Had some work to do Friday night, so this this became Tech at Sunday Morning!

I still don’t see it passing the House after Mike Enzi’s winners and losers talk poisoned the well, but conservative governors want MFA passed for good reason. Ask Scott Walker.

Remember when the T-Mobile/MetroPCS deal flew through the Obama administration without a hitch? I think we now know why: it meant the end of the MetroPCS challenge to Net Neutrality. How convenient.

Stealth recording technology. What could go wrong? Of course, if you don’t like Google Glass, the real thing to do is to let property owners ban it on their own property. Problem solved.

I’m shocked to find out that after Anonymous declared war on Australia, that Australian censorship continues unabated. It’s almost like idiot Anarchist children don’t actually succeed at things. Which is why blackshirt scum continues to get sent to jail, where they belong. I’m also sure Barack Obama is quaking, quaking in his boots over the new Gitmo stuff by the Anontards.

I wonder how many of them are going to lose their shirts, I mean lunch money, over the Bitcoin scam starting to fall apart as the Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange (Mt. Gox) is feeling the pinch.

I can’t wait for them to cry so hard if Mike Rogers, recently the target of an anti-CISPA swatting, heads up the FBI.

Pandora is still trying to lobby the government to let them stick it to musicians. Cheap promotion, they promise, which is what you always tell the talent when you’re just too cheap or failing as a business to actually pay for what you use. Don’t pass IRFA. Two wrong don’t make a right, and we ought not repeat online the mistakes made in terrestrial radio regulation.

Google’s taken heat for being pretty liberal about what they allow to be advertised on their services. Here’s a Wired story alleging it got really bad.

Some fascinating Bitcoin developments: As I predicted, Mt. Gox just got trouble with its US dollar processor, Dwolla. Meanwhile it comes out that a cabal of developers has de facto control over the Bitcoin network and is devaluing very small wallets. The net effect of this is to reduce the money supply, deflating Bitcoin to benefit those with large holdings.

So even as Bitcoin is revealed to have its own central bankers, the new Megaupload is getting censored per New Zealand law, as Kim Dotcom weighs (heavily) in against Obama to attempt to distract from this censorship.

Turns out gigabit Internet isn’t popular. Remember that next time they try to tell you we need government regulations to magically improve domestic Internet speeds, or that wireless isn’t fast enough.

People don’t care as much about speed at this point as they care about price, as long as it’s fast enough to do what they want. That’s why Net Neutrality is stupid and harmful.

DOJ wants to pick which firms win and lose spectrum auctions. I guess lobbying works.

Mark Warner has it right on Aereo and the threats by broadcasters. Aereo works because of free over the air broadcasts. If the networks don’t want free over the air broadcasts to be used anymore, then it’s high time we made that spectrum available for other things.

Sorry for missing Tech at Night on Friday. After that near-miss with a cold, I decided to start the weekend a little early that night. But we’re back. So with five days of news to catch up on, let’s see what we have here.

Here’s a reminder of why Net Neutrality was a terrible idea. Making people pay for what they use creates opportunities for innovation. If ESPN wants to negotiate bulk rates for wireless data, let them!

And yet that John McCain would add more regulations. We need less micromanagement of cable, not more.

Question: Why would Pandora want new laws if they would never, ever pay less? Answer: They’re lying and the bill would shiv copyright holders in favor of The Cloud. Quit picking winners and losers. Hear that, John McCain? we need less regulation, not more. If Spotify can do it, so can Pandora.

Is there room to reform copyright? Sure. But we can make narrow improvements, such as overturning the Library of Congress’s DMCA ruling on phone unlocking, without creating a massive lobby-fest of a major rewrite.

I hope Darrell Issa realizes the left will turn on him in an instant because he’s a Republican. Trust, but verify on these issue-by-issue alliances.

Bitcoin may become illegal in a way I never expected. The core mechanic of Bitcoin is the “blockchain,” which is essentially a record of every Bitcoin transaction, which keeps Bitcoins from being spent twice. It’s very important, and the entire community of Bitcoin processors has to keep a copy of it. The blockchain is now loaded with links to child pornography. I can’t wait for every major domestic Bitcoin market to get shut down, and all the foreign ones to go on the OFAC SDN list, essentially embargoing them.

