Tech at Night: Team Obama pirates software. Ted Cruz wants answers on FCC.
Seen on RedState Friday: Geoffrey Manne talks about FCC rigging the spectrum game, which is such a shame since spectrum auctions are one of the greatest regulatory innovations we’ve seen.
I bet you heard all there was to hear about Ted Cruz after the shutdown ended? Nope. He’s taking on the President’s nominee for FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler. He wants answers, and he’s entitled to get them.
Bitcoin and crime just seem to go hand-in-hand.
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Tech at Night: FCC leaves the lights on. Snowden and Greenwald want us to stop trying to break Tor.
This is a really late Friday tech. Enjoy anyway.
There’s not a lot of government policy stuff going on right now in DC, thanks to the shutdown, but at least we’re spending money keeping the lights on all night at the FCC.
A cell of Anonymous anarchists tried to “pay back’ Hollywood for getting The Pirate Bay, but it is they who are paying the price. Ruining your life because you want to download free stuff on the Internet. Heh.
The fact is, it would be to our benefit to be able to listen in on Tor. Privacy is good, but anonymity is a tool of evil and of our enemies. Just ask yourself why there’s a push by traitor Ed Snowden and the Glenns Greenwald spy team to discredit Tor attacks. A good reason for them to do this is that they’re afraid and want us to get the government to stop trying.
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Tech at Night: 4chan at it again. A little known but important CDA provision under attack?
Christopher Poole’s gang is at it again, as 4chan is attacking the family of another dead teenager. I guess ‘moot’ is amoral and doesn’t care where his money comes from. If he cared he’d have kicked these sorts of people off of his site by now, instead of giving them their own sandboxes to play with.
Time Warner and CBS come to an agreement. Remember: it’s government regulations that already existed that put Time Warner in a spot here, where they had to push hard to resist a sudden doubling of price by CBS. More regulations are not the answer here.
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Tech at Night: The Grand Return
So I’ve been gone a while. Sorry about that. After Summer Games Done Quick and the Redstate Gathering, I was supposed to be back in action. But a case of the shingles took me down fast. I was a sleepless zombie in pain for a week. No fun. Was actually alright on Friday, but I had so much reading to do I couldn’t catch up in time to post on Friday, so here we are. Hang on.
So let’s start with Time-Warner and CBS. The two had their negotiations fall through with respect to carrying CBS on Cable, and so a blackout began. The left wants this as the pretext to more government, but let’s be clear about this. Government created this pickle. The way out of it was proposed way back when, and backed in Tech at Night, when Jim DeMint and Steve Scalise proposed legislation. It’s still the right answer.
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Tech at Night: TOR hacked. Bradley Manning could get 90 years. Christopher Poole profiting from sick behavior.
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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Tech at Night: A key government cybersecurity role. Chinese trojan horses. ECPA reform held.
I’d have signed a letter against IRFA, the Pandora-backed regulatory bailout.
Government is trying to give advice on security online, including advice on how to deal with breakins. Information exchange is truly a proper cybersecurity role for government. Also important is prosecuting private offenders, and dealing with state offenders.
Though it gets tricky when state offenders include firms selling goods while pretending to be private firms, such as Chinese firms like Lenovo or Huawei.
ECPA reform is being held in the Senate. Leaky Leahy says it’s a Republican doing it. I wonder who? Lindsey Graham? John McCain? I’m not entirely convinced that the bill is necessary, but I don’t think it’s a particularly idea as long as we preserve something along the lines of FISA.
If you really want your email to be private, don’t have it all run through Google.
Turns out Snowden’s final decision to pledge allegiance to United Russia has encouraged a child pornographer in Ireland to follow suit.
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Tech at Night: Manning guilty. Snowden lying. Microsoft accuses itself of copyright infringement.
This will be my last post before heading off to the gathering, enjoy!
Previously on RedState: Google as ISP lets us know they oppose Net Neutrality.
So Bradley Manning was convicted on nearly every charge. Let’s hope he gets a serious sentence to go with it.
More Wikileaks: The latest Edward Snowden/Glenn Greenwald report was misleading, so says the House.
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Google as ISP lets us know they oppose Net Neutrality
Previously in Tech at Night we heard that Google had been accused of violating the FCC’s Open Internet order, also known as Net Neutrality. The stated purpose of Net Neutrality is to prevent ISPs from discriminating between one kind of Internet traffic, and another, in order to bolster its own services.
Google as web services provider was a strong proponent of the new regulations. However in Google’s response to the Net Neutrality complaint, Google has come out in favor of discrimination, asserting that because discrimination against “server” traffic is an industry standard, Google is within its rights to continue that discrimination in the Net Neutrality era. Google, in defending its own Net Neutrality violation, is citing the pre-Net Neutrality industry standards it repeatedly claimed were dangerous and harmful to Americans.
Note that in the same Wired report, we learn that Google plans to release a “business” service, presumably at a higher price, to support servers.
Of course, they’re claiming that they’re within the law, but it’s clear they are not.
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Tech at Night: We need E-Rate reform, not a plain expansion. The FTC lets a spammer off easy.
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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Tech at Night: Catching up after a cold.
Woof. This week I had my worst cold in years, the worst I had since the first CPAC I attended. Boy was that a miserable trip home, let me tell you, sick as a dog, with insufficient Claritin Ds to get me through it. I was lucky the middle seat was empty for me on both flights I had to get home! At least this week I could stay home, and sleep.
I’ve got a ton to cover, and I’m not really at 100% yet, so apologies for making this a bit scattershot tonight. Especially since the victory in Texas distracted me from finishing this promptly! (Edit: It’s also help if I remembered to hit Publish…)
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