by CHRISTOPHER MIMS, Technology Review
The first thing you need to know about the Stop Online Piracy Act is that if a single commenter posted a single link to a piece of allegedly copyright-infringing material anywhere on TechnologyReview.com, the entire site could be shut down without notice and without the intervention of a court. Now imagine what that would do to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. It is literally an Internet-ending piece of legislation. The second thing you need to know is that earlier today, according to Congressional Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), SOPA was as good as passed. So the Internet freaked out! Hackers figured out a technical workaround for the main provision of the bill, removal of websites from DNS servers, which are sort of like the postal code tables of the web, telling traffic where to go.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27421/?p1=blogs
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