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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I enjoy that in America, we refuse to give official sanction of the radical appropriation of May Day, and instead have a Labor Day on a completely different day, separating ourselves from anti-liberty radicals.
You can tell the anti-NSA people are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now in their attempts to attack the agency. It’s kind of ridiculous. Even if we take traitor Edward Snowden at his word, despite how he could easily have modified or even fabricated parts of or entire documents to push an agenda, it’s actually the NSA’s job to spy on foreign agents like the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera.
Of course, this is really interesting timing for DEA to be seeking massive amounts of call metadata. That’s not going to go over well with the libertarians. Then again, I don’t know if it’ll sway anyone who didn’t already favor free dope and sodomy. Sorry, but it’s true. You can talk a lot of people into part-way legalizations of cannabis, but it takes a hardcore radical to go all the way and legalize opiates and cocaine.
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Never waste a good crisis. Some Eurocrats are looking to use the NSA fearmongering as an excuse to lock down the Internet, and the Obama administration is fighting back because closing off that form of free trade in ideas would hurt everyone, not just themselves. Of course it’s still suspect to believe just anything Edward Snowden has alleged, given reports that he’s a liar.
So even as Microsoft and Google reasonably sue to be able to release non-specific, aggregated data on secret court requests for data, NSA may release its own stats on its programs. This should not be seen as good enough, since FISA covers more than just the NSA.
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Are the Europeans looking to censor the Internet with the NSA as pretext? Cameron Kerry seems to think so. I don’t know how serious or likely any proposals were, but it bears looking at if you’re a European.
Meanwhile here in the US, the Internet control pretext is Net Neutrality, which ought to be struck down. The Communications Act never gave them that power, and the Telecommunications Act was pretty clear on an open Internet. The FCC has acted illegally.
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Enough about Manning for right now. Back to Snowden. Edward Snowden and the Glenns Greenwald say Snowden wasn’t their source. Of course they’re saying that. Why wouldn’t they say it, whether it’s true or not? If Snowden was the source Greenwald and the Guardian gain nothing by admitting it. He especially has nothing to gain when his boy toy is getting stopped at airports.
And let’s be clear about the ongoing Time Warner/CBS dispute: the problem was created by government, specifically antiquated regulations designed to hinder cable television and aid the lucky network affiliates. That is, regulation hinders innovation and picks winners and losers.
Deregulate, or at the very least loosen the regulations as Steve Scalise and Jim DeMint tried a while back.
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This will bet he only edition of Tech at Night this week. I was out of it Monday night, and this weekend I’m traveling to Denver for SGDQ 2013. I will be there to give live on stream commentary for the Legend of Zelda and Zelda II runs, so watch and donate if you care to.
House Democrats, together with a few libertarians, tried to restrict the NSA, and failed. I’m fine with this.
In other news, Google is accused of Net Neutrality violations for trying to restrict servers on Google Fiber. Heh. If people can run servers on Google Fiber then they’re going to have problems quickly. So this is a very interesting case.
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Update on ECPA reform: Last time I commented that it was problematic to give such strong protections to terrorist emails on American corporate-run servers. Well, it turns out ECPA reform backers are listening, and have pointed out to me that FISA will work just fine in those cases. Fair point. I still don’t think the law makes sense, but at least it’s not too terribly harmful.
This tutorial to “NSA-proof your email” is all wrong. All wrong. You NSA-proof your email by using end-to-end encryption, not by using transport level encryption. Hosing your own email is a great idea, mind you (it makes the ECPA-related issues moot), but NSA can still spy on you all they want if you follow that webpage’s instructions.
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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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China is ‘demanding’ information about what the NSA is up to, wink wink. Because they’re totally, 100%, absolutely not in cahoots with Snowden or anything, of course not.
I hope these SWATters are found and get prison time.
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It’s the hot topic, so I’m going to start off with a few points on FISA and PRISM.
Point one: Foreign agents can control US phone numbers, particularly in this age of constant cybersecurity threats.
Point two: Searching a third party service provider isn’t the same as searching your home.
Point three: ECHELON is an old program, one where the UK’s intel team spies on us, and the NSA spites on them. NSA-avoidance advice that tells you to favor non-US firms is laughably stupid.
Point four: Data mining of metadata for mathematical analysis of networks, using known terrorists and allies as anchors, isn’t the same as spying on anyone.
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