Successful internet blackout, Zuck tweets, but has Don McLean been ripped off?

As you can’t have failed to have noticed, yesterday some of the world’s most famous websites chose a variety of ways to protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation in the United States.

Sites such as Reddit, Wired, Boing Boing and Google either blanked out their content or displayed clear links explaining why they were against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) being debated by Congress.

Wikipedia, for instance, used a simple JavaScript to obscure its website to English speakers (as it happens, that was something that was easy to bypass, as I described to some reader’s consternation and presumably some college students’ relief).

As a side note, I was bemused to hear that Experian claimed UK visits to Wikipedia were higher than normal on blackout day, with…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.