Tech at Night: Cybersecurity and the imperial presidency

On October 24, 2012, in General, by Neil Stevens
Tech at Night

We’re still in wait and see mode on what the Obama administration will try with respect to cybersecurity, but of course they’ll use every news event as justification. Here’s the problem though: Attacks like the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia prove that businesses must use best practices, but government regulation will only hinder industry from keeping up with the latest. Regulation is too slow. Government is too restrictive, and not accountable enough.

Of course the President himself continues to try to make the pitch, but in the end I agree with Eric Cantor. The administration wants unchecked power, and Cybersecurity is the next buzzword after Net Neutrality that is being used as an excuse. Cantor calls it the ‘imperial presidency.’

Tech at Night

Forgive me if I’m not as engaging as usual tonight. Firefox robbed me of a good 20 minutes of time tonight. Firefox 3, what was supposed to be faster and better than ever, had taken up so much memory it was slowing my whole system, and then it took forever to restart. Of course, now they’re saying Firefox 4 will be better this time. Really. Forgive me if I’m not optimistic. As soon as NoScript or equivalent comes to Safari, I’m away from Mozilla forever.

Moving on, I wrote on RedState today about the FCC plotting something that could be a sign that the left wants to start manipulating statistics to push their agenda. We need to watch and make sure they don’t try anything funny.

The IPv4 Panic Button has been hit again. People are saying we’re out of addresses! But we’re actually not. We’ve just handed out many large blocks of addresses to regional authorities who then assign them to those who need them. Of course, if we actually did run out (and couldn’t fix the issue of a few large companies having obscene numbers of addresses, from the old days), I say we just strip pubic IP addresses from countries that firewall the Internet, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. If you’re not on the public Internet, you don’t need public IP addresses.

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Tech at Night

Tonight, we start with a longer note that requires some setup, so bear with me as I break from the usual format for a moment.

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The FCC’s attempt to reclassify broadband as if it were a telephone service had already encountered opposition from a strong, bipartisan majority of Congress – not to mention usually Democratic allies like the AFL-CIO, CWA, IBEW, LULAC, MMTC, NAACP, Urban League and Sierra Club.

It is increasingly becoming a question of whether the FCC really wants to pick a Title II fight in the Courts, another with Democratic coalition members and yet another with Congress. That kind of path has the potential to be lose-lose-lose for the FCC and for Democrats.

But another story that emerged last week may be the most interesting fight of all.

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Tech at Night: Apple, WiMAX, RIM

On August 2, 2010, in General, by Neil Stevens
Tech at Night

Good evening. It’s going to be short tonight, because I don’t actually have anything new to say about G—– or F— P—- tonight, as against freedom as they both are.

But I will say this about Net Neutrality: competition from new technology is the way out of any problems we have with the ISP monopolies and duopolies that state and local regulators cram down our throats. It’s not theoretical, either: Sprint is deploying 4G WiMAX service over more and more of the country.

Technology, not Net Neutrality regulation, is what we need.

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Nima Jooyandeh facts.