Today many websites went “dark” to protest a pair of bills, SOPA and PIPA, that are currently in the US Congress. These broadly reaching bills are seen rightly by many as a vehicle for internet censorship.

Here is many screenshots of what greeted visitors on many popular websites today. The sad Koala to the left is courtesy of The Oatmeal, which posted a clever animation on its site in support of the blackout.

The opponents say that SOPA would give the US government the ability to completely block a website from US viewing even if just one link on that site violates copyright. It wouldn’t matter if the link was created by a user and not the site owner, blockage would still be possible. If that doesn’t bother you, this FAQ on SOPA may. No wonder sites such as reddit – which are driven by user generated content – are up in arms over this legislation and plan to go dark on January 18th as a protest.

While there is some fearmongering going on here, it is clear that the legislation is dangerous and not really in the spirit of a free and open internet that many of us expect. SOPA opponents have many valid points. While there are signs that the White House is beginning to waver in its support of the bill, we are not out of the woods yet.

Joining the SOPA blackout protest? Read this first

Many are urging webmasters to protest by posting a statement on their site or altering their site to redirect to this effective AmericanCensorship.org infographic. There are already WordPress plugins created that you can use. However before you run off and implement any of these, consider that your actions may have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Have a read of this post: How to participate in the outage without hurting your site with Google search. Google recommends that you have your site return a 503 HTTP status code so that it knows not to spider your content that day.

It occurs to me that maybe Google should just not crawl that day?

Picture by aussiegold and published under the Flickr Creative Commons License

Roman Cistern - Istanbul, Turkey

The basics

You don’t have to have a smartphone to share pictures. Most cellphones today can take pictures and send them via SMS (the protocol used for text messaging). You usually have the option to send a “picture message” to an email address as well. You can do this with a smartphone as well. With Android, if you email the picture it appears to be coming from your gmail account.

As an aside,the Android OS is tightly integrated with your gmail account, for example sharing contacts … in some ways this makes life easier when you are emailing from your phone, but in other ways it junks up my phone with a lot of contacts I’ll never email again. This also can impact your uploads as I discovered.

Apps, apps and more apps

Once you move beyond the basics and you have a smartphone, you need to decide where you like to upload your photos to. Do you want to post them to Facebook? Google+? What about Flickr? For all of these and more there is likely an app for that site available for your phone. My experiences have been mostly with uploading photos to Facebook, Google+ and Picasa.

• Find the app you are interested in using and install on your phone.
• Select the photo via Galley.
• Tap the picture and select the share icon (two arrows pointing up), select the app you desire and type in the caption and other details.

Patience and Persistence might be Needed

I found that uploading photos to both Google+ and Facebook was rather hit or miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it appears to work (but the picture doesn’t appear on the site), and sometimes I got an error. The photo upload occurs in the background, freeing your phone to do other tasks, so you’ll need to become familiar on where to find your notifications on your phone to see if a problem was reported.

• Facebook for HTC Sense: This app worked great for the first few uploads, then failed to upload consistently after that. I switched to the regular Facebook app.
• Facebook: After a week or two on giving up on Facebook for HTC Sense I switched to this app, it’s slightly less intuitive but I’ve had no problems with uploading to Facebook since.
• Google+ : The Google+ app worked great to upload picture until I changed my gmail password. I thought it was the prudent thing to do after visiting a rather dodgy Istanbul internet cafe, but it broke many things on my phone. It’s not at all intuitive where to change the password on the phone itself, for example the Google+ app has no provision for changing a password. After working through several password prompts via a broken gmail, I finally got gmail working. The Google+ error was “The application was unable to communicate with the cloud. Please check your network connection or try again later”. I’m still getting the error – but now the photo upload appears to be working again. It’s annoying to actually have to check the site to see if the picture is there.

Browsing through the forums, I do see many reports of the “can’t communicate with the cloud.” error with wildly different causes. Restarting your phone is a common suggestion. It appears we are back in the days of the “three finger salute” (in the early days of PCs, restarting with CTRL ALT DEL was a common solution to Windows problems).

With all of these apps, you might need to be patient, sometimes your photo will show up later in an hour or two.

