On January 18th 2012, thousands of websites participated in a protest against anti-piracy legislation. The legislation that was trying to make it’s way through congress was the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), both aimed at reducing copyright infringement. However, many saw this legislation as an attack on the freedom of the usage of the internet. Among the websites that protested were web giants Wikipedia, Google, and Redding.
Some sites set out to inform their users of the bill and urged their visitors to get their leaders in Congress to hear their voice in opposition of the bill. Google, for example, changed their “Google” image to have a “censored” image across it (See the image at the beginning of this article).
However, other sites in an attempt to show how crippling an online protest can be, completely shutdown service to their website for the day. The most recognized website was Wikipedia. Wikipedia “blacked out” their English site for the first time in the site’s history for a 24 hour period. When attempting to go directly to Wikipedia, the visitor was shown an image similar to the one below which appeared on top of the site not allowing users to access the normal functionality of the site. 
The black out had virtually no effect on me, other than noticing the change in the Google image. However, I couldn’t help but notice a sizable amount of chatter going on around Wikipedia being “down” or “dark”. I was going to let it go, but even four days later I continued to read about complaints of people that use Wikipedia daily that were hindered by the outage. (Do that many students really rely on plagiarizing that site?) The truth of the matter is that all of the information was still fully available.
The Background
Wikipedia and other sites appear to be inaccessible. For this blog entry lets use the protest case. Given the power demonstrated by this protest I am sure we’ll see the black out tactic used again for other purposes.
The Problem
Users of a “blacked out” site cannot get access to information they ordinarily would have.
The Resolution
TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT All web browsers have the ability to toggle off and on Javascript. The majority of the sites that went dark used some kind of javascript to interrupt regular service. However, all web pages are built on HTML, Javascript is used as a tool to enhance functionality. The core of the information is in HTML (or at least should be, exceptions being sites built fulling on Flash which is poor practice).
The easiest way for a site to disable itself is to use Javascript. Otherwise, all of the actual content would have to be removed and the site overall would suffer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consequences. (Yes, I realize Wikipedia is too big to suffer any kind of SEO hit). The point is that the work around is most likely going to be in Javascript so disabling it from your browser should reveal the content in most cases. To see an example of what this site might look like if it were “blacked out” click the link below. Notice that if you disable Javascript in your browser that the link will not work.
Click this link for an example of this site being “blacked out” with Javascript
