dish

In trying to understand what the chit-chat behind SOPA is all about, I realized that I haven't made a blog post in a long while. You can find out everything you need to know about the proposal on wikipedia but I'll try to summarize here before moving on to the thing that I actually wanted to share.

SOPA stands for "Stop Online Piracy Act". On the surface, it makes a lot of sense. If you're a content producer, you need to protect the stuff that you generate. That means others can't do things like copy images without proper permission. There are a few obvious problems. The whole act is hard to enforce and it could open up a hole where a large player like Vevo could use legislation to get at a small blog. That's kind of like giving Chanel more ammo to sue the little handbag copycats out there.

It would be non-trivial, but possible to engineer a workaround by anybody who cares enough and wants to. For example, something like Napster where content is distributed on a "second internet" could be engineered to circumvent the system. There's also a lot of other potential systems that could get around the legislation. For example, one could encrypt data. One could try to deploy a distributed domain naming service. One could get very creative and employ some of the very neat systems research techniques that have been discussed in academia. I'm not saying that one shouldn't voice their opinion in support of or against the legislation. The act may or may not be relevant and the privacy push itself in some shape or form is inevitable. I'm just saying that depending on who you are, you could consider more carefully where efforts are best spent.

That's really all I have to say about the subject and it's enough of a hohum to preface the pictures I came across. I was at the Cambridge Public Library on Friday just browsing the local stacks and I came across a biography on Patty Boyd. Is it just me or does this shot of her look exactly like that old Brittney Spears album cover? Looks like someone else made a similar association but it feels more than just the outfit match ...