Actually that's exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we'll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.
Are you guys going to stop using Mastercard, VISA, and no idea who your internet provider is but if its Comcast, them too?
I did another thread on here regarding this as well and I'm curious how far people are willing to go to prove a point or are they only singling out whatever makes sense. The above three have some strong strong monopolies or close to it so it makes things much harder. GoDaddy just happens to be one of the easy ones people can choose to switch from.
I don't speak for everyone but personally, I'm not against all companies that are pro-SOPA, just the Internet firms who I think should know better. As for others like the music or motion picture industries, I understand and respect their support for SOPA.
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The sheer complexity of the Internet makes it difficult to understand and defend against attacks. You may be unaware of vulnerabilities that affect your network.
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While the brochure makes it sound like standard netsec training... I find the wording of a "Cyberwarrior Training" program to be... surreal. Further, I think it is pretty sick to market such services to a government that clearly is clueless about the internet in general. (not the defense industries - the political arms of the government)
The reason is that it is probably easy to market this service to politicians who want to appear savvy:
"Look, we need more cyberwarriors on the net - we need to block the firewalls of the cyber criminals. This is the next fronteir in protecting our nation!" --- *For the low cost of $150,000 per cyber warrior. No guarantees apply. Check you state for local restrictions.
I am talking about marketing the program to congress/political figures in charge of funding for the training.
THey would not be the ones taking the training - but the ones spending tax dollars on a service they really don't understand - thus the likelihood for abuse is higher.
I err on the side of corruption when anything pertaining to governments is concerned. Call me paranoid.
YC is an investor and has a standpoint. YC is promoting anti-SOPA support outwards and towards its (independent) portfolio companies. KKR is also an investor and also has a standpoint.
But its not KKR listet on the pro SOPA list its one, and only one of there portefolie companies. KKR are not (in the same way as YC isent) responsible for its portefolies standpoints.
They are not legally liable, which is different from being responsible. Imagine if one of their portfolio companies was a child porn distributor. You wouldn't defend KKR, because clearly they have some choice in who they put in their portfolio, and a child porn distributor is an immoral choice. Holding a SOPA supporting company is also a (albeit less egregious) poor choice. Taking away invites of their portfolio companies provides motivation for them to look into this sort of thing when choosing companies in the future.
They're an enabler. You punish them the same to inspire them to push pressure downward on everyone they work with.
Remember when Glenn Beck was still on Fox and people were crying continuously? Nothing worked until they started boycotting the companies advertising for him.
I'm talking to my Congressman on the phone right now. What do you think should be altered so the bill can achieve its original purpose? Or will nothing help?
I think it's very hard to make anything help. Here's a shortlist of things that should be fixed to avoid it horribly hurting innocent people, but I doubt it's enough - there seems likely to be more things in there. The original purpose of the law seems to be "Give the 'intellectual property' industries a blunt instrument to attack perceived violators", so making it less blunt probably violate the original purpose anyway.
Stop removing DNS entries; that's attempting to censor things that aren't in the US for non-US citizens.
Require a full court proceeding to stop advertisements and payment processing in the US - ie, no "court order", it has to be a full lawsuit with the ability to defend.
Require the removal of access to only affect a specific, listed set of companies.
Require the company requesting the blocking to pay reasonable costs of blocking.
Remove the making of copyright infringement into a felony; each of these things can easily happen by mistake.
You could try saying "nothing". Hollywood is actually doing quite alright, piracy or not.
Alternatively, you could suggest Ron Wyden's OPEN bill. OPEN nixes the the DNS filtering, but keeps some of the follow-the-money measures in SOPA. More importantly, it also requires a full court hearing before any action can be taken.
Actually it looks like Visa and MC were some of the most reasonable in the hearings -- they said there would be lots of costs to comply, and while they didn't support visa/mc being used for any illegal activity, ...
I'm sure you've seen the list of supporters (http://1.usa.gov/t7Wpo8). Even the list itself is a half-assed job by pro-SOPAs to illustrate Congressional support for the bill.
Unless, of course, the fragrance company Coty Inc has been seeing a lot of their fragrances being pirated online.
Even though the national/local press does not follow this very closely in Europe, we are making as much effort as possible to bring it to everyone's attention in order to stimulate participation along the same lines as yours. where possible I/we shall boycott over here also.
Just wondering here -- would you go so far as to consider the domain registrars of YC hopefuls when going through the application process, or would their choice hold essentially zero weight in whether they get accepted or not?
I doubt it'll become a topic of conversation what your registrar is..but if it does happen to come up and you happen to say GoDaddy, judging from pg's post above the answer is probably yes, he will hold it against you :)
Funding a company that supports a company that supports SOPA is just one step away from supporting a company that supports SOPA...which in turn is just one step away from supporting SOPA. Scary, isn't it?
Yes, no problem. F*ck every last one of those companies. The only two that I still have no real choice but to support would be Comcast because of my local ISP monopoly (I can get 512K DSL from SBC [ATT] or 100mbit Comcast...not really what I'd call a "choice") and MasterCard because my credit union does not offer debit cards via AmEx.
That list would be a whole lot shorter if you removed the names of Law Firms. Why are they even on there? And the Congressional Fire Service supports SOPA? That's "stretching it" for supporters.
Yes, but I was rather inquiring about whether it was even possible to do so. That list is huge and most likely growing. One of the companies on the list is McGraw-Hill Education. I have to use their products at my school - how do I get around that?
