringement and making the company liable for it, where before we would be liable and the company wouldn't.


The easiest way to explain this is using YouTube's example:


At the moment:
You upload a video to YouTube and it breaks copyright rules, you can end up in a whole lot of shit and depending on how bad it is. Your account gets banned and the video gets taken down.


What SOPA will do:
You upload a video to YouTube and it breaks copyright rules, the US government will find it and land YouTube (Google) in a whole heap of shit by blacklisting it so nobody is able to access it, at all, ever. You don't get in trouble but Google gets punished.


"But I'm in the UK, why will it affect me?"
YouTube is hosted by Google, whose servers are in the USA, so if/when SOPA is passed it is no longer Google's property, it's then the US government's property. Google are just the user of it.


"Okay, I kind of get it, but please explain what blacklisting is"
To explain it, I need to explain some of the technology behind it.


Every web address (domain name) has an IP address attached to it. An IP address is a numerical address which allows routers to find one another to get data somewhere. Most IP addresses have a domain name attached to it. To demonstrate this, go to command prompt (Run --> CMD) and type in PING WWW.GOOGLE.CO.UK (or .com if you're in the US), it will then show it's IP address. For me, it's 173.194.67.94. I go to that IP address by pasting that in the address bar of the browser (http://173.194.67.94/) returns www.google.co.uk. Google is a lot easier to remember than an IP address.


Blacklisting means to block the domain name on the DNS server (Domain Name Service server) so that NOBODY is able to access it. So, on the DNS server, if Google.co.uk is blacklisted, then, well, there's no Google, for anyone. It would also mean the IP address is blocked.


So if SOPA is passed - good night most of the Internet.


(If you're still confused, then it's pretty much the same legislation that's used in China).

www.read.this/now

As of today, the .COM suffix could die (well, not really). It is now allowed to be replaced by any word, yes, literally any word. An advantage to this can be it removes the restriction on the possible web addresses - nearly 3 quarters of a million words (some dead) in the English language, creating a limitation on the possibilities of words used in a web address before the dot. Problem being is that if the web address name has already been taken (Blogger, say) then blogger.net or blogger.edu can't be used as Blogger, the brand name, has been copyrighted.


I suppose the new suffix naming will be better suited for large corporations, and it would have to be, as it comes at a price: a staggering £120,000. The BBC could benefit; instead of having www.bbc.co.uk/news, it would change it to www.news.bbc, or www.iplayer.bbc (still re-directing the old addresses to the new ones, though).


Watch this spa- er, suffix.

Education secretary to overhaul ICT curriculum. About time.

It's been a while, but I'm back.


Changing secondary school ICT to computer science - fantastic idea. It's too late for me, but will actually INTEREST the younger generation, not bore the shit out of them. The teachers are bored of teaching "this is an input device, what is an output device?" and honestly, the kids don't care. One tiny problem that the exam boards and schools will need to overcome - are the teachers qualified?


Many teachers come from a computer science background, others don't. Others may come from networking backgrounds, for example. But, because they have been teaching the same repetitive thing from the exam boards every year, change may be great, but do they remember it?


I, personally, would have loved to write code for webpages in year 7 (age 11), but it was only briefly touched up when I came to year 11, aged 16. I coded an entire website from scratch using notepad (my internet connection was too slow to torrent Dreamweaver), all the HTML was self-taught. We were doing the now-defunct (and waste of time) GNVQ ICT. I haven't coded until this year when I came to university and I can now write small web applications using VBScript. I'm 21 and just started an access couse. I got very poor grades in A Level Applied ICT because, okay, one or two parts of it I found interesting, but the rest was fucking mind numbing. 2000 words on why online shopping has boomed in the last 10 years... you might as well have given me vodka and sleeping pills.


Michael Govee has given this country one thing that it needed. For once, a Tory policy I agree with that wasn't thought of by the rather money-hungry David Cameron who has cut everything you can think of from education police budgets. Although, I suppose this one won't cost the Government anything, just the exam boards and schools (councils).

Viral News

News spreads - Protests in London yesterday, sadly
not very widely reported by any news broadcasters

It seems today that Chinese Whispers doesn't really exist, because due to the rapid growth of the internet nothing gets lost in translation because of all the translation tools available, most notably Google Translate et al.


I thought I'd dedicate this post to the recent civil unrest that's been happening in the Middle East, not the political side of it - although it is very important - but the technology side.


