Join the SOPA Protest Blackout

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month, you've probably heard of the SOPA and PIPA laws that are making their way through the US Congress. If passed, the laws will require US companies to censor the Internet in an effort to prevent copyright infringement.

We built AppHarbor because we love the Internet. AppHarbor makes it easy for people like you to make the Internet even better by taking the pain out of deploying and scaling web-applications. We feel strongly that the SOPA and PIPA laws, if passed in their current form, pose a grave threat to the free and open Internet that we know and love. For that reason, we support the January 18th protests alongside Google, Wikipedia and many others.

If you want to participate in the protest by blacking out your AppHarbor-hosted application, we have created a Stop-SOPA utility that makes the process very simple. Go to https://stopsopa.apphb.com/ to get the details. The utility will cause a blackout-page build to be deployed for your application in the same way that MaintMan deploys a maintenance mode page. Once you're done protesting, you can push a new build to AppHarbor or go to the application dashboard to deploy a previous build.

The Stop-SOPA utitlity uses some clever new bits of AppHarbor API. We will publish the source code in another blog post in a day or two.

Note that appbarbor.com will be available in its usual form throughout Wednesday 18th, but we support and encourage blackout protests by our users.