Sorry but this is just more Facebook-style slacktivism, but worse because it's not even easily discoverable by mere mortals.

Maybe make it more useful by providing a set of DNS lookups for major sites? Since SOPA tries to compromise DNS it would be useful to evolve a decentralized variant.

Yes, and no. Like someone mentioned humans.txt has an addon. Similarly, you can have one for freedom.txt. Its not to protest a bill, or to think that we are making a change. But to clarify our stance. This isnt activism, but saying that your online identity supports free/uncensored internet.

That may be true, but if there is to be a real Computer Programmers' Guild, it will be born out of these sorts of gimmicks. Just something to consider.

This is nice and all but I don't think anyone is going to go to websites and type /freedom.txt to see if it has it. It's much like the humans.txt file. No one actually reads these things.

Maybe we should all resolve to do exactly that every now and then. Competent website owners will soon notice a spike in 404s looking for it...

For the humans.txt, there is an add-on for Chrome that let's you see very easily when a website has one. I do read them when I see one especially if it's a site that I go to often.

I wrote the contents of freedom.txt on a piece of paper and put it in my drawer. That'll teach those Hollywood bastards!!

bravo campion!

I love the idea, but the writing leaves something to be desired; swipes at governments and corporations distract from the message. I think short and sweet is the way to go:

"My name is ____ and I own this website. I staunchly oppose any interference with the internet's ability to connect people and share knowledge. The power to silence this website or any other violates a fundamental human right to free speech, and I vigorously oppose any such action, law, or policy."

On the surface, I admit this seems like an empty gesture. If it catches on, though, it could carry a few advantages: free speech advocates can cite how many domains oppose a given bill, and we can start pushing politicians and corporations to put this on their own sites to publicly display their commitment.

> An open internet is more important than security, copyright infringement, terrorism or child pornography.

I'm not sure this sentence does what you want it to do. It implies these things are all a similar level of evil, and it makes it easy for any reader to dismiss the entire text.

Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C would disagree: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#siteData-36

Couldn't this be worked into the /w3c/p3p file instead as defined by the W3C in that doc?

Why is "Anonymous" capitalized in the text?

Added a small landing page. Please do let me know if you have additional content that you want me to put up. http://wastedcode.com/freedom/

How can you in one post extoll a free/open internet, and after it post links to nonfree sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+? Start walking the walk.

I have a git repo up here: https://github.com/mvanveen/freedom.txt

Included is a Python script which automatically generates a freedom.txt file.

Please feel free to send pull requests. Add a separate line on locations.txt with your freedom.txt address and the script will automatically output it!

I'm suspecting that anyone that knows where to look this up is already on our side.

The challenge isn't recruiting more techies on our side, the challenge is organizing said techies and recruiting & educating *non-techies.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I just feel that sometimes we're misguiding our efforts.

hey zeppelin, thx for submitting this and giving it a little more attention. & cool to own up : http://www.isingh.info/freedom.txt

Its a super cool move! Totally support you!

"Hi, my name is XXX XXX and I own this website. I no longer wish to stay Anonymous"

are you a part of Anonymous? :))

Surely on a free and open Internet you wouldn't have to declare your real name to show support?

Open internet is about choice. You can choose to declare your name, or not, like today. You can put your name in freedom.txt or not. But if its not an open internet, perhaps you will be forced to.