Anarchy update: The black marketeers at Silk Road 2 got robbed for a Bitcoin amount worth over $2 million at current exchange rates. Iran shut down another black market ring, Germany and the Netherlands have joined the global hunt to shut down Silk Road and spinoffs. Keep in mind these online black markets are used for drugs, hired killings, child pornography, human sex trafficking, and anything else you can think of that’s a problem in society. They try to say “Oh it’s just pot,” but it’s not. It never is.
In another bad sign for digital currencies. another prominent digital currency, Dogecoin, is experiencing a major glitch that threatens to disrupt commerce or even take people’s money away from them. Why do people tolerate all the volatility and instability of digital currencies? Easy: it lets them evade the law. That’s it. That’s why these things are going anywhere at all, because they’re a magnet for the scum of the earth.
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Sometimes you just know somebody needs primaried. Wednesday I learned of a member of Congress who’s clearly only in the House because daddy was in the House before him, and he’s using the influence he has out a personal sense of entitlement. That’s clearly why Bill Shuster wants to ban phones on planes, despite both the OBama FCC and FAA thinking it’s a good idea to let the market decide this. Shuster was first elected in 2001. He needs a refresher on what happened in 2001, that would make us consider why passengers on planes may want that option, and why we should let Mister Market figure it out, instead of a blanket ban.
Look we get it, he’s big important man and he flies on planes often, and so he wants to order the airlines to do what he wants, because that’s what he thinks the perk of being the son of a Congressman is. But that’s why we need to defeat his bill, and defeat him in the primary.
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Even the Glenns Greenwald now admits that NSA work leads to dead terrorists. We come to the true agenda of Edward Snowden and his accomplices: hindering America and aiding our enemies.
It’s a real shame that the NSA was apparently pretty insecure. Fortunately it sounds like he would fail today.
Bitcoiners have even been scamming their allies, Mt. Gox.
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5 hour power outage Friday. Threw my whole day off, as you might imagine. I don’t even know whose fault it was: my apartment building’s or Dominion Power’s.
Apple cut Bitcoin from the App Store.. Bitcoiners are responding like a combination of spoiled children and offended followers of a religion. Wait until they find out that Russia is banning bitcoin and Florida is going after Bitcoin money laundering.
Bitcoin and crime go hand in hand. Mt. Gox is now preparing to rip off its users once and for all, it seems. Mt. Gox is the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange, a site originally founded to trade collectible game cards, but now trades Bitcoins. Also, organized drug dealers are looking at Bitcoin.
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How about some FCC? Some bad Net Neutrality laws are being proposed, attempting to save the terrible idea. Meanwhile Dean Heller is trying some targeted FCC process reform in the Senate. That’s great.
So, Retransmission Consent. You know what happens when you rig the system to limit competition, as the Congress and the FCC did in the early days of Cable? Broadcasters raking in the bucks. Never would I say that copyright should be attacked, but that price to license these broadcasts should be dictated by the open market. Let broadcasters compete.
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So the FCC is meeting soon, and that’s probably going to produce some news. Some of us are hoping for the best under the new FCC Chairman, but he may yet be a radical extremist who will try yet again on Net Neutrality, after the FCC has lost twice in court when attempting that power grab.
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It’s happening: the feds have arrested Bitcoin Foundation vice-chairman Charlie Shrem for money laundering. The key point seems to be that his service BitInstant was tied to Silk Road.
Good news: Microsoft and Google won and are getting some declassifications of aggregate data on FISA demands for data. Aggregate data from large providers won’t help the bad guys, but it will inform the voters, and that’s all that matters here.
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Here we go again. The last couple of times, they wanted to use “statistical sampling” to replace the Constitutionally-mandated direct enumeration in the Census. Now they want to use online polls to do the Census.
Let’s be clear: The Obama FCC is terrible, and generally threatens innovation, but I absolutely oppose efforts to do a comprehensive Communications Act bill. It’s nothing against Fred Upton and Greg Walden on this, as they’ve generally been pretty good on these matters. But any huge bill like this is going to get set up by every lobbyist in DC, and it will invariably grow a grab bag of special interest giveaways. A comprehensive Communications Act would become a ‘we have to pass it to find out what’s in it’ moment. Don’t do it. Pass one reform at a time. Find incremental reforms.
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So I took Christmas off, but don’t forget: even as Democrats play blame the Victim, you should get your debit card or credit card replaced if you used it at Target recently. The attackers got your PIN even.
The traitor Edward Snowden very interestingly says he won, which seems to mean he thinks it’s himself against we the people. He’s sure not on the side of liberty, when he’s on the side of the child pornography den Tor. And yet, He’s still desperately trying to feel his Russian paymasters. Not even loyal to them.
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As I mentioned Friday night, I had so much to cover I was breaking up Tech at Night into two parts. This is part two.
Remember when I called out Wikileaks for abandoning their ally Edward Snowden in Russia? They claimed he had settled there and their job was done, but I knew better. Well, here’s the proof that they’ve used him up and thrown him away: he’s still trying to get out of Russia, this time to Brazil. Spying for Wikileaks doesn’t even pay.
Remember when Snowden was supposed to be all about defending American civil liberties? Now he’s sticking up for Russia against Norway. Huh. Almost like we’d expect a traitor that fled ultimately to Russia to do, eh?
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