—Crowd-curated news site Reddit said it would go black for 12 hours beginning at 8:00 am Eastern Time, and Boing Boing has posted a mock 503: Service Unavailable notice.
—Automattic has redacted itself, placing black bars over most of the content on the WordPress.com home page.
—Wordnik, the San Francisco startup that maintains a huge database of words and definitions, has chosen a pseudo-Latin word, spiflicate, as its word of the day in protest of PIPA and SOPA. The site defines spiflicate as a verb meaning “to beat severely; counfound; dismay” and offers this usage example: “SOPA and PIPA are set to spiflicate the Internet; but before that happens we hope to spiflicate them!”
—danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA, has blacked out her popular blog Apophenia in protest of SOPA and PIPA, saying the bills would “undermine the very architecture of the Internet, silencing both legitimate and illegitimate voices.”
—According to SOPAStrike, a site created by non-profit Internet freedom group Fight for the Future, hundreds of other sites are also participating in today’s symbolic protests, including the icanhascheezburger network, O’Reilly Media, Moveon.org, Mozilla, PostSecret, Tucows, Tumblr, Vimeo, and Wired.
Author: Wade Roush
Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco.
Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.)
I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia.
I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats.
My personal site: waderoush.com
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