Help stop SOPA/PIPA from ruining the Internet as we know it

I can’t believe I didn’t post anything about this sooner but here it is.

The Internet has been flooding with posts, articles and blogs about SOPA/PIPA over the past few months. I do think the medias are finally catching on to this (finally) and people are starting to get informed. SOPA/PIPA, the bills that could destroy the internet as we know it today needs to be stopped.

But what is SOPA/PIPA? They are 2 bills, one directed by the House and one by the Senate, that try to give extra power to the U.S government and copyright holders to fight piracy. PIPA, the Senate Bill, stands for Protect IP Act while SOPA, the House Bill, stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. PIPA is a rewrite of an older bill that failed to pass in 2010, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) and SOPA is built on PIPA.

What do they actually do? Well it is fairly simple. The bills, if they pass, will allow the U.S. government and copyright holders to go against websites that have copyright infringing material through a court order. Doesn’t seem so bad at first glance. That’s probably what the people who wrote the bills thought as well. Unfortunately, the statements in the bills are so vague, it is nearly impossible to say that your site is safe from them. The bills try to force the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) into doing the dirty work for the copyright holders by having them block (read censor) the sites. Non-compliance is of course met with penalties. Most ISP will prefer to just follow orders without any arguments than to hire a bunch of lawyers to figure out if the court order holds or not and avoid blocking sites that are not infringing copyrights. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) works in a similar way in that, through a take-down notice, a website takes a decision to block an infringing video or not. If the video is indeed infringing copyrights, then the company can legally sue the website if the said website decided to not follow through the take-down notice. However, the websites usually remove the content without regards to copyright infringement out of fear of being taken to court and also to save money, because having a team analyze every take-down notices and every video costs a lot of money.

So anyway, SOPA/PIPA will enable the government and companies to legally shutdown websites, such as youtube, for hosting copyright infringing material on their site. But it doesn’t stop there. Linking to copyright infringing material would also be an offense as per the bill, so any websites linking to a page that has copyright infringing material will also be admissible to a block. So Google, for example, could get shutdown if through a search you end up on a webpage that has copyright infringing material.

So anyway, the bills are bad for the internet and a lot of people have noticed this and are rallying against them. Several petitions are available to be signed, a lot of big websites will be going dark today or will just display an informational page before bringing you to their main page. These websites earn a lot of money through their daily traffic, for them to go dark and lose that money means they are very serious about this. A lot of people I know have been writing to their congressmen to vote against the bill and on top of that, even people outside of the United States are trying to get their point across to the US government to have them drop the bills.

While I know SOPA has been dropped for now, there is no telling when it will be brought back under another name at the House. I also know I don’t bring much to the table other than rehashing what was said through the past few months, and really my only objective here is to maybe inform someone who doesn’t know about SOPA/PIPA and hopefully help them take a rational decision into fighting it. Unfortunately I will not be able to shut this page down because I don’t know how and wordpress is not owned by me.

I do hope this helped a few to understand what’s at stake here. If I was unclear, please visit the following links for a lot more details about the bills and why they are not a good thing.

To know more about SOPA and PIPA:
SOPA on wikipedia (will be offline today)
PIPA on wikipedia (will be offline today)
Why SOPA/PIPA are bad ideas

How to fight SOPA and PIPA:
US and Outsiders can sign up here

Proleague is upon us – My Fantasy Proleague draft

With the new Broodwar Proleague around comes a new season of Fantasy Proleague (FPL). This year I took some time to properly build my team unlike last year where I knew almost nothing. With the format change, the teams and players moving around, it was somewhat harder to pic my team, but I still manage to pick up a decent team… I think.

Note: This article was written before I was able to see this weekend’s Proleague games.

SC2: Ars October Tournament is here!

It’s that time of the month again, time where all the cool Ars people face off in an epic tournament for honor and glory. “Where was September?”, you might ask… We took a break, we really wanted to be at the top of our form to be able to watch the epic OSL finals… OK, I lied, that was just me. Anyway, we dropped the ball for September, nobody really saw the topic, I didn’t cross-post to ArsClan forums and IRC and the result was that a less than ideal number of players signed up.

After a poll and some waiting, we finally got the date for the next Ars Tournament: October 22nd 3pm EDT. Check out at the end of this post for all the details.

