Wow. I really think that of the sites that have decided to go black, or even put banners up... this is the one that's likely to affect the most people who need to hear about this. Fingers crossed.

Incredibly so. I am a bit disappointed about the content of the info page: I don't think it tells much to somebody hearing about it for the first time.

It's weird how it loads the page and then goes black.

I wonder if that's for SEO purposes, or if they've intentionally done that to get the emotional reaction it gives me... I feel like I dropped my ice cream cone every time I load a page and it goes black.

It's javascript. The normal page loads, then javascript replaces the content with that.

You can turn off javascript to see the original.

They've also made the entire site read-only, so even though you can read stuff you can't make any changes.

I have to admit that of all the ideas I had of how to black-out a big site like wikipedia a simple overlay never occurred to me, but its brilliant, not really disturbing SEO or any other service that is built on top of Wikipedia, congrats

Previous submission, with lots of discussion of the technical details:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966

I'd much rather you plaster all your friends walls but anyhow here's a fix you just paste in the address bar whilst on a wikipedia page.

javascript:$('#mw-page-base, #mw-head-base, #content, #mw-head, #mw-panel, #footer').show();$('#mw-sopaOverlay').hide()

Shorter version: javascript:$('*:hidden').show();$('#mw-sopaOverlay').hide();

This jacks up the header for me in Chrome.

Here are a few methods for unblocking the blackout taken from HN and my own method: https://gist.github.com/1631355

Didn't realize it because of NoScript. I'm actually a little bummed at how easy it is to work around.

A thousand school kids are now drowning in their own tears.

fix: https://gist.github.com/1631148

There's also just using the Mobile version of the website.

or you could just disable javascript? Its just a js overlay.

I prefer CTRL+U