SOPA, PIPA and our lost innocence
Today many websites are engaged in protests. They protest against abusive and oppressive laws proposed by corporations who are unwilling to adapt to the new reality they found themselves in. Corporations who have corrupted representatives in many countries (albeit the protest is against two laws being considered in the United States, similar laws exist and are being considered all over the world) threaten to enable corrupt governments to quickly and swiftly silence any opposition. For these dinosaurs to survive, our new world of free exchange of ideas must die. We must not allow that to happen.
Update on the SOPA supporter list
Since originally posted, the SOPA supporter list has moved and changed. Some interesting additions, some interesting removals.
Companies that support SOPA
Here is a handy list, copied on 2011-12-22, 21:30 UTC from http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Supporters.pdf, of the companies that openly support SOPA. It's handy in case some lobbyist persuades the US House of Representatives to remove the original file
Wikileaks followers, a thousand data-points later
A couple days back, I measured how the Twitter @wikileaks account was gaining followers. I suspected my dataset was biased, since it was captured on a Saturday night (here, GMT-2) and that I would see different values according to time of day. I decided it was a nice idea to focus my analysis tool on the account and keep it capturing data for a longer time. To my surprise, it's still a more or less straight line. I still think they'll cross the million follower mark in early-to-mid February. This could indicate Wikileaks is gaining followers around the globe (or, at least, evenly distributed according to time-zone) or that the people who follow @wikileaks don't follow conventional sleep cycles.
Wikileaks and its followers (1 every 8 seconds)
After playing a little with the Twitter API, I built a small tool that helps me keep an eye on some indicators. Today, I turned its sights on the @wikileaks account on Twitter and got this:
I may be wrong (it's late and I am tired and I don't trust my math at those times), but it seems like @wikileaks is gaining about 1 follower every 8 seconds or so.
To give you an idea of what these numbers mean (and, being measured on a Saturday night in most of the Western world, I would consider them to be very conservative), keeping this rate, they will cross the million follower threshold in early-February. I will measure the growth rate again during the week and for a longer period to get better numbers, perhaps getting a nice curve. I also expect the media circus around Assange to get larger as he fights extradition and as Wikileaks releases more leaked documents. My gut feeling tells me they will cross the million follower mark in early to mid-January.
For something so many people want to silence, that's quite impressive.
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