You know what, if government agents want to search and wiretap phones, fine with them. But they have no right to demand free help doing it for them, not from Apple, not from anyone.

Reasons it’s good that Aereo exists, #1: innovation begets innovation in a free market.

Mike Rogers, CISPA champion and victim of intimidation tactics by anarchists, continues to press for better security at home. I think we all know talks with China will go nowhere, but we have to try before we can declare them a failure.

We should press Tom Wheeler: Will he fight for an FCC that fights for us, or to gain power for itself? We need a fully pro-innovation FCC for the coming IP revolution.

I’m on antihistamines and hoping I’m not getting too sick, so this is going to be less… focused than it usually will be. Hang on.

Let’s recap the CISPA situation. Anonymous is proving why we need it (though BGR is delusional for thinking Anonymous was “attacking North Korea” when it hacked Twitter accounts, though BGR does sometimes go gaga for radical propaganda). China is, too. But the administration is opposing CISPA on “privacy” grounds. Hold that thought.

The Obama administration is not opposing and may back government mandates for “wiretapping” Internet communications – that is, government-mandated backdoors into encrypted communications. What was that about privacy, again?

At least Republicans are still serious on the matter, looking at the large scale of thefts and spying going on. Make no mistake: this is aimed at China. In theory it would affect Iran, but we already embargo them, so this affects China.

Anarchist morons might think that government can’t take down a “peer to peer” system like Bitcoin, but again, they’re morons. They’ve let the Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange (MtGox) become a dominant market, and guess what? They have to deal with regulated banks to work with real currencies, which means if they and other Bitcoin exchanges get stuck on a list like OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals list for laundering money for organized crime and/or terrorism, bye bye convertibility.

The EU says Google is using its patents offensively against Apple which is impossible. Google says it only uses its patents defensively. They can’t lie!

As I said before, I think Mike Enzi and co. have ruined any chance of MFA passing the House. The toxic, anti-competitive rhetoric being driven by the big-box retailers has made this a polarizing issue. They’ll need to try again next Congress with a tighter, smaller bill that only ratifies the compact. And leave behind that stupid ‘fairness’ rhetoric about picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

What’s dumb is that it’s not even true. Amazon is winning because of better pre-tax prices, better service, better selection, and better convenience. With Amazon Prime you basically get a home video streaming service, and free 2-day Amazon shipping on top of that. Best Buy isn’t losing to that because of sales taxes, folks.

Kill the Obamaphone.

Let’s hope the next FCC chairman, likely to be Tom Wheeler, is good and doesn’t try to harm innovation.

Even as I’ve said the bill is a good idea, Senate conservatives overwhelmingly voted against the Internet Sales Tax. The whole Tea Party era gang is there in the NAY column. It’s easy to see why too: guys like Mike Enzi are coming out and saying their purpose for the bill is to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. I can’t see this passing the House with the cloud of toxic rhetoric around it.

As Team Obama wavers between a bureaucrat and an actual expert for its DHS Cybersecurity head, insecure accounts are getting hammered by foreign attackers. Use good passwords. Never give the actual answers to ‘security questions.’ Keep software updated. And don’t approve random “Who unfollowed me/How much time am I wasting/Which President am I” Twitter apps!

We tried ‘patent reform’ the Democrat way with the America Invents Act. Now let’s do it right, and take care of patent trolling.

The Glenns Greenwald are worried, heh.

Aereo gets feisty in court. I hope that means they’re winning, as they go after CBS. It’s an innovative service.

Lefty attempts to push Net Neutrality through shareholder activism failed again. I guess that means groups like CalPERS don’t own enough shares, heh.

So the left is mad that the President’s new pick for Commerce isn’t totally in the pocket of the unions, and they’re mad the new pick for FCC, Tom Wheeler, isn’t a radical socialist like Bernie Sanders. I’m not all that optimistic about either pick though. The President is choosing bundlers for personal loyalty, which means radicalism on his terms, but still radicalism.

This is amazing though, and this is something the radicals will never tell you: more Americans lack access to public water than to broadband Internet. Twice as many, in fact. Government is a failure, compared with private competition.

Reason number one that government needs to leave Aereo alone: competition benefits all of us.

Apparently Google made an active change to its search service to recognize “Palestine” not as territories under Israeli control, but as a separate thing. Fear or ideology? Either way, not a good sign.

Speaking of Internet firms taking political stands, eBay went way out on a limb against MFA, which I think was dumb when it doesn’t even affect sellers who make less than a million in gross sales. Grandma on Etsy or eBay is not at risk of having to do Internet sales tax compliance, guys.

We’re still at war online, guys. The Chinese are scouting us and even criminal enterprise is under constant attack. And make no mistake DDoS attacks affect not just the target, but the networks surrounding the target, too, so even a criminal racket like Silk Road should have attacks on it stopped, for the health of American networks. And again, the anarchists SWATted a member of Congress, Mike Rogers, to fight for weaker security online.

Yet, The President and Democrats continue to obstruct CISPA, instead of getting the job done. This guy made illegal executive orders on the topic, but as soon as we take good, light-regulatory legislative action, he suddenly wants to slam on the brakes. Shameful.

We’ve been wondering just what kind of FCC Chairman the President was going to choose. It turns out we now know: He’s nominated another big-time bundler, just like he did last time. So yeah, Tom Wheeler may have industry experience and may not be unhinged, but we should expect him to be an activist as the President wants, and not an independent regulator.

Also, here we go again with that activism business, as Softbank and Dish Network want the President to pick winners and losers in the race to buy Sprint Nextel.

The Pirate Bay meanwhile is on the run still, losing its Swedish domain and moving to Sint Maarten. I don’t see how that’ll last long, as the island is half Dutch governed and half French governed. Seems to me a high profile flight from Europe is a great way to get the mostly-passive Dutch to do something on their side of the island.

I agree with Mike Wendy: the radicals say 6 choices makes a monopoly in the Internet broadband market. If that’s monopoly, I’ll take monopoly!

So back on Saturday it came out that CISPA supporters were being threatened, and now today it comes out that Mike Rogers was “SWATted”. That is, the Anonymous-tied anarchists tried to kill him by lying to the police about him.

I said recently that the radicals opposed CISPA, and were lying about it by saying it was the new SOPA, because they didn’t want American networks to be more secure. Sounds like these criminal, radical gangs really do feel threatened. This is why we must pass a similar bill, and the Senate does the nation a disservice by not doing so.

Privacy arguments have gone way, way, way too far when we’re pretending government shouldn’t search the web. Seriously now? I’m definitely not in favor of wiretap mandates in general, as I think there’s a world of difference between letting government listen in, and having a mandate of insecurity, but that argument is just so technically ignorant.

I love it when Internet criminals get rolled up.

Crime Watch: Lulzsec bigshot gets taken down in Australia, and an Anonymous gang member is on trial for multiple rape at an Occupy event. Bad week for anarchists. Heh.

Democrats tuning their rhetoric for the moment: IMMEDIATE ACTION needed on Do Not Track, even as it’s taken YEARS to do anything on outdated ECPA email rules which now may include a warning requirement, and it wasn’t even Jay Rockefeller who got off his tail to get that done.

Let’s just hope that the FCC listens to Ajit Pai and reacts well to the IP revolution better than the Congress has dealt with email technology.

Further let’s hope the FCC manages to do some spectrum actions well, just putting spectrum on the market instead of rigging it to pick winners and losers.

Remember when I said the real motivation behind the Net Neutrality activists was that they didn’t want to pay for what they use? Well, now they’re against data caps, caps that generally only affect mass copyright infringers.

Any excuse to regulate: A bad tweet on the AP account is cause for market regulation apparently, because there was a tiny blip as idiots tried to trade on it and got hammered. Let’s be clear: the markets recovered immediately. The system worked.

It turns out the only option for me right now is Tweetdeck, and it’s hanging on by a thread. Here’s why.

