[Post updated -- video interview with Matthew Prince below]
In response to my earlier post about the idiocy of shuttering Wikipedia for a day over SOPA, CloudFlare‘s Matthew Prince emails to tip us off about his company’s solution.
Launching in a few minutes now, Cloudflare’s Stop Censorship app (available free to all Cloudflare users) will partially censor sites, allowing them to make a political point without a total shutdown. The first time a new visitor accesses a participating site, words over five characters will be blacked out and a “censored” banner will be added to the top corner.
Explains Prince…
“Inspired by Ben Huh, but concerned that the idea of entirely blacking out your site is dumb for lots of reasons (see, e.g., Paul’s article earlier today or Dick Costolo’s comments; plus the SEO costs are HUGE for being offline even for a day), we built something that allows anyone to raise awareness against SOPA/PIPA and similar style laws with one click. We also worked directly with the crawl teams at the major search engines to ensure that it wouldn’t harm SEO rankings.”
Cloudflare’s offers free tools to protect sites from DDOS attacks and other skullduggery. The Stop Censorship feature will be available here in the next 20 minutes or so. [Update: It's live!
Update II: I just had a quick Skype video chat with Matthew Prince -- we discussed the irony of Cloudflare making self-censorship easy, the thinking behind the service and whether the whole thing is just a big publicity stunt. Excuse the crappy video quality -- the choppiness is just an ironic comment on Cloudflare's app. Or something.
[...] Shared CloudFlare Gives Sites a “Less Foolish” Way to Fight SOPA, PIPA [Updated]. [...]
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LikeA better protest: crowd source a list of every US Government IP address block; participating sites then drop all traffic from those address blocks until SOPA disappears.
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LikeCool man -- even the Internet can have free speech zones, like, you want to protest, take your protest and put over here in this little corner, cause us adults we got to continue surfing on by buddy. /double facepalm
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Likecloudflare.com not crowdflare.com -- check your link, i also think the image should link there, not to a bigger version of their logo, though that may cut down on page views :P
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Likecan you please update that link to a service that i LOVe paul my man its not http://www.crowdflare.com/ its cloudflare.com :) Good to see you man. hahah good to see the whole techcrunch crew over here. :) LOVE IT.
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LikeThe difference between an APP and a blackout is simple. The blackout will raise awareness and the app will not. No one cares about an APP as if it is really that simple to get millions of people to download an app in the first place. Wake up. Twitter is a for-profit so of course they are going to look at this differently. The ironic part is Twitter has THE MOST to lose. Your new site also stands to lose the most. You might get knocked off the net before you even make it. Peace :)
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Like@Captain: This is an "app" for websites themselves -- not a mobile device or whatever you had in mind. This would affect all users of the site regardless of whether or not they want to download anything.
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LikeCool idea! I think UI modifications like these are a great way to spread the word without crippling your service. However, I have to say my first inclination wasn't to start clicking on blacked-out text. I was looking for some info-slider that might be around to let me know what was going on. Maybe if the corner badge would show up (tested in both FF and Chrome), that wouldn't be a problem.
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