SOPA Solution: Block Congress
Today, I was wondering how easy that would be, and spent about 10 seconds in google to find that Congressional staffer IPs have been outed by Wikipedia for editing their boss’s pages:
To confirm, I put the first IP in an IP Locator tool and got this:Wikinews contributors have discovered that members of the United States Congress or members of their staff have recently been making questionable edits to Wikipedia.
[…] In one instance, Wikinews found that someone with one of the IP addresses, 143.231.249.141, began to edit the Wikipedia article for Steve Austria, the Republican representative for Ohio's 7th congressional district.
[…] Another individual, with the IP address 75.187.63.132, also removed the allegations of plagiarism from Austria's article in February. The individual removed what they called "Politically Motivated BS" from the article of Deborah Pryce.
From here you can figure out an IP range to target, and then it’s trivial to serve them different content (perhaps giving them a taste of what SOPA IP blocking would be like). I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
To be effective it needs to be done by sites that Congressional staffers actually depend on or on enough smaller sites to get media attention.
Trainers for Programmers
I've had an idea for an introductory book on programming that follows the model of "trainer" books for learning a musical instrument. Most of these books are organized like this:
- There’s a bunch of exercises.
- Each exercise is 1 or 2 pages.
- There’s only a little bit of prose.
- You do each exercise exactly, then move on.
The results are at Learn Python the Hard Way.