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Rackspace: SOPA "Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legislation"
hypnosec writes "Cloud-based hosting service provider Rackspace has joined the ever expanding list of companies that are opposed to the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In a blog post, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said that the controversial bill, which will get its final vote before the House Judiciary Committee, will do more harm than good, punishing innocent users in the process. 'The SOPA bill, as it stands, is a deeply flawed piece of legislation. It is bad for anyone who uses the Internet, including Rackspace, the more than 160,000 business customers that we serve, and the tens of millions of retail customers that they serve. It is bad for job creation and innovation,' Napier wrote."
No shit?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Most all laws over the last few decades have been deeply flawed in some way. That's what you get when you elect idiots.
yes, we all know it's bad, and yet it will probably pass
I highly doubt Rackspace would have come out and said this if it wasn't for what GoDaddy is going through. If GoDaddy's public stance on supporting SOPA was supported by the IT/tech/informed community, I suspect Rackspace would be shouting, "hey, we support SOPA too!!!"
Maybe I'm a bit bias since I have had few positive experiences with Rackspace over the years?
The most hilariously annoying part of this bill is that there's not a single sane citizen of this country who, when properly educated on the bill's impact, would vote for such a thing....yet the lunatics running this country will probably pass it right on through since they're in the chokehold of the industries and power mongers which DO want it.
If it's possible to lose any more faith in the people at the top, I certainly will if this is passed. I'll also cast opposing votes against any representatives who vote for it, regardless of party affiliation.
Obama and most of the Democratic Party are owned by the big Hollywood studios. The Republican Party is owned by big business in general. The only reason this hasn't passed already (without even a public debate) is that Google and a handful of other big players are fighting it. But even Google is a relatively small fish in this money game.
As for those of us without deep pockets--well save yourself that stamp on a letter to your Congressman.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
“The dynamic is clear. Once SOPA — and its Senate counterpart, Protecting IP Act, or PIPA — became high-profile among the Internet community, the lazy endorsements from companies and various hangers-on became toxic. And now, those supporters are scrambling, hollowing out the actual support for the bill. Suddenly, a bill with ‘widespread’ corporate support doesn’t have much support at all,” Dayden said.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
While Rackspace here says that SOPA is a flawed piece of legislation (jumping on the bandwagon after seeing the turmoil caused for GoDaddy in the blog and geekospheres), it leaves the door open for them to support future, similar acts when that becomes fashionable or serves to make them money.
Coming out now and making a public statement in support would be suicide for their business, especially their cloud hosting business that has a lot more tech-savvy and SOPA-conscious customers than GoDaddy's services like wordpress hosting etc.
But at the end of the day, if anyone sends Rackspace a subpoena or DMCA letter, they knee-jerk right into compliance and give what they want. They don't have a policy of fighting things like Twitter (which is of arguable utility), and have no history of using their legal resources to do anything but guarantee business continuity.
Rackspace is not known a company with any strong moral, ethical or other principles, it's just out there for profit, and it says what is fashionable for profit at the time.
Serious question for consideration:
What would happen if the "big players", such as Level 3, Verizon, Google and the like came out and said, "If you pass this legislation, we are turning off all of our equipment. We will back up our servers, send our customers their data, rip out the equipment, sell it for scrap, leave the wires hanging, sell our buildings and retire to the Caribbean. If you pass this, we won't be able to do our jobs, so we will simply quit and leave you with nothing to legislate. Good luck suing us, because you'll be back to typewriters, pens and wired telephones."
Totally NOT going to happen, but as an exercise in thought, would it be possible?
Could a company as big and powerful as Google hold the world hostage with nothing more than a power switch?
[End Of Line]
I remember back in 2004 when Rackspace turned over entire hard drives to the FBI that contained data for Indymedia websites as part of a terrorism investigation. The FBI only wanted copies of logs, but Rackspace I suppose wanted to go the extra mile.
http://jebba.blagblagblag.org/?p=175
Lets face it. The problem is money in politics. When the RIAA and MPAA come knocking with oodles of cash to help get congress critters elected how can they refuse? The only way to solve this problem and much of the problem with Washington is to thoughtfully and radically remove money from politics. Until that is done the politicians will just keep on promising the people and delivering to the corporations with the fattest wallet.
The users of that law are the MAFIAA.All others are irrelevant.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Rackspace is a large constituent of Lamar Smith's District 21 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas.21st.Congressional.District.gif) as they are headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Having this large of an employer in his own district against the legislation should be a big wake-up call to Rep. Smith.
Vote for the guy who has taken the least in bribes, I mean "campaign contributions", from corporations. It's easy enough to find out how much from third party sites like http://www.opensecrets.org/
From the looks of it and from other comments about SOPA on the internet, one way or another this will be brought in. What can we actually do once it is brought in to get around the problems of the law? It sounds more than just changing your DNS information to still access the sites taken down. Wasn't the law talking about actually bringing down the business (ie. youtube for copyright)? Is it just a matter of "bringing down the business" is just blocking domain name resolutions of "youtube.com" or actually removing all youtube servers?
