What Is CISPA?

Last Updated on Monday, 4 June 2012 05:04 Written by Arian Jahansouz Friday, 25 May 2012 12:00

The official position of Arvixe is against CISPA. This is simply an educational article informing blog readers about the CISPA bill and its potential impact on the average Internet user. 

So it seems that the threat of SOPA and PIPA has passed. Arvixe explained what SOPA was and took a stance against the act in this article.

But have you heard about CISPA? CISPA is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act and it actually passed through the House of Representatives on April 26th.

While SOPA focused more on copyright issues, CISPA aims to “track cyber threats.” The bill allows for government agencies and private companies to all be allowed to share private information about cyber threats. No one can deny that cyber threats have certainly been on the rise. We live in a world where most of our daily activities and private information is online, so criminals and vandals have turned towards the Internet to achieve their goals. While CISPA actually does have the potential of being a good thing, the question simply becomes: “what is considered a ‘cyber threat’?”

With CISPA, a cyber threat is anything that makes “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy” vital networks. Also, a cyber threat could be anything that can be taken as a “threat or misappropriation” towards information that is privately owned or owned by the government.

SOPA – What does it all mean?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 3 January 2012 05:28 Written by Mike Hoffman Friday, 30 December 2011 04:41

The official position of Arvixe is against SOPA. This is an educational article informing blog readers about the current SOPA bill and its potential impact on the web hosting industry.

Over the span of the last two months, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) [1] has garnered much attention and criticism. In a nutshell, this bill was designed and proposed to help protect artists and intellectual property owners. Sharing and illegal downloading of music, movies, and software  has been very prevalent since the inception of the internet, and even beforehand – some of our older readers might remember swapping floppy discs for the latest computer games. This bill also extends to the realm of counterfeit goods, such as purses and perscription drugs sold online.

SOPA would allow the US Justice Department to seek court orders against websites that host or provide access to these illegal goods. Proposed on October 26th, the CEO of the BBB says that online piracy costs companies billions of dollars a year [2]. We are all very familiar with the suits brought against sites like Napster, which were easy to bring down under US law since all facets of the website were in the US domain [3].