I don’t know how many people saw the blackouts on Wikipedia, Google, and other sites yesterday. I only became aware of the impeding blackout about 10 hours ahead of time, and it wasn’t enough time to prepare anything here. I suspect most of you preferred not to have the site interrupted anyway. The essence of it is that congress has been considering several proposals to alter the way the internet currently works.

Right now if someone posts an ad on Pennswoods.net offering to sell illegal drugs, pornography, etc any law enforcement agency interested in prosecuting can enlist my help in tracking down the lowlife.

Under several of the proposals, in particular the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), would put the burden of enforcement on the web sites. Under the proposed law if someone posted an ad stating they were willing to pirate music, software, sell drugs Pennswoods.net would be responsible as if we posted the ad. Every day I remove ads for that sort of crap, as well as ads from scammers all around the world. I don’t have the budget for that sort of continuous legal defense under the new proposed laws.

To read more about it, visit Wikipedia.

–Chris–

Tonight starting a little after midnight I’ll be doing the last of the end of year maintenance on the databases that power the PW Classifieds. I’ll take the website down shortly after midnight, and I’ll bring it back up as soon as I am have it finished. Unless you happen to be using the site during that time frame, you are unlikely to see anything different.

–Chris–

Tonight I’m going to be working on bringing our databases up to date again. The website will be occasionally unavailable between 1am and 5am tonight. Thank you for your patience.

–Chris–

I hope everyone is having a splendid new year, may it bring you all the best in life.

This week I’m doing some house cleaning on the databases. I’ve had the databases (and thus the website) down intermittently between 2am and 4am. Thursday (5th) and Friday (6th) mornings I’ll have the databases and website down intermittently between 1:30 am and 5am. I realize that there are some people accessing the site during that time, and I apologize for the inconvenience. I always do my best to minimize down time, but in this case it is unavoidable.

–Chris–