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).