To bad the people who are voting on this are (A) morons who don't have a clue as to what it's about and/or to busy selling out their constituents to give a crap about the implications of it all. It really is time to throw all of them out and start from scratch.
If nothing else, this sure is a lively discussion. :-)
Given that the constitution of the USA blocks this, and you can only override the constitution by amendment not laws, why would the supreme court follow such an illegal law?
Thats what happens when you wait to protect the very thing you live on - the internet. Those parties perpetrating sopa has been trying to pass some shit like this since early 2004. What have you done ? nothing. just kept on with your business.
If you had had started lobbying as the datacenter/hosting industry back then, none of these would have happened. But this industry is not the only one to blame. There are search industries, device manufacturers, google, microsoft. Granted, some of the latter did some stuff about acta. But totally insufficient. Instead, everyone sat in their pretty and secure silicon valley bubbles, and behaved as if internet was untouchable. At least it seemed totally stupid to break it, and to the detriment of everyone. But hey ! here is something to break it totally for the benefit of a VERY small minority - so much that a few hands could count the number of those who will primarily benefit in the ultimate end.
Now, what are you going to do ?
Read radical news here
is to thoughtfully and radically remove money from politics
thats a fairy tale in a capitalist economy in which some minority can command mountains of cash against the minority. there is no way to prevent backdoor dealings over money. observe what happens with bureaucrats - like the whore who just retired from fcc in order to take up a good paying job in a corporation she benefited. seemingly there was no cash transaction occurred when all the process was happening. but, what happened in the end ?
Read radical news here
DNSSEC is unpopular with governments because it breaks censorship.
Why people don't just create a wireless router that links with other wireless routers to create a type of wireless "net" that is able to access any computer that is connected to any of these wireless routers and also allows foreign access. We could call them citynets or townnets. All that would be needed then would be a similar type of communication between these city or town nets, perhaps even the current internet providers could provide them, that way if something like this does go through, there is a community that is able to still view the content, copy it, and spread it to other city and town nets with ease, and thus make it pointless to even bother with garbage like this bill.
I may be no computer expert, and this is by no means a complete idea, but I do know enough that it is doable (public willing), we have the technology and enough intelligent people to figure out how to make this type of idea functional.
I know this is going to get voted down by offended Americans, but...
After 9/11, the US government began dismantling support for Constitutional rights in favour of anti-terrorist security theatre. They invested billions in surveillance, security, police, staff, and computer systems. Yet despite that huge investment, they couldn't stop the domestic terrorism of the fellow in Texas who recently took out a half dozen people.
They claim to have stopped a few terrorists over the years, but when they've presented the "evidence" against those who were planning attacks, it turned out that the attackers were using ineffective techniques that were unlikely to kill anyone (e.g. The underwear bomber.)
Now they've stepped it up and officially denied the Constitutional rights of anyone the government deems a "terrorist", without having the nasty hassle of proving it to a judge and/or jury. They can just "hold" someone for years without charges or court cases while they "investigate".
SOPA is just the next step of that change in American policy. Instead of championing the legal system, they want to be the arbitrary judge and jury over the world.
Sorry, but the American government does not deserve that level of trust from the world when they can't even follow their own rules for governing a country.
And don't get me started about the persecution of medical cannabis users south of the border and the denial by the US government that cannabis has any medical use.
And yet some people can't understand why so many in the world hate the US and what it's done to their nations in the defense of "freedom" and "democracy." You can't go around invading people, ignoring their laws, ignoring your own laws, and expect to receive any measure of respect on the international stage.
But I bet not ONE of the Congressmen who support SOPA have ever even thought about how this bad legislation is going to be received by the rest of the world.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Melon Wazi is talking what ,can't get it.oK?!
http://www.jpzentai.com/
http://www.udreamybridal.com/jp/
sounds like it is more like
send our pay abroad
as innovation and skilled jobs carry on declining in the us due to laws like this.
- and being abroad i dont have a big problem with that
if i was american i might not be so unconcerned
SOPA will not result in censorship.
SOPA will not hurt the economy.
Under SOPA, if you run a legitimate site, a site that does not violate copyright, you will have no problem.
Please stop with the hypocricy. The only reason you do not want SOPA is that you will no longer be able to download copyrighted material for no money.
I am serious, this is not a troll post. While SOPA is the result of the lobbying of Hollywood and othe media owners, it is about COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, not censorship.
Thousands of web sites have based their business model on copyright violation. This is the unfortunate truth. I am a regular youtube visitor, for example, and I am usually entertained by videos that are usually copyright-protected. I recognize though that these videos are illegally available by youtube, because they are copyrighted and the publisher has not reached an agreement with youtube regarding these videos.
People are also worried that sites where users post their comments, along with links will not be sustainable under SOPA. This is wrong. There are workarounds that can be used to circumvent the problem...for example, linking does not have to load the linked page directly...a link could be a downloaded text that ccntains the actual internet address to visit. Browsers could be automated to open these files and visit the addresses directly, without user intervention. In this way, a web page will not contain direct links to content, it will contain links to text which will contain the links to content, and thus the sites will not be restricted by SOPA.
That is, unless SOPA outlaws linking at 2 or more levels...in that case, the whole internet would be illegal.