A SOPA We Still Can’t Get Behind

[Brad] had an extremely productive January 18th. Considering how many websites went dark to protest SOPA, we can’t blame him. While considering what he could get done if popular Internet time sinks went dark on command, [Brad] thought of the Stop Online Productivity Avoidance box. This build will redirect all traffic to sites like reddit, hacker news, and (gasp!) hack a day to a simple web page that asks the eternal question, “shouldn’t you be working right now?”

The box has two modes: in SOPA mode, the whole Internet is at [Brad]’s fingertips. In NOPA mode, an Arduino communicates with a Python script running on the router to pull up an Internet blacklist. A simple button would be too easy to override, so there’s a ‘nuclear mode’ that shuts off these time sinks for one hour. The only way around the blacklist is to restart the router, a process that takes 15 minutes and will kill the entire Internet for the duration. Not something you’d like to do if you’re slightly bored.

All the code for the SOPA box is up on github and you can check out [Brad]’s demo of the SOPA box after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rncAj876od0#!&w=470]

15 thoughts on “A SOPA We Still Can’t Get Behind

    1. As we all know, the internet has already been destroyed once by Jen of “The IT Crowd” – I really hate that now even [Brad] gets to do that…
      The elders of the internet should REALLY do something about that, they can’t keep letting everyone borrow it.

  1. heh last thing i want is to be working on somthing important than need to google somthing to help me and have to wait an hour XD

    my boss at my first job when he found out that i found the keybord to his cash register (it ran XP!) and when i tried to load digg.com i got a “site blocked contact system administrator” on a nice fancy screen XD
    tried to end any stray processes and system shut down XD

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.