After hearing all the media buzz around Google and Wikipedia protesting SOPA, I expected to go to Wikipedia’s website and see the entire website disabled. To my surprise, the Wikipedia worked just fine for me this morning. I asked friends and colleagues if they could access Wikipedia and they could not. Then I realized the reason… I use a JavaScript blocker that requires me to enable JavaScript per-site and Wikipedia’s block amounts to a post-load JavaScript hack. Simple and easy to implement, but also easy to defeat.
If you want to continue using Wikipedia today, install a JavaScript blocker into your browser and set it to block anything from “wikimedia.org”. In Firefox, I recommend NoScript and in Google Chrome I recommend NotScripts.
I fully support Google and Wikipedia in their efforts to block SOPA. I just found it interesting that Wikipedia’s block implementation was so trivial, anyone could get around it and access the website as normal. Once you finally do enable JavaScript the page looks like this:
Hi,
They describe on their page somewhere, how you can disable the black screen (including disabling the javascript as you found out). Their aim was not to prevent people from using Wikipedia. Just to make sure everyone gets the message.
🙂
@Radek
Actually, no they don’t. Not on the first two pages anyway. You have to click the “Learn more” and search through a large pile of text to find it. Not the kind of thing regular web surfers are going to easily find.
Thank you for sharing your insights.
It could be also useful to know, that blocker could be canceled by clicking ESC on the keyboard right after page start loading.
I’m assuming if you can figure out how to get around the Wikipedia block, then you’re probably tech savy like me, and support defeating SOPA, ergo this embargo punishes us unfairly.
For the rest of world, though, life without Wikipedia is apparently a horrific experience worthy of multiple pages of writing: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/how-im-surviving-or-trying-to-without-wikipedia-at-my-fingertips/?hp