On December 21, 2012 the Mayan long count calendar will end. Many see this as an indication that the world will either end or be significantly changed on that date. We can not be certain what will happen, if anything, as this year comes to a [...]]]> Read part one of this article series

On December 21, 2012 the Mayan long count calendar will end. Many see this as an indication that the world will either end or be significantly changed on that date. We can not be certain what will happen, if anything, as this year comes to a close, but we do know that the year started with an online glimpse of what the future might look like. On January 18th select websites all across the Internet went dark in an online strike to protest censorship on the Internet.

Among the sites that went on strike the most significant may have been Wikipedia. For 24 hours the online encyclopedia went dark to its English users with the graphic shown here.

Imagine a world without free knowledge.

The move was a protest against what some saw in SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. To find out more about the bill and why so many prominent websites protested it, see the first part of this article series Justice Department Megaupload and Anonymous… what happened and why.

Those who were using the Internet on the 18th  may have encountered a number of sites that went on strike. And, in full disclosure, several websites associated with Freelancer’s Office also went dark; including this website, Phantascene.com, Alaskan Home & Garden, and Mars Station One.

Some of the websites that joined the strike, either by full blackout or a display of visible support, include:

Area907.info
Boing Boing
Craigslist.org
The Escapist
Google
ICanHasCheezburger
imgur
Internet Archive
Mars Station One
Minecraft.net
MoveOn.org
Mozilla.org
Namecheap.com
Nedroid.com
The Oatmeal
O’Reilly Media
Post Secret
Reddit
Tech Crunch
TwitPic
Webmusher.com
Wikipedia
Wordpress.com
XDA Developers
xkcd.com

The above list of 25 websites are only a sampling of the websites that joined in the protest, and even more sites helped to spread the news that the sites would protest and why the persons in control of the websites felt it necessary.

Some sites, such as Nedroid, presented the very serious issue in their own unique manner, often incorporating humor to encourage the visitors to read the notice:

Some of the sites that went full black as Wikipedia, include: Craigslist, MoveOn.org, and the Internet Archive. (click images for larger views)

Perhaps the most visually striking of the websites to be seen, or not seen, on January 18th was WordPress.com, a very popular blogging platform which is used by Freelancer’s Office. What greeted visitors to WordPress.com was a very visually striking view of what online censorship could look like in comparison to other forms of more well known censorship.