Wikipedia and SOPA

Hello ladies and gentlemen. James from tech here again. Now I know many of you will be having problems today with not being able to visit Wikipedia. We're always told not to use it for academic work but lets face it, it's useful. Now I'm going to tell you how to get around the SOPA protest and use Wikipedia as normal.

The first option may stop other sites working for a while. Go into your browser settings/preferences and dissable Javascript. You'll now be able to use Wikipedia as normal (reload the page if you're on there) but other websites that use JS may stop working.

The second option will just sort out Wikipedia. Get a plugin such as NoScript for Firefox which dissables JS on a per-page basis. With NoScript, you want to change it's options by right clicking, going to "NoScript", clicking "Options" and selecting "Scripts Globaly Allowed". This will let JS work on all pages as standard (It says dangerous but this is just putting your browser in the state it would be normally). Then visit Wikipedia, right click, click "NoScript" and click "Mark Wikipedia as untrusted" (This just tells NoScript to dissable scripts on Wikipedia). You can always un-install this plugin tomorrow when the protest is over.

So what is all this SOPA thing? Basically, it'll give the American government the power to block websites within their country much like in China at the moment. One of the reasons the USA may be able to cease a URL and block it is for linking to a website that infringes copyright. So Google could be blocked. Or Facebook. Or even your website if you link to youtube. In fact, Fuse FM could be blocked within America for linking to some websites. But this is not a solution. This is being demonstrated by Wikipedia today in that the internet is coming together to get around the blocks. If the USA builds a wall, there will always be someone willing to install a door.

Thanks for your time. I hope you find this of help and the best of luck for your exams!