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We Stand With The Internet

By Michael Bleigh January 17, 2012 in sopa, pipa, censorship

Medium

You may have heard about two pieces of legislation recently: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills are dangerous both to the rights to freedom of speech of our citizenry and to the fabric of the internet itself. While SOPA has been "shelved" for now it could always be brought back to life and PIPA, it's Senate counterpart, is still very much alive and may soon come to a vote. At Intridea we strongly oppose these bills and as such today we are announcing that we will be joining the one-day blackout tomorrow.

Intridea's website and blog will be unavailable tomorrow between the hours of 8am and 8pm Eastern time during which time a simple message will be displayed declaring our position and urging visitors to learn more and take action.

Of course, we're also software developers, so our preferred method of protest will be enacted through an open source Rack middleware called "Censorstrike." If you run a site using Ruby and would like to join the protest, you can learn how on Censorstrike's GitHub page.

SOPA and PIPA stand to threaten the amazing, open internet that has given us the chance to succeed as a business and is the lifeblood of our company as well as that of our clients. We urge you to take action in any way you can to prevent these bills from becoming law.

Medium

Michael Bleigh

Michael has been with Intridea since 2007 and works to build Intridea's portfolio of products. With many years of experience working as both a designer and a developer, Michael specializes in helping to bridge the gap between the back-end development and the front-end design of a project. Michael is a prolific member of the Ruby on Rails community, having released popular open source libraries such as OmniAuth and spoken at conferences including RailsConf and RubyConf.

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