Wikipedia SOPA Protest Easy Workaround

After hearing all the media buzz around Google and Wikipedia protesting SOPA, I expected to go to Wikipedia’s website and see the entire website disabled. To my surprise, the Wikipedia worked just fine for me this morning. I asked friends and colleagues if they could access Wikipedia and they could not. Then I realized the reason… I use a JavaScript blocker that requires me to enable JavaScript per-site and Wikipedia’s block amounts to a post-load JavaScript hack. Simple and easy to implement, but also easy to defeat.

If you want to continue using Wikipedia today, install a JavaScript blocker into your browser and set it to block anything from “wikimedia.org”. In Firefox, I recommend NoScript and in Google Chrome I recommend NotScripts.

I fully support Google and Wikipedia in their efforts to block SOPA. I just found it interesting that Wikipedia’s block implementation was so trivial, anyone could get around it and access the website as normal. Once you finally do enable JavaScript the page looks like this: