SOPA and PIPA Blackout!

As of today (January 18, 2012) many websites have "blacked" out their content for the day, one of the more notable websites is Wikipedia.org. As this can be a small compromise as an act of protesting against the heinous bills going through the United States' Congress. A lot of these websites are using a type of Java-Script or JS for short, and others are using simple little Pop-Ups to block the sites. Through the use of some clever addons everyone that cares about their online security should have using the Firefox browser you can "by-pass" the JS and other Pop-Ups.

What you need:

• Firefox
• Internet Connection
• NoScript add-on
• FireBug add-on

You can get these add-ons from here (No-Script : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/?src=hp-dl-mostpopular ) and here (FireBug : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/?src=hp-dl-mostpopular ).

Once those add-ons are installed go to any page you want to be unblocked (I will be using Wikipedia.org for an example) and right click anywhere in the webpage and scroll over to NoScript and make sure "wikipedia.org" is allowed to use scrips and "wikimedia.org" isn't allowed to use scripts.

If No-Script does not work on the website you are tying to unblock right click the element on the website and click "inspect element with firebug" then in the console on the bottom of the page hover the cursor over the elements till it highlights the one you want to get rid of and then right click it and hit "Delete Element" then you will be able to browse that website for the time being and you will need to do this every time the page is refreshed or reloaded.

Even after the date has passed you can use some of the same techniques to block unwanted ads or other things on different sites. Please contact your representative and tell them to stop this bill before the Internet becomes suppressed.

Here you can find a list of websites that are blocking today in protest to SOPA : http://sopastrike.com/

Image courtesy of :

http://www.iblognet.com/