Internet Defense League - Bat Signal for the Internet
Written by Lucy Black
Sunday, 27 May 2012
Website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaigns. The banner logo for the "bat-signal" site is a cat for reasons to be explained.
Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian, and the online advocacy group Fight for the Future which organized the anti-SOPA blackout have now combined forces to create the Internet Defense League.
Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA.
This would add an "activist call-to-action" to all participating sites - such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.
Sites that have already joined include Reddit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mozilla. IDL is also asking developers to join the project to build the JavaScript tools it will need to respond to future threats.
It is a nice idea but perhaps a step too far. Yes the general public and news media notice when sites that are large enough, such as Wikipedia, go dark but smaller sites are fairly irrelevant as protest fodder. You have to admire the super hero attitude however!
An Indiegogo campaign for a smart cat feeder that can monitor your cat's health by tracking appetite and weight change has already met its target, demonstrating a new role for AI in the home.
