UPDATED 13:59 EDT / JANUARY 17 2012

NEWS

CloudFlare Develops Anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP App Just in Time for Blackout

Tomorrow will be a big day for sites protesting against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” dubbed the “Internet blacklist bill” by opponents and the PROTECT-IP bill. January 18 is the date set by numerous large websites and social media to darken themselves in order to protest and educate customers about these two bills before the US Congress and how they anticipate it will affect the Internet at large.

In addition to Reddit, Wikipedia, icanhazcheezburger, and Boing Boing, CloudFlare—a well known cloud-based service designed to speed up websites—has developed a protest-blackout app for websites that use their service to easily join in with the flick of a switch with the “CloudFlare Stop Censorship” app.

Sites who use CloudFlare to protect themselves against DDoS and possible downtime can now simply go into their management interface and instantly have their website censored with a ribbon on the side announcing why. The effect is such that certain words on the page will have black bars blocking them from view like a redacted document—visitors can easily click on the ribbon and have the black bars removed and visit sites educating on how certain Internet companies feel about the bills.

“We thought it was an effective way to reach a mass audience and raise awareness about the dangers of a law like SOPA/PIPA,” CloudFlare founder Matthew Prince told TechCrunch. He said: “We see more than 25 billion page views per month for more than 400 million unique visitors. To give you some sense, that’s more page views than Amazon.com, Twitter, Wikipedia, Zynga, and AOL – combined. 400 million uniques is about 25% of the Internet’s entire population.”

We’ve reported on CloudFare’s attitudes about regulating the Internet before and censorship in general when their service was used to hide the IP address of LulzSec’s servers. Then CloudFlare responded to demands that they withdraw LulzSec as a client with a hardnosed reply that they do not support censoring people because people don’t like what they’re doing and pointed out that if the proper authorities asked for the IP address or information with legal warrants they would comply with the law.

The “blackout” app will not affect a website’s SEO on search engines and will apply only a visual effect for visitors—which can easily be swept away.

They are also offering a code snippet on GitHub for people who do not use CloudFlare to use the app on their own websites.


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