No matter where you live in this world, our insane SOPA and PIPA legislation is going to affect you.
That is, unless you have no dealings or contact with any American residents — in which case, you would not be reading this. Having observed politics most of my conscious existence, I feel certain these two abominations (eventually combined as one) will be passed into law before Christmas, or soon thereafter. The primary thrust of these two bills is to grant the MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Association of America, a combination of the execrable MPAA and RIAA) more power to shut down anything they don’t like. Are you prepared to imagine they will exercise any scintilla of ethics in the use of such power? At their behest half the stuff on the Internet will disappear. At the same time, the protection of copyrighted material becomes the government’s excuse to persecute anything the arrogant officials dislike.
The question is not, “How can we stop or change this?” I am utterly certain we are past that point. The only variations at now are scripted far, far above the level of our concerns as users. In terms of the Net users, it’s the second edge of the same blade on the sword of state coercion. The first edge was the imposition of martial law, as noted in the posts of the past couple of days here. The question, then, is what can we do to dodge the swinging of that sword, which will surely come all too soon in our direction?
It depends on why you are connected to the Internet. What does it matter to you? For me, being the unrepentant loudmouth on the topics which interest me, it’s about communication and publication.
I always keep at least one off-shore email account. Right now, I have one in Germany (GMX.net) and one in Norway (mail.opera.com). Both happen to permit using regular mail clients as a full-bodied mail service, but when you run Windows, that’s unwise. Windows users should generally avoid downloading email directly to their systems. So in the case of GMX, it means knowing enough German to use the menus and such. There are lots of free webmail services all over the world, and in many languages. I’m pretty sure the Great Firewall of America (GFoA) will have numerous holes in it, and the proliferation of domains will keep things real.
For blogging, there are numerous options for me. Aside from the big ones we all know, there are several lesser known operations. Again, Opera in Norway hosts free blogs at My Opera. This is one of those community-oriented sites, where other users of the service are by default free to peruse and comment on your blog. There are others of varying fame, some listed here by links:
My Blogsite
Aeonity
Thoughts
SOS
Blogigo
Blogtext
Xanga
If you can tolerate something more primitive, but with vigorous resistance to take-down demands, you could try this rather versatile free site: Free Conversant. I used it once, but that was before I knew enough about CSS to get what I wanted from it. While it can be used as a blog, it’s basic design is more of a conversation site, almost a forum.
A technical note: From what I know of the DNS blocking planned for the GFoA, it’s much harder to block Americans from visiting your site if you are registered under some other domain as a subdomain. If you’ll notice the URLs for some of the blogs on these sites, the only personalization is adding your site nickname as part of a longer domain name. That comes as either a prefix, as here at WordPress, or as a subdomain under it at other sites — somesite.com/yoursite/ is common. With some, having multiple accounts is no problem, either, so you can keep the GFoA administrators guessing. Using your own registered domain name makes you an easier target for GFoA blocking. Instead, focus on keeping your personal brand name(s) (mine are “Kiln of the Soul” or “soulkiln” and “jehurst”) as part of the longer domain name so that your friends and readers can find you wherever you move.
For more fully developed websites, it’s a lot more work. There are hundreds of free hosting plans around the planet, with widely varying degrees of freedom for you as user to set up what you really want. The ease of use varies, as well. If it really matters, you’ll either have to learn webmastering, or get an associate who can do it for you. If showing up in the search engines matters to you, it’s not so much you need to learn SEO (search engine optimization) techniques — I don’t use them at all — but simply choosing a domain which gets indexed. Some of those obscure services see precious little webcrawling.
Another concern is backing up your material. For myself, there is plenty of stuff I can generate and regenerate in just an hour or so, from scratch. This is stuff written into my character, as it were. But to prevent having to do too much work, my static site — Kiln of the Soul (site is gone as of 2020) — is fully backed up. That is, I keep multiple copies of the whole thing; I even have one prepped for burning to a CD, complete with an autorun utility. It would be too easy to simply add excessive junk, but not everything I write is that critical to whatever I regard as my personal legacy. But the basic outline of what I consider important is all ready to upload, complete with landing page and all. I keep it all synchronized on all my backups, and follow the KISS principle. My basic material is all text; nothing dynamic, no JScript, no graphics, just simple XHTML pages. The nature of my work is textual in the first place, so your mileage will vary.
I’m not vain enough to imagine I have, or ever will have, any great following. Everything I have can be quickly reduced to plain text, just like we used to see in days of olde with electronic bulletin boards and slow dialup connections. It’s not simply removing the HTML tags, but replicating the markup according to some recognized standard which has been around for quite some time. If there were no readers at all, I’m not sure I would simply disappear from the Net. I’d keep at it until it was simply not possible within my skills and resources. There is little reference to any market, but the burning urge within.
Others would have to adjust their own plans based on what they imagine is the justification for it. I would have no trouble taking up one of those free Unix shell accounts wherever they are available in the world and producing a plain text blog. Can you imagine the URL — some-weird-place.net/soulkiln/blog.txt — for that? It may come to that someday all too soon.
