Imagine a world without free knowledge
This is the message that all Wikipedia pages greeted users with for a full 24 hours on January 18, 2012. The online encyclopedia was protesting a very serious concern, two US congressional bills that were modelled towards building robust responses against privacy outside the US, but could also possibly infringe upon freedom of speech online, on which, many online communities and websites thrived.
The proposed laws in contention were Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The negative feedback was simmering for some time and on January 18, 2012, it manifested in the form of protests. The main points that the web communities were trying to make were that overreaching and unhelpful laws cannot exist in the same world where free and open internet was the driving factor.
While Wikipedia went all in, Google blacked out its logo on the homepage and included a link which one could click on for more information, Reddit made its opposition clear via a message and provided users with helpful links and whoever visited mozilla.org and mozilla.com were greeted with action pages.
Altogether, they certainly made their point very clear since the plans to draft the bill were postponed.
Yahooooo!
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle — did you know this is the full form of Yahoo, the search engine. In another event from the World Wide Web, the domain name yahoo.com was registered on January 18, 1995. Do you know where the creators Jerry Yang and David Filo took the word from? The book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The definition for the word given in the book was "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth". Well, go figure.