Uploading your photos in bulk

This is where it is highly dependent on your phone and provider. Usually what you will need is software for your computer and a cable to connect your phone to your computer. For example, if I connect my Android to my laptop via a USB cable I will get prompted to download “V Cast Media Manager” from Verizon. Some phones come with CDs that have the software on it. If you go this route make sure that your OS is compatible (My 64bit Windows is not supported with the V Cast Media Transfer Client, neither is my Mac).

Alternatively, you might want to stick with the apps to do bulk load (especially if you are using WIFI for your connectivity rather than paying for your data), for example the Picasa app allows you select multiple photos to upload to a picasaweb album, although it’s not great for hundreds of photos.

With a little persistence though, you will find a way that works for you. Since there are so many apps one can use, please comment on what works for you!

Probably the biggest disappointment has been my Droid’s ability to connect to various wireless networks. Maybe it’s because I’m a relatively new smartphone user and somewhat clueless. In Munich, at first it had full connectivity, but then uploading of pictures to Facebook and Google+ failed, although email continued to work. In Istanbul it just wouldn’t connect to the private wireless network we had in the apartment, no matter how many times I typed in the password correctly, meanwhile the laptop, my clunky Windows XP Dell, didn’t have a problem. Now it’s having fits over the fact that I changed my gmail password and keeps prompting me to enter the password and failing.

Setting up a plan so that I could use it for voice and SMS was a good idea though. I’ve only used it to call once due to the expense, but having the ability to text (5 cents to receive a text and 50 cents to send one) has been very handy.

BTW. I’ve visited one or two internet cafes – and everyone is still using Windows XP. No Vista, no Windows 7.

Most everything else has worked well. I’m a new fan of Skype. I got a monthly subscription to call the US and Canada and that has worked great. You simply start up Skype and use the “call phone numbers” option. The calls are clear (you’re calling from Istanbul, really? But it’s so clear!) and it has worked very well. I dare say it’s clearer than calling on a cell phone! Unfortunately I haven’t tried Skype mobile yet, due to the challenges I’ve mentioned above.

One thing about travelling and work is that in each place you are never quite sure of what you might encounter or how your schedule might work. However by being flexible and taking advantage of “downtime” with some flexibility you can mix work and travel.

Courtesy of K Mick - Flickr Creative Common License

• Timezones – Germany is nine hours ahead of California, so this means that my client meetings will need to be at night. Since I will need to meet with a couple of clients during the three weeks I will need to allocate “work” nights during the time I will be there.
• Connectivity – One of the reasons I picked Europe is because it is a developed country and I should be able to find internet connectivity fairly easily in hotels and WIFI hotspots. I do need to be careful on what I send over unsecured WIFI and may need to invest in a USB broadband card. Similar to the card I have here, there are pay as you go plans in Europe. On my todo list is reconfiguring my mail on my phone and laptop to send over SSL as I have noticed that some of my mail providers block SMTP over unsecured WIFI. Hopefully using SSL will do the trick.
• Power – Fortunately I won’t need an actual transformer as the laptop’s power is already transformed to a lower voltage, but I do need a adaptor plug. I picked one up at Radio Shack. My cell phone plugs into my laptop to recharge.
• Phone – This was the most daunting part of planning the trip. At first glance it looked like I would either need to rent a phone when I arrived or try a service here that ships you a phone to take with you. Europe uses a different network (GSM) than the US (CDMA) and although AT&T and T-Mobile phones work on GSM, many of the travel blogs will tell you that Verizon phones won’t. This however is changing, my new Droid does have the capability to work on GSM. I called Verizon to set up a plan and get the magic incantation to activate GSM. The plan is not cheap, it’s $.99 a minute and $.50 to text. However I can receive texts for only $.05. Due to this I may still consider renting a phone, but at least I’ll have a phone that works there. The real killer is data roaming, that can run hundreds of dollars. I plan to keep that that turned off.
• Phone meetings – At $.99 a minute, this is not a feasible option for hour long (or even half hour) client meetings. Enter Skype. I will be signing up for unlimited calling to US landlines and cell phones for $8 / month. Another alternative is MagicJack but this requires additional equipment to order from them.