If there’s one thing Google guards closely, it’s the secrets of its search service. Despite praising the virtues for the customer of transparency online, Google’s anything but transparent. Take a look at their webmaster guidelines, which in part explain how to avoid the Google Death Penalty.
But one thing that is clear is that linking schemes, particularly those using shadow websites, are forbidden.
So the question is: Is Google watching the Chris Bowers pagerank scam? Will they delist him and the entire Daily Kos.com domain if they find that he’s breaking the rules? It’s clear they’re recruiting people to spam links to pre-selected pages across volunteer website owners’ sites based on their use of a SEO Blogger checkbox option on their signup page. This is precisely the kind of illegal cross-link scheme Google warns about being an unethical SEO practice.
So the ball’s in your court, Google. If you do not delist Daily Kos for this behavior you call unethical, then you have a partisan political bias.
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Catch future episodes of The Needle for a special discussion of Tech at Night and my other project, UnlikelyVoter.com. Be warned, though, The Needle is a bit rowdier than RedState.
I’ve said it in this space before, and I’ll keep saying because the Lame Duck session is coming: Republicans need to get out in front on Net Neutrality and we need to do it quickly. We cannot hinder the Internet by forcing ISPs to go to court over Title II reclassification.
Imagine if every video you play online, every download you make, every OS upgrade you run, every podcast you play, all got slower, skipped more, and just became a greater drain on your time. That’s just the beginning of we face if Title II reclassification happens, and investor dollars are scared away from building private Internet infrastructure in America.
But that’s the situation. Henry Waxman is using Republican inaction to argue for radical FCC action. It shouldn’t be the case as Seton Motley points out, but that’s what he’s saying. So let’s judo this and fight back by using his own bill against him.
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Apologies for missing the last two Tech at Nights. But unlike the paid staff of the well-funded Free Press, every word I’ve ever written here on technical issues has been on my own time, for free, because I care about the issues. And when work overwhelms me, as it did last week as a huge deadline approached, something had to give. And what gave was what I had to do at night when I just wanted to sleep.
So we start tonight with an update on the Waxman Net Neutrality bill. I wrote of it before in support of it, and proved prophetic as Henry Waxman used Republican opposition to justify radical, illegal FCC action on the issue.
It’s not too late, though. We can still build momentum to stop the FCC’s end run around the Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution. We need to talk up the Waxman bill because it is more limited than any other major proposal we’ve dealt with during this debate, because it would strictly, expressly forbid the FCC from doing the disastrous Title II reclassification which would give the FCC broad powers, and it’s just possible that the Congress taking the baton on this would encourage the FCC to back down until the process runs its course.
Politics matters, and there’s going to be a lame duck session. We can judo the Democrats on this, and use their bill in a bipartisan way to get the Congress behind a clear majority of the nation against massive Internet regulation. But we have to step up to the plate, ignore the Waxman name, and use the decent language of his proposal to make it happen. It’s time to put country first.
Especially when it gives even Barack Obama an out from a divisive issue, even as it gives American an out from regulation potentially more devastating to our economy than Obamacare, if it chokes off the Internet, one of our high growth, high potential areas.
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Hello. The longer the Democrats are in Washington, the more the mask slips with respect to their true beliefs regarding freedom online. They claim they don’t want a government takeover, they claim they don’t want to regulate content, they claim they don’t want a kill switch, they claim they want to respect privacy, but time and again all of these issues just keep coming up.
Witness the new disaster coming out of the White House which would force private firms like Facebook, Skype, and RIM to assist the government with spying on you. They are to cripple, deliberately, any safeguards they have on your privacy to make it easier for government snoops.
Remember: already nothing prevents them from listening in on the Internet. What they are demanding now is a huge expansion of power to require encryption in America to be crippled for the benefit of domestic Internet spies. Or at least, that’s the phrasing the left used throughout the Bush administration, so I’m going to throw it back in their disingenuous faces every single chance I get.
Remember when fining Janet Jackson’s breast was the worst thing going on in Washington with respect to this stuff, and how horrible that was? As the sign goes, “Miss me yet?”
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Good evening. Welcome to the special, totally planned, and not at all a fallback because I wore out after a week of catching up after the RS Gathering, Saturday edition of Tech at Night. I did want to make sure we all read about this poll by Hart Research Associates which shows over 75% of likely voters (MoE should be about 3.4 for a sample of 800) saying that the Internet works.
Further, support for regulating the Internet is trailing badly at 51 against to 37 for, which means per my handy analysis tool I wrote myself for Unlikely Voter, there’s only a 1% chance per this poll that likely voters actually favor regulating the Internet. This poll is a clear and convincing rejection of the entire FCC/Free Press agenda.
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Barbara Boxer, having been in Congress for 28 years, is a clear expert on where to go, and what to see, on the taxpayer dime. Here’s a great new site showing her expertise as compiled in Boxer’s new book: Five Places to See Before You Retire: A Senator’s Junket List.
Also make sure to help her pick a retirement spot for when Carly Fiorina charges ahead and wins in November.
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Hello! As it crosses midnight here in California, I apologize for the lateness but do return with yet another installment of Tech at Night.
Still don’t believe the socialist pushes at the FCC are driven in part by a desire to get free stuff? Take a look at the ITU Broadband Plan for the whole world, what with its insistence that governments must build Internet infrastructure, which of course would result in greater state ownership of the Internet.
Ars Technica points out also that the ITU claims that state Internet development will end poverty and hunger. Talk about socialist utopian thought! And we’re supposed to let these types get more power over the Internet with magical thinking like this?
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It’s clear that these lefty writers are no friends of law, order, and American values, given their clear amusement at the widely known fact that Loretta Sanchez stole her first election against Bob Dornan. The spirit of their use of “Trannies” as a way to mock Van Tran‘s supporters should be noticed, as well. Ah, the tolerant left. They respect the LGBT community alright, but only when that community coughs up cash and votes.
But anyway, even OC Weekly had to point out the incredibly racist remark she made on Univision, where she thought she would be away from the prying eyes of the general electorate, and spoke for la raza alone about how “the Vietnamese” were trying to take the seat from “our community.”
Don’t like those ideas in the House? Give to Van Tran so we can beat Loretta Sanchez and secure justice in California’s 47th district.
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I skipped Tech at Night on Friday because I was in Austin for the Red State Gathering 2010, but I’m back now, so here we go.
We start off with what would have been the lead story on Friday, too: Net Neutrality hero and all around socialist gasbag Al Franken is now under a cloud of suspicion for ethics violations, violating Senate rules to spend money inappropriately on Net Neutrality advocacy, as well as using his role as Senator to raise money for private groups.
He’s crooked enough, he’s dishonest enough, and doggone it, people pay him.
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