Thoughts with lorcas – Netcode vs Lag Compensation

Today I was confronted with someone who is rather new to first person shooters (FPS) on PC and he had complaints about people being so much better than him even if he played 800 hours in the past year. Now other than the 1 year vs 15 year experience debate, we at the ArsClan community forums started giving him tips on how to improve his play. One of his questions had me explain something that might have been missed by the majority of today’s gamer population – The netcode.

Summer’s over! Finally!

Yes! You read it right. Summer’s finally over! The god awful season of constant sweat and heat is going away and we will soon enjoy some nice cool air where the only limit to enjoy the fresh air is how much clothes you can put on. Because let’s face it, during summer, once you’re naked, you can’t really do anything more to cool down without involving water or air conditioning. Unfortunately, those aren’t always available in public places and those usually requires you to wear something more than a loincloth.

With summer gone, we have loads of returning stuff that stops during summer because even those things acknowledge that summer sucks. House, Dexter and The Walking Dead (to name a few) will be back on air in the following weeks. The hockey pre-season already started for most of the teams. And with the “shitty cold weather” showing up, my friends are going to be available for more gaming and less of that “going outside” crap.

So, great temperatures, awesome TV series, awesome sports and lots of gaming, what is there to hate about winter? Sure the ladies won’t show us their boobies as easily, but there are ways to get them to reveal the fun-bags. Honestly, I don’t see any reason to hate the coming seasons and neither should you!

So long summer, and please, don’t come back.

</3 lorcas

Today’s News

Wow, so long ago since my last post, I must be slacking off or something.

ARS TOURNAMENT- Sad news for the people trying the links in the SC2 tournament recap post. It seems that I forgot to manually save the VODs and they are now gone (except for the Ravebomb vs Moobob matchup). Of coursse I didn’t know I had to manually save them but a twitch.tv employee pointed out the function. Now my question to twitch.tv is “When will we have the automatically-save-all-videos option?”
Well for next time I’ll try and remember to save them VODs.

STARCRAFT 2- I have decided to improve my SC2 skills by switching to terran. I have realized that the only reason my macro is somewhat good is because as long as you don’t miss an inject as Z, you cannot fail at macro. I have realized this while playing a few games against my friend where I failed to keep my money low in the first 10 minutes. So if I can manage the macro as T, I think it’ll improve my Z a lot as well as my multitasking.
Up til now I have only played games to go down to where I belong in the ladder (thanks again Blizzard for not having one ladder per race). I have played a few games where I have been rolled hard and another where I rolled hard. So I’m not yet in the sweet spot of fierce competition but I’m getting there.

GENERAL GAMING- I have finished playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolutions. I will probably do a review on that in the near future. I really liked the game but it falls a bit short from the original. The story itself is magnificent, the graphics are almost all good (you’ll see in the review) and the game mechanics are really well done and don’t get too much in the way of just me enjoying the game. The game flow is kind of broken by the side-quests, they could have planted them a bit better but again, look forward to the review I’ll go into detail on all of those.

NETWORKING- For those of you who didn’t know (almost everyone), I am rebuilding my home network to accommodate the new DSL line I got back in July. Up to now, I have been switching my network cable from one router to the other depending on what I wanted to accomplish. But that will change soon as I just finished configuring the Single-Link PPP on my pfsense box. Now I just need to write some load balancing rules and plug in the other ISP and I’ll be good to go!

CATS- Cats? Why cats?
BECAUSE CATS! Or cat rather. I will be getting an adorable fluff ball in the near future but I do not have a name yet. Meh… names… Lord Baron von Melvin Shel Tuckersforth the Fourth sounds like a good idea. :3

And that’s the end of the news.

Results: Ars SC2 Tournament – August Edition

Update 2011-09-28: Twitch.tv doesn’t save VODs forever unless explicitly mentioned on each VOD… so we lost all VODs other than the Ravebomb vs Moobob game. Sorry won’t happen again.

Last Saturday was the August edition of the Ars SC2 Tournament. While a lot of people had some plans considering it the last ‘summer’ weekend, we still managed to get a great turnout of registrations. With 11 players showing up, we could split everyone in 2 groups and offer the maximum amounts of games to everyone with a round robin qualification. While I will be using the classic Lower and Upper bracket names again, most players were Platinum/Diamond so they were pretty much split between these two leagues with no regards to their actual ladder spot.