Odd Rumour of the Day

So last night, someone came onto #fedora-admin and wanted to know why Fedora had changed all its rpms to remove MP3 during the SOPA debates. They were convinced they had downloaded the DVD's from before then and could play MP3's and afterwords could not.

Now either this was an epic level of trolling or some really large confusion. Either way, to try and set the matter straight there was no MP3 support in Fedora 14,15,16 before SOPA or after. No packages were updated to remove this feature since it wasn't there before.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/MP3
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Installing_the_Fluendo_MP3_plugin for more information on MP3 in Fedora. Now there is the men in black excuse that somehow this is all a redaction from six months ago, but a quick way to check would be to compare the sha sums and GPG signatures of the ISOs with dated archives from multiple non-Fedora sites. Now maybe that would still not prove anything but it should increase assurance that there isn't a massive plot going on.