A: Multiple accounts are to be supported seamlessly. I use two personal accounts (@PresJPolk is my main personal account, but I also have @PresJPolkSDA for my activities in the video game speed running community), one business account (@StevensMediaLLC), one website account (@UnlikelyVoter), plus a client’s account. The two personal accounts I should be able to have simultaneous, easy access to, in particular.

B: Many separate lists/columns should be viewable simultaneously. I want to be able to watch my interactions for both personal accounts (see above), as well as a number of small, narrowly tailored lists I’ve created: Anime, Video Games, SDA, Friends, Polling, Tech, Transit, Humor. That’s 10 columns, folks. I want to see them all, across two separate accounts, at the same time. I’ll also want occasional access to those website and business accounts’ interactions

C: New RTs are not to be shown. I don’t want to see them. The use of small, tailored lists (see above) is the only way I can enjoy Twitter. I find myself getting bored if I see a list of blah blah blah from people I’ve never heard of or never wanted to follow to begin with (which includes politicians, whom I very rarely follow). I don’t want to have to turn them off for every person I ever follow or watch on a list, either. That’s not practical.

So, having seen my needs, how am I being failed? The Twitter website fails on A, B, and C. Twitter for Mac fails on C, and makes B difficult by failing to remember what I was up to. Tweetbot fails on B (columns won’t narrow) and C. Tweetdeck is having issues with B, as it’s got a cap of 9 columns on a 27″ display, regardless of font size. Twitterrific seems to fail on A, B, and C. Janetter fails on C.

As a result, I’m using Tweetdeck for now, and having to scroll (which is so terrible) to see @PresJPolkSDA interactions, which I can tolerate for now as they are not common. But seriously, why is this so hard? Oh right, it’s because Twitter went to war on third party clients, and has been working hard to ram new RTs down our throats.

My theory on this is that the goal is to put ads seamlessly in our feeds, and the clutter and confusion of new RTs make that easier to get away with in the long run.

I really wanted to like Tweetbot, too…

Forgive me for being a bit brief tonight. I’ve had caffeine-related sleep issues the last two nights, getting up at 2am wide awake. So… yeah I’m tired!

I was productive this morning at least though, which is why I was able to bang out finally this post on CISPA and why we need to pass it.

CISPA is a bill that we ought to pass, even if the Democrats might obstruct, so it looks like Michael McCaul is ready to move on regardless, talking about his own cybersecurity bill.

There’s still the matter of a new FCC chairman. It’s important that we get a humble FCC chairman, not a wild-eyed activist. A letter to that point has been circulated by Tech Freedom and Geoff Manne of the International Center of Law & Economics, signed by groups including Heritage Action, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform. We need a pro-innovation chairman who will obey the law, not one looking to grow government for its own sake regardless of the law, as certain rumored choices for FCC might consider.

Again, I’m pretty solidly against any attempt at a comprehensive copyright reform. I favor copyright reform, but one big, bundled bill isn’t a process I trust. Let’s fix it with smaller, targeted bills. Not a big lobbyist grab bag.

Oh look, privacy being used an excuse for regulation again. For the children. COPPA sounded like a good idea, but in practice it’s a bad idea. Just another reason to oppose a big, grab bag bill of copyright.

Individuals do tend to get nabbed after the fact, as they build massive botnets for credit card fraud and Bitcoin mining, but it’s not enough to sit back passively and wait to get attacked before doing anything.

We need to be proactive, and that means putting together all the information we can about attacks past, present, and future. We need to be able to deal with attacks before the spin up fully. We need to pass along warnings before it’s too late. And that means we need legislation to prevent trial lawyers from making a mess of all of this. So that’s why it’s time to pass CISPA.

Inaction isn’t going to fly as an answer here. If we do not find a way to use government in a legitimate role as national security provider, then the Democrats will try again. The last few times they’ve tried, they went with a high-regulatory approach, giving the President ‘emergency’ dictatorial powers over private property and internet infrastructure. These bills have gone as far as the Internet Kill Switch plans, letting the President order that American Internet connections to the rest of the world be shut down, and be given power over the private employees who have the ability to do that.

