Can we just start shooting the hackers? It seems like it’s war on the Internet these days, and the more there is for me to cover, the more work it is churning out Tech at Night!
Lulzsec denies the allies are in Baghdad the leader is arrested despite an earlier claim on Twitter that it was true.
Anyway, Shame on the Daily Mail for trying to turn a Lulzsec hacker into a sob story. He’s a criminal gangster who couldn’t hold a real job. Let him rot.
How bad is Lulzsec? Even other hacker gangs hate them. I assume it’s because others realize that Lulzsec’s insane overreach is going to bring the hammer of justice down on the entire field. Especially when they’re targeting security experts, besides. It’s true, too: The FBI is on the march here, on the heels of arrests already made in Spain, Turkey, and the UK.
Fortunately the fight to stop the patent rip off is on as Republicans in the House aren’t rolling over and letting the Patrick Leahy America Invents Act, which seeks to remake our patent system to match that of Old Europe, rewarding large companies and cross-licensed cartels at the expense of actual inventors. Dana Rohrabacher has more as he takes a key role in the fight to defeat a bad bill.
Democrats are opposing the bill for entirely separate reasons, so hopefully we can get a bipartisan rejection of the bill. Better than passing it, eh?
Yes, Virginia, Astroturf abounds on the side of pro-government, pro-regulation, and the nationalization of the media in America. They get the big bucks, while I don’t get a dime, and they claim I’m the Astroturfer.
Regardless, elections have consequences, and the House is keeping the pressure on the FCC, now by having hearings on the need for FCC reform. I still think it’s fundamentally flawed to have the same body make a determination on whether regulation is needed, and then be empowered to write that regulation. We need a separation of powers. The New Deal model of regulation is broken.
But, barring that, I’ll take a plan that puts up a number of barriers to harmful regulation, putting burdens on the FCC to justify its actions, be totally transparent, and give the public plenty of time to build up opposition to bad proposals.
Not that legislators don’t write stupid bills. Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, wants to legislate the meaning of “4G.” Hey, I love to mock T-Mobile and AT&T for calling their older technology “4G,” but the idea that we need a law on this is so very, very stupid. Let the market sort it out, as Leap’s Cricket is joining the list of 4G LTE carriers soon.
I think CTIA was diplomatic with its reaction to this Eshoo’s idiotic proposal:
We are concerned that the bill proposes to add a new layer of regulation to a new and exciting set of services, while ignoring the fact that wireless is an inherently complex and dynamic environment in which network speeds can vary depending on a wide variety of factors. Congress should resist calls to impose new regulations and instead focus on the real issue, which is making sure that America’s wireless carriers have sufficient spectrum to lead the world in the race to deploy 4G services.
On the heels of the head of GLAAD being fired over the Soros agenda against AT&T and T-Mobile, other radicals are angry that the unions aren’t with them on issues like Net Neutrality. Heh. Too radical even for socialist unions entirely in league with Democrats.
Yeah guys, the vindictive plans to punish Amazon, pushed by Amazon’s failing competitors, have costs. In California, the Amazon tax would kill 25,000 jobs in a state already slammed with terrible unemployment. Hey, Texas: Don’t be like us.
I like to keep my data on my own servers. Dropbox vindicated me this week.
Google is apparently resisting a Senate probe into the firm’s market power. Now I think any attempt to use antitrust law against Google would be ridiculously bad and make a mockery of the idea that such laws are anti-monopoly, rather than a simple choosing of winners and losers. But I enjoy watching Google be so opaque even as it champions transparency.
So Apple sued Samsung, claiming Samsung is copying Apple’s hardware designs. A judge then allowed Apple early access to Samsung’s future designs, to gather information about the alleged copying. Samsung tried to get a peek at future iPhones in return, but a judge smacked Samsung down. Ha.