4 ms·

Hackers hate it, but there are more programmers than "hackers". Think about middle aged family men, career men. They aren't all going to care as strongly or b

Hackers hate it, but there are more programmers than "hackers". Think about middle aged family men, career men. They aren't all going to care as strongly or be able to quit. Also even if you could convince all american talent to boycott it, there's a whole world of people out there who don't care at all, and just like America has been happy to sell censorship tech to the rest of the world for years, I'm sure the rest of the world would be happy to repay :) I don't think Indian or Russian programmers are going to give a toss about it if it pays bills. Ha or you could just buy back equipment already sent to Chian and Iran. Which sort of raises the point that American talent has already built this equipment and been selling it for years now. It is way past too late for this boycott to work.

pg 15y ago
I'm not suggesting we could prevent e.g. Cisco from finding enough people to build this stuff. More that Cisco would steer clear of such projects if working on them would put a black mark on their corporate reputation that would make it harder for them, as a company, to hire good people.
- zem 15y ago
  and yet the likes of the nsa, fbi, etc have never lacked for good (in the technical sense) people to write surveillance software. heck, there are some pretty sophisticated spammers out there, and the spam industry is almost universally regarded as the cesspool of the tech world. if sopa does need to get implemented, i'm sure questionable small companies across the nation would flock to bid for the job.
  - omouse 15y ago
    We might be able to enlist the technical help of spammers like that. They may not like SOPA either? I wouldn't be surprised if all technical people, regardless of what they do as their job, are against SOPA and other things like it.
    - zem 15y ago
      i'm pretty sure that the spammers are personally against spam too, as in they would not like to receive it. my point is that people are more than willing to implement something they would not like personally applied to them, for money, the challenge, job security or whatever.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  The companies that are likely to a build a lot of this (large government contractors) already have trouble hiring quality developers, any engineering boycott is likely to get lost in the noise.
- mindstab 15y ago
  "good people" is a relative term. If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now? It already to some extent has that problem just by not being a small sexy startup. I'm not willing to flat out say all the best hackers only want to do startups, but even assuming so, there are still lots of really good career engineers who also probably have no interest in working in a small sexy start up who Cisco can hire. Convincing them all that a nice company job is bad is going to be very hard. And then there's the fact it's too late and this tech's already been built in america with american talent. They already found the people. And often these big company products aren't built by the best people. Big government contracts like this have so much bureaucracy to choke the love out of many people. They aren't well written, they are slowly and expensively and they are ugly and horrible but they work. Does this sound like the working conditions that anyone we know would want to work in? Probably not. Big government projects don't need A* hackers to get out the door sadly and never have.
  - pg 15y ago
    In my experience most organizations, however mediocre, have some smart people who ended up there by various accidents. But even in the unlikely event that e.g. Cisco is able to operate without any smart people, it's even more unlikely the people running it see themselves that way. So they would be worried by something that would make it hard to recruit good people. Good programmers are in such demand right now that it's hard to imagine any company not worrying about something that would make it harder to hire. I think they'd worry especially about the difficulty of hiring recent grads. To undergrads all big companies look pretty similar; it would be a disaster if there was something that made your company look distinctively worse. It's not too hard to imagine a situation in which there was some sort of blacklist of the worst SOPA collaborators, and undergrads knew and avoided them.
    - mindstab 15y ago
      That may even be too late. The military has its own programmers and I presume it trains some of them in house, which means it gets then possibly at 18 out of high school and trains them itself. They can be put to any use they are ordered to. The government in general is probably rarely thought of as sexy and it still gets grads. I guess I'm decrying this idea because I just do not see it as enough from both sides. I don't see you ever getting 100% of people on board with you and I don't see 100% of sources of software caring. This plan only works if 100% of everyone buys in, as long as one lone group produces the code, SOPA will go into effect. And then theres the fact the tools are already built and at least 10 years old. This is simply not the solution and any time spent on it is a waste of what little effort we do have that could be vastly better spent else where. Exactly where? I don't know, I just feel strongly this is not the solution. As for at least a direction? Look to Larwence Lessig. He's been fighting copy right reform for ages. He was doing it in the 90s and it was getting old. Then after Eldred was lost he kind vanished from that scene. He's now back and he's stepped up a level and is working on Government reform. He realized after they lost that you can't fight in a system that's so broken, so he's now working on System reform instead. If you can spare 10 minutes check out his talk on the Daily show from Dec 13, it does a decent job of summarizing what he's fighting now. Then tell me this is how we can best spend our time :( I supremely believe we need to step it up at least one level and fight something bigger, this is just a symptom. Also I believe the world is a sadder harsher and more depressing place and not everyone clings to our ideals like we do. We need a system to take that into account. To be a little more strong handed than "All the hippie flower power new talent won't work for you" because I'm pretty sure there is still more than enough talent to go around to get these jobs done. :(
- jim-greer 15y ago
  What is the stuff that needs building for SOPA to be effective? All the rights holders need to know is the name of the domain they want seized, and it gets removed from DNS. Pretty simple and sadly effective. Edit: For people that think this is difficult - ICE is already doing it quite easily. They contact the company that controls the root domain. For .com, it is VeriSign.
  - imgabe 15y ago
    So they know the name that they want removed. Who do they tell? How do they tell them? Do they call on the phone? Do they enter it in a web form? Who wrote that web app? Who maintains the server that runs it? Who edits the DNS record to remove the name or writes the software that does so? There are a number of intermediate steps between "knowing the name" and "the DNS record gets removed". DNS servers are not yet controlled telepathically, to my knowledge.
    - mindstab 15y ago
      Have you seen all the ICE FBI domain seizures over the last year? That part is already done and has been running along taking hundreds of domains in its first year of operations
      - imgabe 15y ago
        Yes, they seized 150 domains. I would not be surprised if they printed the list out and handed it over, and someone had a very boring afternoon of banning them. What happens when a counterfeiter registers 1000 domains? or 10000? or 100000? That's all besides the point. The point is that somebody who knows this is a bad idea had to be involved in making it happen. I want that person to stand up and refuse to do it. There are thousands of engineers working at the companies that are advocating this law. How long would Sony stay in business if its engineering staff up and quit?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
    DNS could be circumvented or supplanted. The real horror scenario is language mandating dropping addresses from routing tables making it into a treaty.
- ldar15 15y ago
  Yeah. Look what we did to Visa and Mastercard after they screwed Wikileaks. Cisco's gonna be totally scared!
nsmartt 15y ago
Since SOPA would result in various American internet companies being crippled (censoring those would result in the death of the company if a large portion of their users is American), there would be plenty of other countries affected negatively by the passing of SOPA.
- mindstab 15y ago
  Like what? In some of the countries I mentioned they already have replacements. You think google is big in china? Try Baidu. Somehow the Chinese economy has managed to struggle on :P And Iran? Syria? There are already lots of countries out there with tougher laws that have also gotten rid of this companies influences and are able to carry on. And some of them also have successful tech industries despite it. We need a better solution then revolt of the entitled well off white nerds. How about instead we pour all our money into counter lobby or governmental reform groups, like what Larwence Lessig is up to these days. That may be the only way to change things. This idea of a protest is at least a decade too late.
d0mine 15y ago
Please restrain yourself from swipe generalizations about Indian or Russian programmers.
- statictype 15y ago
  Those were merely used as examples since both countries have a large pool of programmers. The same would apply to any developer anywhere

pg 15y ago

I'm not suggesting we could prevent e.g. Cisco from finding enough people to build this stuff. More that Cisco would steer clear of such projects if working on them would put a black mark on their corporate reputation that would make it harder for them, as a company, to hire good people.

zem 15y ago
and yet the likes of the nsa, fbi, etc have never lacked for good (in the technical sense) people to write surveillance software. heck, there are some pretty sophisticated spammers out there, and the spam industry is almost universally regarded as the cesspool of the tech world. if sopa does need to get implemented, i'm sure questionable small companies across the nation would flock to bid for the job.
- omouse 15y ago
  We might be able to enlist the technical help of spammers like that. They may not like SOPA either? I wouldn't be surprised if all technical people, regardless of what they do as their job, are against SOPA and other things like it.
  - zem 15y ago
    i'm pretty sure that the spammers are personally against spam too, as in they would not like to receive it. my point is that people are more than willing to implement something they would not like personally applied to them, for money, the challenge, job security or whatever.
aidenn0 15y ago
The companies that are likely to a build a lot of this (large government contractors) already have trouble hiring quality developers, any engineering boycott is likely to get lost in the noise.
mindstab 15y ago
"good people" is a relative term. If we're talking the kind of ultra a level hackers you deal with at Y Combinator, even as it stands, would any of them work for a big slow company like Cisco now? It already to some extent has that problem just by not being a small sexy startup. I'm not willing to flat out say all the best hackers only want to do startups, but even assuming so, there are still lots of really good career engineers who also probably have no interest in working in a small sexy start up who Cisco can hire. Convincing them all that a nice company job is bad is going to be very hard. And then there's the fact it's too late and this tech's already been built in america with american talent. They already found the people. And often these big company products aren't built by the best people. Big government contracts like this have so much bureaucracy to choke the love out of many people. They aren't well written, they are slowly and expensively and they are ugly and horrible but they work. Does this sound like the working conditions that anyone we know would want to work in? Probably not. Big government projects don't need A* hackers to get out the door sadly and never have.
- pg 15y ago
  In my experience most organizations, however mediocre, have some smart people who ended up there by various accidents. But even in the unlikely event that e.g. Cisco is able to operate without any smart people, it's even more unlikely the people running it see themselves that way. So they would be worried by something that would make it hard to recruit good people. Good programmers are in such demand right now that it's hard to imagine any company not worrying about something that would make it harder to hire. I think they'd worry especially about the difficulty of hiring recent grads. To undergrads all big companies look pretty similar; it would be a disaster if there was something that made your company look distinctively worse. It's not too hard to imagine a situation in which there was some sort of blacklist of the worst SOPA collaborators, and undergrads knew and avoided them.
  - mindstab 15y ago
    That may even be too late. The military has its own programmers and I presume it trains some of them in house, which means it gets then possibly at 18 out of high school and trains them itself. They can be put to any use they are ordered to. The government in general is probably rarely thought of as sexy and it still gets grads. I guess I'm decrying this idea because I just do not see it as enough from both sides. I don't see you ever getting 100% of people on board with you and I don't see 100% of sources of software caring. This plan only works if 100% of everyone buys in, as long as one lone group produces the code, SOPA will go into effect. And then theres the fact the tools are already built and at least 10 years old. This is simply not the solution and any time spent on it is a waste of what little effort we do have that could be vastly better spent else where. Exactly where? I don't know, I just feel strongly this is not the solution. As for at least a direction? Look to Larwence Lessig. He's been fighting copy right reform for ages. He was doing it in the 90s and it was getting old. Then after Eldred was lost he kind vanished from that scene. He's now back and he's stepped up a level and is working on Government reform. He realized after they lost that you can't fight in a system that's so broken, so he's now working on System reform instead. If you can spare 10 minutes check out his talk on the Daily show from Dec 13, it does a decent job of summarizing what he's fighting now. Then tell me this is how we can best spend our time :( I supremely believe we need to step it up at least one level and fight something bigger, this is just a symptom. Also I believe the world is a sadder harsher and more depressing place and not everyone clings to our ideals like we do. We need a system to take that into account. To be a little more strong handed than "All the hippie flower power new talent won't work for you" because I'm pretty sure there is still more than enough talent to go around to get these jobs done. :(
jim-greer 15y ago
What is the stuff that needs building for SOPA to be effective? All the rights holders need to know is the name of the domain they want seized, and it gets removed from DNS. Pretty simple and sadly effective. Edit: For people that think this is difficult - ICE is already doing it quite easily. They contact the company that controls the root domain. For .com, it is VeriSign.
- imgabe 15y ago
  So they know the name that they want removed. Who do they tell? How do they tell them? Do they call on the phone? Do they enter it in a web form? Who wrote that web app? Who maintains the server that runs it? Who edits the DNS record to remove the name or writes the software that does so? There are a number of intermediate steps between "knowing the name" and "the DNS record gets removed". DNS servers are not yet controlled telepathically, to my knowledge.
  - mindstab 15y ago
    Have you seen all the ICE FBI domain seizures over the last year? That part is already done and has been running along taking hundreds of domains in its first year of operations
    - imgabe 15y ago
      Yes, they seized 150 domains. I would not be surprised if they printed the list out and handed it over, and someone had a very boring afternoon of banning them. What happens when a counterfeiter registers 1000 domains? or 10000? or 100000? That's all besides the point. The point is that somebody who knows this is a bad idea had to be involved in making it happen. I want that person to stand up and refuse to do it. There are thousands of engineers working at the companies that are advocating this law. How long would Sony stay in business if its engineering staff up and quit?
- jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
  DNS could be circumvented or supplanted. The real horror scenario is language mandating dropping addresses from routing tables making it into a treaty.
ldar15 15y ago
Yeah. Look what we did to Visa and Mastercard after they screwed Wikileaks. Cisco's gonna be totally scared!

nsmartt 15y ago

Since SOPA would result in various American internet companies being crippled (censoring those would result in the death of the company if a large portion of their users is American), there would be plenty of other countries affected negatively by the passing of SOPA.

mindstab 15y ago
Like what? In some of the countries I mentioned they already have replacements. You think google is big in china? Try Baidu. Somehow the Chinese economy has managed to struggle on :P And Iran? Syria? There are already lots of countries out there with tougher laws that have also gotten rid of this companies influences and are able to carry on. And some of them also have successful tech industries despite it. We need a better solution then revolt of the entitled well off white nerds. How about instead we pour all our money into counter lobby or governmental reform groups, like what Larwence Lessig is up to these days. That may be the only way to change things. This idea of a protest is at least a decade too late.

d0mine 15y ago

Please restrain yourself from swipe generalizations about Indian or Russian programmers.

statictype 15y ago
Those were merely used as examples since both countries have a large pool of programmers. The same would apply to any developer anywhere