It is important that we can improve this situation, and get us moving in the right direction, with a light touch. A clearing house for voluntary information sharing, aggregating data in industry-standard ways, is about the lightest possible touch we’re going to have here.

Amendments are possible. There are surely ways we can tweak the language of the law to find just the right balance between private ‘privacy’ agreements, and need to address the pressing national security threat. Address those in the Senate.

But nebulous privacy concerns are not an argument in themselves. Improving this bill is something that must be done in a constructive way. In particular, we must dismiss entirely the left-libertarian radicals who keep screaming that this bill has anything to do with copyright or SOPA. The anarchists, freeloaders, Pirate Party types, Anontards, and associated scum want to sink this bill because they oppose greater cybersecurity. The online bomb throwers don’t want us to be better protected.

Let the normal legislative process move forward, amend CISPA into the best practical bill we can make it, and make it into law.

Some legislative action still ongoing: the Senate looking to fix the ECPA, an email search law that was written to the technology of the time, and now defies the expectations of its framers.

I was told Amazon and eBay would like the sales tax compact, but eBay is coming out against it, spamming its users. But the Senate continues to support it.

Quick hits:

Facebook takes a position on the Second Amendment. It turns out Facebook opposes our rights as enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Help hackers, get fired. I like that rule. I hope his next prospective employer notices this and trusts him to the appropriate degree.

It’s not often I see FCC criticized for not censoring enough.

Google continues to pay fines over the WiSpy Street View spying operation, that spied on people’s home Internet connections worldwide.

So yes, CISPA passed the House. Unsurprisingly, Anonymous isn’t happy, what when as things stand Lulzsec already is getting hammered. Greater information sharing is a threat to online anarchists, as well as foreign private and state actors.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where Jay Rockefeller may stall on an ego-driven separate bill. I think the bill’s a good idea. It’s not perfect, but not all of the criticisms floating around are correct. In particular, SOPA is a red herring, and totally unrelated. CISPA is about information sharing, not regulation.

As I said previously, the ECPA’s email search regulations were written for an older technical era, and are already out of date. This is common when government tries to touch fast-moving technology. we can fix ECPA but again, this is a lesson in why not to regulate.

Kelly Ayotte is going to war against the sales tax compact aimed at online sales. I find this interesting because New Hampshire doesn’t even have a sales tax. I guess Ayotte fears this is a step toward a true national sales tax. I think the answer to that is to add greater safeguards, not to defeat the whole bill. Let the states that want the compact, have the compact.

Google wins its case against Viacom, defending the DMCA against attacks by Viacom. Basically, Google was following the letter of the law on DMCA’s copyright infringement rules, but Viacom decided that wasn’t good enough. Google won. I think this a good thing, because for the most part, DMCA was a reasonable compromise on copyright issues. In this case, to do otherwise would threaten Youtube and all sorts of other websites entirely! Innovation would be damaged.

So the House did not pass the amendment to CISPA that they probably should have passed, but the House did act to find a compromise that would ensure our needs are met, while addressing the privacy issues some have.

While the above-linked criticisms are legitimate, it is the case that not that all privacy criticisms of CISPA are legitimate. “Privacy” has become the vague catch-all for left-libertarian positions that “for the children” has become for progressives. All too often there’s no actual meat to the criticisms. Heck, half the people complaining about privacy would tell you that CISPA is the new SOPA, when the two bills are entirely unrelated. It’s baseless scaremongering designed to defeat Republican efforts and clear the field for Jay Rockefeller and Barack Obama to act.

I do plan to say more very soon on CISPA, explaining why we should pass the bill. Watch RedState.

Darrell Issa is a busy man, busy passing FISMA reform legislation. One thing I’ve noticed he likes to do is pass small, specific legislation that’s easy to get support for. He peels off Democrats for individual pieces of reform and then gets them passed with huge majorities.

In this case, we’re getting the government’s own cybersecurity house in order, which I support. It’s one piece of the puzzle.

Security is hard. As xkcd makes fun of, people often think about these issues badly.

