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Tech at Night: Al Franken, Google, Net Neutrality, Copyright

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 21st, 2010 at 02:55 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

I skipped Tech at Night on Friday because I was in Austin for the Red State Gathering 2010, but I’m back now, so here we go.

We start off with what would have been the lead story on Friday, too: Net Neutrality hero and all around socialist gasbag Al Franken is now under a cloud of suspicion for ethics violations, violating Senate rules to spend money inappropriately on Net Neutrality advocacy, as well as using his role as Senator to raise money for private groups.

He’s crooked enough, he’s dishonest enough, and doggone it, people pay him.

Moving onto Google, the firm makes a true point about the importance of competition, conveniently enough relying on competition to prevent regulation of its core business even as it rejects competition as a safeguard for ISPs. But one example they use is not quite honest:

Google’s search algorithm is actually one of the world’s worst kept secrets. PageRank, one of our allegedly “secret ingredients,” is a formula that can be found in its entirety everywhere from academic journals to Wikipedia. We provide more information about our ranking signals than any other search engine. We operate a webmaster forum, provide tips and YouTube videos, and offer diagnostic tools that help websites identify problems.

When all the human, manually-generated interventions, as well as language-based, speed-based, and other tweaks, are all documented, then they can say they’re open like that. They even admit they’re not “100% transparent,” but invoke special pleading to explain why transparency would be bad for the Google Goose, but good for the ISP gander.

In short, Google is 100% hypocritical on the issue of search regulation, given the firm’s strong commitment to an unprecedented expansion of the FCC’s power online in the Net Neutrality debate, something that exists even in the relatively mild Google-Verizon Net Neutrality proposal.

And of course, there are proposals even worse than the Google-Verizon one, and Media Freedom reminds us of just how radical Free Press’s “Third Way” deem and pass reclassification plan really is.

Tonight we finish with a few points on copyright. Darrell Issa is asking exactly the right question about copyright, as he questions whether it needs to be so long. After all, the goal of the Congress over the last 40 years seems to be to give Disney an unconstitutionally perpetual copyright on Steamboat Willie.

But instead, Orrin Hatch (R-Disney) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT, currently challenged by Len Britton) want to expand government yet again. Instead of leaving copyright holders to do their own dirty work enforcing their rights in civil court the way it always was, they want to subsidize these massive media giants like Disney, Sony, NBC Universal, and Viacom by getting government even more aggressive online.

Not that it’d even accomplish much beyond making government bigger and more intrusive, because HDCP, the protection behind HDMI, has been broken. With HDMI broken, anything that can be displayed on a television can be copied easily.

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COMMENTS

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  • jackhammer

    Neil : Google
    Karl Rove : O’Donnel

    There is something there…..

  • minncon

    But in our own defense, the citizens of Minnesota didn’t really elect him.

  • Sirithil

    If he had gone in down by ten, or even by five, he certainly couldn’t have done so.

  • http://www.redstate.com/etcartman Kenny Solomon

    Most of this is from a post I popped in Sunday night.

    Somehow, I think this matters right now and will pop up from the whack-a-mole game board in the future to bite everyone…… Then again, it all may be nothing.

    ————

    Interpol’s boss is a gent named Ronald K. Noble and right about now he?s got a bug on his back about cyber crime.

    Part of that bug is buzzing because Mr. Noble had his ID compromised and phony FaceBook pages were set up in his name. Now, there’s a big meeting about ‘cyber crime’.

    Don’t know Mr. Noble ?….. I actually think you do…….. Here’s something from Lloyd Bentsen (Sec. Treas. under Pres. Bill Clinton) on Mr. Noble?s past experience: Assistant Secretary for Enforcement Ronald K. Noble has conducted a comprehensive review of the adequacy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? (?ATF?s?) procedures, policies, and practices, and whether they were followed during ATF?s investigation of Vernon Howell, a/k/a ?David Koresh,? and his followers.

    A background and other stuff on Mr. Noble is at Wiki??. take anything at Wiki as you may, but it all seems to be sourced proper-like??? Mr. Ronald K. Noble, Secretary General Of Interpol.

    ================

    My two (and a half) cents: Looks like the recent exec order ‘change’ giving Interpol open access to America is starting to come into a bit more focus now.

    Given the current governmental attitude for giving a ‘nudge’ to and sidestepping all things legal and Constitutional, my guess is (begin snark) none of the following is even remotely possible (end snark). However, inquiring minds want to know……..

    Approximately when was Mr. Noble’s ID compromised and those Facebook pages run up ?

    If the deeds were done after the exec order……. Hmmmmmmm.

    If the deeds were before the exec order, life is beautiful – for about two minutes……….

    That’s because, with all that’s going and the true Statist/Totalitarian power grab involving ‘net neutrality’, (to use the legal term) is it “beyond a reasonable doubt” this is not some sort of a setup ?………. Meaning that it’s within the realm of possibility that Mr. Noble’s ID was ‘put out there’ and the ‘unauthorized’ Facebook pages set in as just one more reason to force in ‘net neutrality’ and maybe more dire, for Interpol to actually begin operating here – not just being ok’d on paper to do so by exec order.

    Think about it – really think – try and lose the ‘it can’t happen here’ idea……….. Let the extrapolations begin as to what truly is possible in the current socio-political scene through technology…… legally or otherwise.

    To people like Cass Sunstein, Eric Holder, Harold Koh and our current president – plus orgs like ICR2P, The UN and others – there isn’t much more dangerous of an ‘international crime’ than published simple dissent that instantly goes world-wide.

    Thanks for your time.

    ……. and Neil……. Thank you again for keeping Tech at Night going……. We’re entering some seriously dangerous territory for individual Rights and overall freedom….. with many more than just the average person completely unaware of it all.

    PS…….. I’d give a nice donation to some Minnesota children’s charity to see Senator Franken perp-walked out of the Dirksen Building, or even better still……. from his home at 3am in a rain storm.

  • krsnadas

    I liked your reference to Sthewart Shmalley. Started my day with a good laugh.