part 2 of where the world is now, a quickie

Ok so between my first post about the world and this one, lots of things have been happening.

on january 18th wikipedia, google, flickr and thousands of other web sites had either gone dark or added additional pages to protest and bring attention to the SOPA/PIPA bills being strongarmed through congress. it was the largest recorded infonets protest ever, the presence was pretty intense.

on january 19th, feds brought down megaupload.com without so much as a whisper of due process, arresting people in new zealand and confiscating u.s. servers in virginia. within minutes the internets troops began rallying. for the remainder of the day and all the way through right to this minute, hacktivist group anonymous has been dropping government and mpaa web sites using thousands of anonymous ddos attacks from all over the world. theres a program called LOIC(low orbit ion cannon) that anyone can use to help anonymous etc flood servers.

i spent part of the day in an anon-run irc chat coordinating attacks and constantly receiving updates on the operation.

i watched as they systematically took down the department of justice website, fbi.gov, mpaa.org, universal, etc etc etc.

it was messy but vaguely organized, with people from all over the internet chiming in to let everyone know what was up or down.
"mpaa down in lithuania, fbi.gov down in brazil, mpaa chugging in u.s., down in canada, fbi.gov back up in argentina, etc."

the chatrooms caption changed depending on the prime target at any point, which changed every half hour or so. it was a mix of noobs like myself figuring out how to use LOICs and HOICs and skilled cats using all kinds of things i didnt understand, but it sounded like they had a lot more power to work with than i did on my toshiba tablet.

aside from this, the supreme court on the same day had ruled to make re-copywriting public domain works legal, which essentially gives corporations yet another way to own things they shouldnt. this affects anyone using public domain works to make a living, such as orchestras now being forced to pay licensing fees to play certain songs they could legally play a week ago.

also there was a rather large protest at UC riverside, on again the same day, in which occupy l.a. joined students protesting the constant enrollment fee hikes. several hundred if not thousands of people eventually pooled, as did roughly 200 police officers. rubber bullets were fired into the crowd injuring a few, and a professor was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer. the UC regency meeting was soon after closed to the public.