In other legislation, the Internet Freedom bill passed the House, seeking to commit the US Government to an open Internet worldwide. The Senate is looking at ECPA reform, seeking to apply heightened warrant requirements to email services. It’s argued that the original law was written to support a downloaded-email model back when people were mostly using POP email services. A server-side, IMAP model causes more data to be stored on the server, and therefore more data to be open to ECPA searches. So, they want to change the bill.

And yet, the Democrats who want to do this, aren’t going to notice how this is a perfect example of how government action online quickly becomes out of date, and won’t see how this argues against Net Neutrality and other regulations.

So we need to learn the lesson and deregulate as the IP revolution comes, and old-fashioned phone services are replaced with modern Internet-based technologies.

I told you so, continued: The broadcasters don’t like Aereo because they want you to be paying for cable, and not to get free over-the-air broadcasts. It’s not because any rights are being violated. So we must oppose strenuously any attempt to legislate winners and losers.

CISPA is still the top issue right now. The new version is getting broad support in industry, it appears. Again: the attacks America faces against our government and industry would be acts of war if done on the high seas, but are continuing consequence-free just because they’re online. Francis Cianfrocca points out what is needed: a framework for sharing information about threats. Not massive regulations, which won’t help. Not blaming the victim, which will make the bad guys laugh.

In Internet Sales Tax Compact news, Mike Enzi is feeling the heat to defend his bill to his constituents, and is making reasonable arguments for it. “If we don’t collect that revenue, they’ll have to find a new source.” Ding. “This is a states’ rights bill and it would require the states to act before anything could happen.” Ding. But we shall see if it can pass the House. I do wonder if the terrible “fairness” rhetoric from the big box retailers has poisoned the well.

Microsoft is claiming open source software is illegal for Google to promote. Wow, it’s the Halloween Documents all over again. Also, it’s ridiculous that Microsoft – a victim of runaway regulators – is now pushing for the same to happen to others.

We don’t want to be like Europe, where regulators are now dictating Google search content.

Greenland shuts down the Pirate Bay. I’m surprised they haven’t followed in Kim Dotcom’s chubby footsteps and gone to New Zealand.

CISPA continues to remain the big story right now. It’s moving on, though some are concerned that it was effectively renegotiated in back room meetings. It needs scrutiny before passage, I’m thinking. It’s probably a decent but watered-down bill at this point, but let’s look before supporting at this point. We need a good cybersecurity bill, not just any old thing.

Which is exactly what Jay Rockefeller is up to: flailing about, expanding government willy-nilly, in the name of cybersecurity. The SEC? Doing Cybersecurity? Insane.

I like the idea of the Internet Freedom bill, though. The global trend is away from freedom online, and it’s up to us to try to do something about it. The idea that the bill would hurt Net Neutrality is just a bonus.

Remember when I said that the real problem with Aereo was that it was cementing in the minds of the public, that the major networks are still giving their stuff away for free over the air? Fox may be confirming what I said.

Probably the best argument for a bill tightening email privacy against government intrusion, is the Obama IRS claiming it can look at what it wants, when it wants.

Looks like Google is feeling the sting from criticisms that its ad services promote shady services.

Anonymous retards getting prosecuted. Joy. Lulzsec. Ha.

While it’s true that cybersecurity can be cover for bad proposals, it is true that foreign organized criminal and state-backed attacks are hitting American government and business interests online every day. They’re even stealing large sums of money on a regular basis. This is why we need to address the issue in a serious way. If these attacks were going on at sea, it would be an act of war. Because it’s online, nothing happens? Come on.

Amending CISPA in order to try to get it to pass might be a good idea. If anarchists and other left-libs don’t like it, then it may yet be a good bill after the changes.

Patent trolling continues in Barack Obama’s grand America Invents Act era. Google isn’t waiting on government to stop it, which is interesting.

Greg Walden is doing good when he wants to make sure small market broadcasters aren’t shortchanged by FCC, which is a good way to ensure that rural America gets the spectrum it needs freed up in order to provide high speed Internet for all. This is about allocating resources efficiently, but the Obama administration is trying to skim extra cash off the top to pay for socialist programs like Obamaphone.