Time to defend Google: It’s unfair to attack them for excluding Youtube from its “anti-piracy” penalties, when they’re also excluding every other popular site driven by user-generated content. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube are four sites that, whether Google-owned or not, need to be indexed and valued to a degree. The point of the penalty is to punish illegitimate sites, not legitimate sites with some illegitimate users. So, yeah, lay off this time.
However I see I’m not the only one who thought Google got off easy over the Safari privacy hack perpetrated at Google, that led to the paltry $22 million fine of Google by the FTC. I still wonder if somebody should have gone to jail over it. Who was responsible? Where was the oversight that leads up to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt? Google should have named names.
Most analyses of the Marketplace Fairness Act, pro and con, seems to suggest that eBay will soon back the measure, as the firm looks at same-day delivery.
I don’t know if I believe that iPhone lacks backdoors for law enforcement. It may be true that iPhone (and Mac) encryption is good enough to defeat ordinary law enforcement, as opposed to NSA spooks, but I’m not quite sure I believe it. Then again I don’t know what algorithms and protocols Apple uses.
Silly wording aside, I believe FBI’s fears were well-founded that the mastermind of a large Internet-based criminal enterprise such as Megaupload may have the means to destroy evidence rapidly, and so raiding Kim Dotcom was perfectly reasonable.
I have a rule that I always oppose DDoS attacks and want the perpetrators to go to jail. Even when Wikileaks is the target. DDoSes (Distributed Denial of Service attacks, basically overloading a server and Internet connection) hurt the innocent far more than the guilty, due to the overloads affecting more than just the target’s Internet connection. The Internet is interconnected after all. We, the civilized world, should use legal means to shut down Wikileaks.