If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it.

You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries, it has global consequences.

Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens.

Public interest groups and informed politicians have long lamented these problems with ACTA. But the impact of dubious backroom law-drafting is getting fresh attention in light of the powerful global opposition movement that has emerged out of last week’s Internet blackout protests.

Activists and netizens all around the world have woken up to the dangers of overbroad enforcement law proposals drafted by monopoly industry lobbyists, and rushed into law through strategic lobbying by the same corporate interests that backed SOPA and PIPA.

ACTA may have been signed by public officials, but it’s crystal clear that they are not representing the public interest.

Do you believe in democracy? Do you believe that laws should be made to reflect our collective best interests, formulated through an open transparent process? One that allows everyone, from experts to civil society members, to analyze, question and probe an agreement that will lead to laws that will impact potentially billions of lives? If we don’t do anything now, this agreement is going to crawl itself into power. With the future at stake like this, it’s never too late to fight.

continuing the tradition of denying European citizens any opportunity to offer their views on ACTA, the Council of national ministers employed the shabby trick of pushing the treaty through by adopting it without debate at a meeting whose main business had nothing to do with international trade.

At the time of the write-up the payload is a Trojan downloader. Once executed, the file will grab two additional modules from a remote server. The modules are encrypted dll’s able to log keystrokes and steal passwords.

When the well-known domain name registrar Go Daddy threw its support behind the Stop Online Piracy Act, it led to a PR disaster: Internet users rebelled against the registrar, and called for Go Daddy customers to transfer their domains.

In response to the boycott Go Daddy has switched their position, but some companies are deciding to take a stance against the Internet blacklist legislation.

In a day of action scheduled for December 29th, these companies are publicly protesting the scary legislation that endangers our Internet infrastructure and threatens online free expression in the name of combating so-called rogue websites.

If you’ve been hungry for new ways to promote online freedoms and protest the blacklist bills, then help these companies with their campaigns. And if you don’t have a need for any of these services, you can still become a member of EFF, sign our petition against the blacklist bills, and check out our activism toolkit for other ways you can help fight SOPA and Protect IP.

The Internet blacklist bills are a looming threat to our online rights in the new year.

“Leonard Napolitano, Sandia’s director of computer sciences and information systems, warned in a letter that the legislation is “unlikely to be effective” and will “negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality.”

Additional remarks by the Director: There are also potential consequences to DNS filtering that might adversely affect proper functionality of the Internet.

In particular, it is possible that the resolution of some domain names could be negatively affected by the filtering of other domain names under the provisions of the these bills. Domain names often rely on other names to be resolved, and the failure of these dependencies can cause partial or complete failure of the dependent names…” - via CNET’s Declan McCullagh

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation—but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Namecheap.com Coupons
$6.99 domain name transfers

Coupon Code: SOPAsucks
Coupon Code: BYEBYEGD

Imagine if you were able to genetically combine Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Darth Vader and Barbara Streisand into one horrifically terrifying being. Now imagine that being is actually a piece of proposed legislature — the terrifying creation in your midst would then be the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is currently being considered by the House.

We here at HostGator support a free internet.
An Internet in which free information and unhindered distribution of said information is an unalienable human right.
Do the same, contact your representative and tell them to vote NO on SOPA.

50% off Shared / Reseller / VPS first month.
Coupon code: NOSOPA