So, the FCC put out another report (the “706 report”) that just pushes an agenda rather than reporting the true facts about high speed Internet in America. Commissioners McDowell and Pai tell it like it is. We’ve also got Broadband for America telling the story. I’m not even worried about the details: the FCC is saying what they feel they must say to justify expanding government.
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Another quick one tonight. Ah, the joys of there being no Internet crushing legislation or regulation under consideration right now.
Cue the dramatic music: While it’s true that both Oracle and Google were paying people online to write for their side (not that I was even offered a penny; I’m thinking it’s more because I’m unimportant than that I have some reputation of some sort), Google made the mistake of not complying with a judge’s order to reveal who. Uh oh.
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So with Cliff Stearns having lost his primary race for re-election, it’s time we started thinking about who to elevate on Energy and Commerce. I think Marsha Blackburn deserves a lot more prominence. She’s doing a good job there.
Ecuador: haven for serial rapists and spies. Julian Assange has fled from authorities in two countries now, taking asylum in the Ecuador embassy from the UK police. But remember: this isn’t about the Wikileaks. This is about him being a rapist according to Swedish law. Say what you want about contraception but it’s pretty unbalanced I think to manipulate women into getting pregnant against their wills.
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I guess legislatively it’ll be slow going the rest of this year, thanks to the elections. So Tech at Night just may be shorter for a while to come. That’s good for my sleep schedule, I believe.
Though the aftermath continues of Harry Reid’s failure to ram through the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act, as John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and other Republicans criticized Harry Reid for poor process. It’s a true and valid criticism.
Wow: After much stalling by the Obama administration, the Verizon/Comcast spectrum deal may go through the FCC
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Time to defend Google: It’s unfair to attack them for excluding Youtube from its “anti-piracy” penalties, when they’re also excluding every other popular site driven by user-generated content. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube are four sites that, whether Google-owned or not, need to be indexed and valued to a degree. The point of the penalty is to punish illegitimate sites, not legitimate sites with some illegitimate users. So, yeah, lay off this time.
However I see I’m not the only one who thought Google got off easy over the Safari privacy hack perpetrated at Google, that led to the paltry $22 million fine of Google by the FTC. I still wonder if somebody should have gone to jail over it. Who was responsible? Where was the oversight that leads up to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt? Google should have named names.
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So the FTC is on a tear. Google is officially smacked for $22.5 million for hacking though Safari’s privacy protections to sell Safari users’ information to advertisers. Then Facebook got whacked for lying about what privacy protections it was giving users. Some are saying this is bad, as it’s expanding FTC power, but this is really a bad time to make that point. Google brought this on us. I’m not up on the Facebook issue, but the Google/Safari thing was a huge breach.
Had someone gone to jail, I would not have thought it wrong. If an ordinary citizen hacked through that many users’ privacy protections, we might have, you know.
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With the Cybersecurity Act on hold for now, it seems like a slow news week, so a quick one tonight.
We’re in a spectrum crunch, and as long as the Obama administration is restricting spectrum allocation, including the critical secondary spectrum market that firms like Verizon and AT&T are trying to operate in, it’s not going to get better. The Obama FCC claims to get it, but it’s not there yet.
Also, some have praised the Universal Service Fund reform the Obama FCC pushed through but Continue reading »
We had no Tech at Night on Friday becuase I was at the Gathering in Jacksonville. Hope those who went enjoyed it, and that those who weren’t able to attend can make it next year!
So, Harry Reid offered to let Republicans fix Lieberman-Collins. Republicans took him up on that, and he was unhappy. So he tried to ram it through after all. Republicans objected, and the cloture vote failed. I’d say my support for this tactic by Republicans has been vindicated.
Harry Reid, the embattled Senate majority leader under a cloud of serious allegations about his behavior lately, has continued to try to politicize the Cybersecurity Act. Republicans tried to be good legislators. That was embarrassing to Reid, so he had to cut it off.
Proof Democrats have been bargaining in bad faith the whole time comes from Barack Obama’s consideration of rule by decree on this. This of course is a bad idea.
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Lieberman-Collins is in trouble! There is apparently some misinformation going around. I’ve seen people claiming that gun control is in the bill, when it’s just an amendment possibly to be added, along with an anti-Obamacare amendment going around. Further, The Hill posted and pulled a story saying Harry Reid postponed the Cybersecurity Act.
But it looks like I was right to respect Republican attempts to modify the bill, because it’s going as it should, according to reports.
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Having decided to give amending Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act a go, Republicans now engage in that amendment process. Though, is it unfair of me to point out that it would be against Symantec’s best interests for American Internet security to improve?
Why not to trust Senate Democrats on cybersecurity, in a nutshell: We’re criminalizing victimhood with this new Patrick Leahy proposal. Insane.
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