Newspapers are becoming more redundant because only in the last few years news travels very far very quickly with the help of the Internet - namely Twitter. The first I heard about the Tunisian unrest was through Twitter's @BBCBreaking news feed and then "tweeted" by thousands of others. It was then relayed on the news later that evening unless you watch the 24-hour news.


But governments in the East don't like it... it makes them suspicious, creating fears that other countries are spying on them and spreading hate about them. I was annoyed to hear that all lines of communication had been severed with the outside world - mainly by the Egyptian and Libyan government. I have some extended family living in Cairo so we never heard from them to see how they were. Communications (mostly) are back up and running.


This was censorship that went a little too far, as the governments had taken their money, their homes, their families and finally their free speech as you are now seeing with Mr Mubarak in Egypt and Col. Gadaffi in Libya, and previously done in China and Zimbabwe.


People will always find a way round the censorship. In Egypt people set up illegal DNS servers which gave the few people that knew what they were doing to get the word out to the rest of the world before foreign news journalists could report it which in most cases was pre-recorded as it was too dangerous to report live.


The governments should realise that even trying to cut all communications to the outside world, they can't silence everyone as there's always a way round it.

Androids to rule the world? Google, I mean.

Android to rule the world. All hail the Androids.

Google are going to take over the mobile world with their Android system.


Not really.


Although interest in the operating system has increased as Android now hold 38% of the market, parallel to Apple's iOS. RIM's Blackberry OS only hold 19% of the market, making up 95%. That's over a third of the market each held by Google and Apple.


The only problem with the Android OS is that a lot of the time it has to be adapted to each handset and not just a single platform like the iOS, so a ROM that works on one handset may not work on another. The upside to this is that because Android is open-source it can be adapted to work on other handsets, including Windows handsets.


Windows, Symbian and other phone operating systems make up the other 5% of the market.


It may seem like we can see less of the Symbian system as Nokia have now merged with Microsoft, but to be honest the change in the uptake of Windows Mobile 7 will be negligible, as it's not the most popular operating system on mobiles... or computers depending on who you are

Are netbooks shortlived?

Are tablets on the rise?

Since the iPad, I've seen less and less of them. The tablet market is starting to boom a bit, first with the iPad, then Samsung's tablet, then you've got RIM jumping on the bandwagon with their tablet PC. Educational computer company RM have recently made the RM Slate which is being rolled out to schools that want it.

Less netbooks are being made it looks like, as hardware and software manufacturers are keen to stay on the tablet trend. Because let's face it, there's only so much you can flog the netbook. They have a hardare limitation - 1.66GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM, whereas tablets don't so there's a much freer market for expandability.

In my opinion, netbooks are a little shortlived. They're slow and only have the most basic version of Windows 7 (Windows 7 Starter), or Linux, if you want a different interface and don't want to do much like install programs - some of them require a little programming know-how. The tablet has a proprietry OS (Apple iOS4, Android, Windows Tablet) and apps can be made specifically for them, although only through the App Store for the iPad.

Okay, I'm being a bit cynical, as netbooks do have their uses when you're on the move but the problem comes with internet access on the move. On a netbook you have WiFi, however the problem arrives when you try to find a WiFi hotspot, especially a free one. Depending on where you are there probably isn't one. One of the only ways of getting internet access on the move like this is with a dongle from a mobile broadband provider, but it's impractical as it's sticking out and can easily break. The tablet in most cases has a space for a SIM card on a mobile broadband contract as well as WiFi so even if you are outside a WiFi hotspot zone you can still get internet.

I want your opinions - Netbook or tablet?

London will receive free WiFi, no, seriously

Free WiFi to the masses soon

Yes. FREE.


But don't go and cancel your broadband just yet! This free wi-fi is only available to you for fifteen minutes. Yup, you read right, only for fifteen minutes a day


The Cloud service bought by BSkyB at the end of January will allow anyone with a wireless device - iPhone, Blackberry, phone with WiFi, tablet or laptop - to connect up to the cloud and use 15 minutes of no-hassle free internet.


The Cloud isn't the only public WiFi network though, BT have released their Openzone which allows BT customers to use their WiFi device on their public network at a small-ish fee. O2 have released free public WiFi to the masses as well in partnership with local businesses.


Without sounding ungrateful, I do think that 15 minutes isn't much time to do anything, especially if your device is slow to load and has a small screen.


What are your opinions?