It doesn't really matter which textbook manufacturer you get your books from. They are all morally bankrupt institutions. The entire textbook industry is a scam.
I love how you can pick nearly any topic in almost any subject(especially computer science) and find an amazing book for free, or for about $60, yet every textbook my school uses gets < 2 stars on amazon and costs $150.
My "favorite" was a biology book written by a guy with a B.S. in journalism. He published the book years ago and every year he releases a new edition with the chapters out of order.
Buy used textbooks whenever possible. If you're stuck in one of those situations where there's a new edition every year, make sure to ask the instructor if you can use the previous edition.
Discover? I've been a happy customer of theirs since the 90s, and their coverage has gotten near total within the US. Sparser in other countries, though.
With my credit union in California, wire transfers are $20 + 2-3 business days. This is cost prohibitive. Western Union is similarly pricey. Dwolla is an interesting competitor ($3/mo for unlimited instant transfers), but it needs wider adoption before it can be used directly.
In Sweden wire transfers within Sweden[1] generally do not have a per transaction cost and most utility bills are paid through wire transfer. Recently many online stores have started allowing purchase with invoice (many use a company called Klarna[2] which handles the sending of invoices and the risks) which you then have to pay through wire transfer.
1. I think it is usually free to all EU countries too as long as you use IBAN.
How is this relevant? I don't spend much, and use cash in real life. But I need a card for online purchases for my business (hosting, etc.) and for access to my bank accounts in a different country. Maybe I can replace most of it with wire transfer, but Amazon, Rackspace, etc. won't accept it.
It's a compromise. If VISA and MC bother you in this context, use them less. You can't practically eliminate them, but you can, if you choose, reduce their use.
They already pay the licencing fees to the respective music labels, so if SOPA gets passed they'll be one of the few legal music streaming sites remaining. If SOPA is used to full effect then it's plausible they could get a larger market share.
I suspect one reason is that they get process a lot of chargebacks when people's fake Viagra and counterfeit NFL jerseys get seized by Customs before delivery.
I'm going to piggyback on your comment here, since it's at the top of the comment thread.
From the Reddit link:
"Name Cheap messaged me with a special discount code for reddit users: BYEBYEGD I'm not taking any positions i'm just reporting it. I asked him to give reddit users a better deal."
I'm not affiliated with NameCheap at all, but if you're going to move your domain, this might make things easier.
I transferred my domains to NameCheap from GoDaddy during their last PR nightmare. I wish I had done it sooner. NameCheap's interface isn't the best in the world, but not having to use GoDaddy's site is worth more to me than 5x the transfer fees I paid. Plus the domain privacy option is bundled, meaning cheaper domain registrations ($11 for a .com vs. $17 at godaddy -- at least for the first year).
I've decided to go with Name.com as it seems Namecheap is a reseller of ENOM, who I haven't particularly cared for (no reasons I can link or substantiate, just my own personal experiences and opinion on this one.)
I've been seeing a lot of recommendations for NameCheap, but there is one thing that makes me hesitate: I get a staggering amount of spam from domains registered by NameCheap with the Whois info shielded by WhoisGuard. Yes, I've used their reporting tool to report spammers, but it still comes.
Is this about scammers flocking to NameCheap because it's, well, cheap? Or is NameCheap somehow marketing to spammers while trying to maintain plausible deniability? I'd be happy to consider moving my sites over to NameCheap, but I don't want to move from one evil registrar to another registrar.
I have all my domains at NameCheap and have never gotten any spam (or maybe google blocks it all?).
Either way, I'm happy. I haven't tried http://en.gandi.net/ but they are bit more expensive.
I've been using Gandi for 11 years. They've generally been great. Initially I was drawn to them because they were one of the first registrars to make it clear you owned the domain name and they were an agent.
I've kept with them largely because of the generally convenient and low-upsell nature of the website on top of this.
One caveat for U.S. customers: on the very rare (once or twice a decade) occasions when I've had to contact customer service, the time separation and some rough English skills have led to a slightly bumpy communication experience while resolving issues, but even with those obstacles, they're better at it than GoDaddy (and their English is a heck of a lot better than my French :).
~$15usd/yr rather than $7ish a year isn't a big deal for domains I care about.
I like Gandi's motto ("no bullshit"), but their support is - for lack of a better word - exactly that. It's now hovering at 36 hours without a response after repeated emails to them. No excuse. I'd rather pay the $10 extra and get real phone or live chat support from anyone else. Avoid.
Employee here. GoDaddy does care very much about their registrar roots. The fact that we have over half of all registered domain names is a source of tremendous pride, and unlike the elephant scandal I'm willing to venture their registration will not go up because of this, namely because there doesn't seem to be any support of SOPA from consumers, educated or not. And Godaddy's users are decidedly less technologically educated, generally speaking.
"but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes."
I was going to complain about this sentiment from someone not that rich and who can't afford the fanciest red polo shirts money can buy ha ha, but then I said forget it, for what it truly costs to move a domain it's far less then the cost on our liberties if SOPA passes, so I went outside shoveled a few driveways and earned enough money to move over the domains I have without cutting into my budget. There really isn't a reason for people not to do this.
Along those lines. It seems pretty important to do what you think is right, even if it's effect on convincing others of your correctness seems negligible.
In the past godaddy has invited (and thrived) based on negative publicity as well as questionable sales practices. (Godaddy girls, exploitation of women, the elephant hunt as a few examples).
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes.