Note that I didn’t say anything about turning the engine off, or putting it in neutral. Or only doing so in places where the speed limit is properly posted. Or worrying about whether there’s a car behind them that will have to slam on their own breaks to prevent a pile-up. Or actually checking that the car really is speeding before acting on the report.

Now imagine that criticisms and objections raised by actual drivers, the auto industry, traffic engineers, highway planners, and city planners are all dismissed as speeder propaganda.

That’s basically what’s going on with the “anti-piracy” bills being discussed in the House (SOPA) and Senate (PIPA/Protect IP).

(Posted yesterday on Tumblr)

But why was GoDaddy such a target? And for that matter, why did so many people follow through, rather than just rant about it on the internet?

I think there are several reasons.

1. The tech industry is mostly opposed to the bill on technical reasons. Pick a random hosting provider and chances are they’re officially against it. That made GoDaddy stand out in a way that a random movie studio doesn’t.
2. They provide a service, not content, and there are many competitors who provide the same kind of service. (And it seems like they all came out with discount codes to encourage people to switch to their company.) With content, you can choose to read a book from another publisher, or watch a movie from another studio, but if you want to watch a particular movie, you can’t get it somewhere else. There are lots of comics publishers out there, but if you want to read Spider-Man, you can only get it from Marvel.
3. Public opinion of GoDaddy was already low. For some it was their sexist ad campaigns. For some it was the CEO bragging about shooting elephants. For some it was their incessant email marketing, or focus on upselling unneeded services to people who didn’t understand what they were, or the fact that their website is such a %^$^@#%& pain to use. They’re cheap, and they’re well-known, which means a lot of people used them…but they weren’t that well-liked. Supporting SOPA ended up being the last straw.

As a result, you had a company that was tolerated at best painting a target on themselves, and a relatively easy way for people to vote with their wallets and not actually give anything up other than the time and money needed to make the transfer.

Full disclosure: I used to have about 10 domain names registered through GoDaddy, plus a few at DreamHost and one at Network Solutions. (Yes, Network Solutions.) GoDaddy was annoying, but cheap, and it was easier to renew than move. This week I consolidated them all at DreamHost, where I’ve had my websites hosted for the past year. DreamHost is offering a discount code for new customers who want to switch: SOPAROPA. I don’t get anything for telling you that, but if you sign up and list me (kelson – at – pobox – dot – com) as the person who referred you to DreamHost, I’ll get credits that I can apply to my hosting bill.

Of course, once a system like this is in place, we all know it’ll never be abused, right?

And that’s not even getting into the technical implications of the bills, which would put an extra burden on tech startups and actually undermine efforts by the US government itself to make the internet more secure.

████, the ████ ████ █████ ██████ the ████████ ██████ the US in the ████ of ████████ ██████ (█████ it ██████’t), isn’t ████ yet. In ████, it’s █████ to a ████ ████ ████.

“unknown or illegal alias” is now my official favorite way of saying that an email address doesn’t exist.

• Cornell lab prints food (LA Times) – One step closer to the day we can order pizza online…and download it!
• Nifty idea: Google is designing a designing a “web intents” system for web apps, similar to intents in Android. That way you can have, say, a social network and a photo site that don’t even know about each other, and you can still share your photos directly from the site using that network.
• Ping isn’t always the best way to test network connectivity (or even speed) – ISC Diary
• XKCD and the paradox of password strength. ISC responds: it’s not that simple.
• Consolidation in the Telecommunications Industry since 1984 (the government-imposed breakup of AT&T into the seven “Baby Bells”) – WSJ
• ISC asks: Should We Still Test Patches?
• Introducing CloudFlare’s Automatic IPv6 Gateway – Very cool use of an existing proxy to make any website reachable by IPv6 with no changes to the server.
• Extrasolar planets seen by Hubble in 1998 revealed by new image processing techniques.

• Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
• The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
• YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement
• ShareThis on Multi-Post & Fast-Sharing.
• OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

• Quickster? That sounds oddly familiar…
• Webcomic The Oatmeal explains it in terms of the food service industry.
• Woot’s CEO parodies the “apology” letter by announcing Crapster.
• Interesting theory at ZDNet: Splitting off the DVD business sets up Netflix to be bought by Amazon without subjecting Amazon to sales tax requirements in all the new states where they (used to) have shipping centers.
• Netflix and studios compared to grocery stores and dairy farms (Me at Google+)
• I was tempted to leave this funny Netflix comment up, but it was also spam. Good thing I’ve got @lol_spam for that: Netflix Drunk-Dialing

Well, here are some ideas I came up with over lunch:

• Add Google+ activity to a lifestream.
• Allow someone to comment on your blog using their Google+ identity.
• Create a map of movements of based on public checkins.
• Analyze posting frequency & times.
• Analyze most popular posts based on reshares, +1s, replies (basically: add Google+ to Klout [Update: That was fast!])
• Associate a person with other profiles you might have from other social networks, based on their profile URLs.
• Build a list of people who work at an organization and speak a particular language.

Of course, it’ll really start taking off when they enable write access and the link-sharing and cross-posting services can get in on the act.

So, how about you? What else do you think can be done with the limited API released today?

You can find me at Google+ here: Kelson Vibber.

For example, “I can’t connect to this coffee shop’s wifi” may be worth trying to fix for a couple of minutes, but the real goal is connecting to the internet. The coffee shop just happens to be the most convenient/obvious means of doing so. If you have another way of connecting — say, by tethering to your phone connection — you’re better off switching methods instead of continuing to chase what may be a dead end.

Similarly, with software design, whenever you begin with a set of parameters and start off down a path that seems to be getting more and more complicated, it’s worth taking a step back and asking: what am I really trying to solve here? Are the constraints real, or can I drop some of them and take a different, more effective approach?

If the problem is presented as: How do I use these tools to accomplish this task, sometimes you’ve got to use those tools — but sometimes another set of tools will do the job better.