I have a charity event I’m participating in tomorrow (I’m the one doing The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II), and I’d like to have slept for it, so this may be briefer than usual.
Looks like a push for real patent reform is brewing. After the lawyer- but not innovation-friendly America Invents Act was signed by Barack Obama, we’ve been left with a need to fix the actual problems with the US patent system. the i2Coalition and Google are backing anti-Patent Trolling ideas. There’s got to be a way to continue to reward small-time inventors without allowing the fakes to abuse the system.
Do Americans have a duty to diminish the security of their communications to ease government spying? Some seem to think so, as we’re reminded of in the flap over Apple’s iMessage being more secure in its encryption than government would like. Let me remind you though that any back door that government can exploit, China and Anonymous can, too.
Cybersecurity matters. We’re dealing with constant attacks on America that, if they weren’t online, would probably be acts of war. But being online, nobody takes them seriously despite the millions of dollars a day of damage done to our nation’s economy. And yet, Democrats are still demonizing CISPA. Information sharing is a mild step that is a reasonable compromise between doing nothing, which would be foolish in the face of a real, demonstrated foreign threat, and empowering government to take over the Internet, which would be a case of giving up essential liberty for temporary safety.
Speaking of China, the Congress is starting to look at ways to deal with Chinese security threats, while Apple obeys the dictates of the PRC to continue to gain access to that market.
We must ask ourselves just how far do we allow a corporation to cooperate with oppressive laws before we judge them for that? Where is the line? Cooperation with mass murder would not be acceptable – just ask all the firms scrutinized for possible ties to the Holocaust – but we wouldn’t say that participating in a ban on chewing gum would be immoral, would we? Somewhere between is the line. Where is it? And how do we, as a society, enforce it on a firm like Apple, Microsoft, or Google?
I guess it’s news that Firefox is working on Do Not Track, as Firefox still has about a fifth of the traffic out there. If firms begin to ignore these settings, and evade them, what do we do? Do we have the FTC go after them?
PS, Anontards: You hacked the service of Twitter, an American company. That is, you broke the law, but did nothing to the actual DPRK. Idiots.