News: We’ll Be Striking on Wednesday

We’ve had pretty good reliability on our site—we’ve only had some downtime due to server upgrades or major relaunches, but we’re shutting things down on Wednesday, January 18 to protest SOPA and PIPA, two bills that are designed to stop Internet piracy (good), but have a lot of other implications, including censorship (bad).

As such, a number of sites will be “striking” to protest on Wednesday:

January 18th is going to be amazing. Sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can, and drive contacts to Congress.

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

Instead, you’ll see a splash screen when you visit SchwarzTech, and Eric, Matt, and Lindsey will use the time to catch up on trashy daytime talk shows and video games. Of course, we’ll be back on Thursday, January 19 to cover Apple’s education event. You can learn more about the negatives of SOPA and PIPA.

There have been reports that SOPA has been shelved, but its sibling, PIPA, is still alive and kicking.