[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]
Wait, what? When he restarts his router it kills the *entire* internet? That sounds like an impressive bit of kit.
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.
And for God’s sake DON’T type “Google” into Google… you can break the Internet.
Children of geeky parents around the world cried out and suddenly fell silent. For an hour.
What about using SSH tunnel to my company’s datacenter and reading hackaday through it? You can’t increase productivity by blocking SSH connections to servers that you need to do your job…
This is a pretty cool way to “unplug”. I often have that problem… closing email and chat clients… but then I can just open them again and reload reload… uhg. My wife would NOT be happy about this box.
Man, I hate when my time starts sinking.
This needs to be distributed to every household in the world. If you are a 4chan member, you get 5. Just in case.
There’s a chrome plugin that does basically the same thing (StayFocusd), it’s amazing what blocking the internet can do for your productivity.
Every office manager will want one.
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
What kind of router takes 15min to reboot??
I wonder if ‘duino + python had anything to do with that :p
A Soekris Net4801 running a mostly-full Debian distro off a compact flash card!
the linux kind with slow processors and slow interfaces :P
im sure arduinos and python was not causing the booting problems XD