I’ve been talking about FCC overreach in this space for a long time, but now the Obama FCC is trying so hard to go so far, everyone’s noticing now. Yes, the FCC’s plan to attack free speech got so much unkind attention that it’s been pulled, for now. Don’t count on it being gone forever, though.
Because they still haven’t given up on Net Neutrality. Commissioner Michael O’Rielly points out that Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plans are wrong and an overreach, however just as importantly, Commissioner Ajit Pai calls it “Groundhog Day” because this will make at least the third attempt to grab this power.
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Bitcoin is not really as widely used as its shills want you to think.
Ajit Pai is the man and understand what it means for the courts to be used to quash innovation. As the courts refused to crush the VCR, I want them to leave Aereo alone.
By the way, Healthcare.gov is still at risk. Good thing it’s a miserable failure, though that doesn’t help the poor souls already signed up and at risk in the vulnerable systems.
Democrats want to pass a new law mandating a private-public partnership to track where you and your phone are at all times, in the name of 911 calls. But remind me again how all the Snowden stuff is about privacy and not anti-Americanism and a rollback to 9/10/2001 thinking again. Sure, guys. Sure.
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This winter has been so cruel to me. I just have been getting every cold there is. I’ve been a magnet for bugs, and they just keep knocking me flat. So, it turns out I have so many links built up to go through for tonight’s Tech, that I’m going to break this up into two pieces. Some tonight, some over the weekend.
Democrats may be playing their usual game of blame the victim as an excuse to grow government, but know this: If you used a debit card at Target in the last month, you probably should get it replaced immediately. No joke. These cards are being actively sold for Bitcoin.
Gee, Bitcoin and crime, hand in hand. Again
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For months I’ve been dreaming of the day that NSA could crack TOR. Well, it turns out, they did it. That child pornographer in Ireland I mentioned previously? It sounds like that’s how they got him.
TOR, aka The Onion Router, is a distributed network designed to let people do things online without their actions being traceable back to their locations. It failed.
In more good news, convicted spy Bradley Manning is facing 90 years in prison for working with fugitive rapist Julian Assange and his Wikileaks gang.
This is so disgusting: Users of Christopher Poole’s site 4chan are willfully tormenting the family of a dead teenager. Poole, aka ‘moot’, needs to do something about the sick community on his site. I hold him responsible for his continued failure to act. His site is a hub for criminal and anti-social activity. He does nothing to stop it, instead choosing to profit from it.
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SGDQ raised over $230,000 as of this writing, with the main marathon about over and the bonus stream soon to begin. I got to be there for about a day and a half, which was great fun. I ever learned that hiking uphill a mile and a half from the Arapahoe light rail station to the Sheraton Denver Tech Center is a lot harder than it sounds, in that mile high air. I don’t know how the Nuggets ever lose a home game.
So, I’m back, but there’s still also going to be no Tech on Friday this week, because I’m going to be off again for the 2013 Redstate Gathering in New Orleans. So what we’re doing tonight is the same as we’ll likely be doing next Monday: a catch-up post. Enjoy.
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Here we go. The President, Jay Rockefeller, and the grabbing hands are on the move, using “Internet for the Children” as a pretext to expand spending. We need E-Rate reform along the lines of what Ajit Pai is talking about, not anything that’s just a plain old expansion.
The FTC went easy on this spammer. Texts can cost people 5-10 cents each. They do me. So if this spammer sent 20 million spam texts, he could have costs his victims 1-2 million dollars. And he only got find 60 thousand. Weak.
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Update on ECPA reform: Last time I commented that it was problematic to give such strong protections to terrorist emails on American corporate-run servers. Well, it turns out ECPA reform backers are listening, and have pointed out to me that FISA will work just fine in those cases. Fair point. I still don’t think the law makes sense, but at least it’s not too terribly harmful.
This tutorial to “NSA-proof your email” is all wrong. All wrong. You NSA-proof your email by using end-to-end encryption, not by using transport level encryption. Hosing your own email is a great idea, mind you (it makes the ECPA-related issues moot), but NSA can still spy on you all they want if you follow that webpage’s instructions.
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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.
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Jeff Flake. Jeff Sessions. Ron Johnson. Tim Scott.
Ted Cruz. Marco Rubio. Mike Lee. Rand Paul.
I’m generally pleased with all eight of these guys being in the Senate. They were on opposite sides of the sales tax compact amendment vote, though. If you look at the way Governors split on the issues, you’ll see similar responses. Effective conservative Governors have fallen on both sides, including neighbors Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal.
I’m fine with the compact. It’s Constitutional and merely lets states preserve existing revenue streams, without having to defy basic economic reality by unilaterally cooperating in the rewrite-the-sales-tax Prisoner’s Dilemma. That is, any one first state that shifts from buyer-owes to seller-owes in sales tax, creating the marketplace of sales taxes that compact opponents favor, automatically creates a disincentive for businesses to set up shop there.
So, we pass the compact as the best practical solution.
Recently at RedState: Ajit Pai on Robert McDowell is worth a read. Then there’s Seton Motley on Marco Rubio challenging Internet regulation.
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Ah, Free Press. One of my early favorite tech topics at RedState. One of the more visible George Soros-funded fronts, along with Public Knowledge. I have to say my early hits have been somewhat successful too, when Free Press completely gave up on Save the Internet as a fake left-right thing, instead fully integrating it with the Free Press extremist brand. Remember when they could fool solid groups like Gun Owners of America with their dishonest rhetoric?
I mean, they do still have language up that says “Organizations as diverse as the Christian Coalition for America, Moveon.org, the ACLU and the American Library Association have joined in support of Net Neutrality.” But, what? MoveOn, ACLU, and ALA are ‘diverse?’ Get real. Christian Coalition is the only right-wing fig leaf they have left, and Christian Coalition isn’t exactly known as a small-government group, nor a tech policy leader. Come on. I won, they lost. Net Neutrality was exposed as a single-party, left-wing effort, like so many others of the extremist Obama regulators. Time to… Move On.
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