By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 20th at 11:00 PM  | 

Twitter has a credibility problem on its hands, all of a sudden. Even as I’m getting blind link spam sent to me every single day on the site, Twitter has singled out a conservative activist group to have its accounts wiped out. Not only was the Empower Texans feed shut down, but every single employee’s personal feed was targeted as well. Twitter’s response has been | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 16th at 12:00 AM  | 

Wednesday I told you guys to look for two posts of mine. One is still pending, but I at least got my post on the California Amazon tax, and possible referendum shenanigans posted yesterday. At least I’m halfway there. Beyond self promotion, we still do have other matters, like the pending AT&T/T-Mobile deal. Despite being left out of the Sprint coalition, Free Press is still | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 14th at 08:30 PM  | 

While Jerry Brown has signed the budget bill that imposed an Internet Sales Tax on California, an arguably unconstitutional attempt to tax out-of-state businesses conducting interstate commerce with Californians, the fight’s not over. I’ve said again and again that Amazon doesn’t play around. And sure enough, the very night Brown signed the bill, Amazon emailed me and every other Amazon Associate in California to terminate | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 14th at 03:30 AM  | 

Sorry if you’ve been missing Tech at Night this week. Monday I just ran out of time as I had to do a whole bunch of housekeeping*, and tonight I’m running late. So let’s go. In classic Tech at Night style, let’s talk about the FCC. They took forever to get the ball rolling on Net Neutrality, but it’s coming now and it’s a vehicle | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 7th at 03:30 AM  | 

I remember when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed. It created a boatload of new rules and restrictions on Americans, in the name of tightening copyright online. One of the key provisions of the DMCA is the “safe harbor” rule, which effectively turns ISPs into agents of copyright, by making them honor so-called DMCA takedown notices in exchange for not being held responsible for what’s | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 30th at 02:00 AM  | 

Amazon’s not kidding one bit about punishing states that attempt to punish it. After Amazon sent a last ditch warning to Associates that all California Associates would be terminated in the event Governor Brown signed the budget with the Amazon Tax in it, the Governor went ahead and did it. So, every Amazon Associate in California just got terminated, including countless small businesses scraping by | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 28th at 02:00 AM  | 

And we truly are back. Friday night was a night off thanks to some maintenance at RedState. It was nice because I could rest on a Friday night… but it’s not so nice now when I have a whopping 20 Firefox windows to sort through tonight. So here we go. With so many big stories going on, it’s hard to pick which one to start | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 23rd at 01:30 AM  | 

Can we just start shooting the hackers? It seems like it’s war on the Internet these days, and the more there is for me to cover, the more work it is churning out Tech at Night! Lulzsec denies the allies are in Baghdad the leader is arrested despite an earlier claim on Twitter that it was true. Anyway, Shame on the Daily Mail for trying | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 16th at 03:00 AM  | 

Even as Mary Bono Mack and Republicans fiddle with the pointless SAFE Data act that won’t actually do anything to prevent or even to deter online crime, the Internet burns with a string of further attacks. The Senate was hit twice, and the CIA was hit as well. I thought we were the party that likes to solve crime by putting the criminals in jail? | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 15th at 05:30 PM  | 

Don’t our elected officials have access to Ballotpedia? If the California Democrats did, they’d know that the Amazon Tax being taken up this afternoon in the legislature is unconstitutional under the state Constitution. And it’s not some old, obscure provision that’s violated either. It’s the brand-new Proposition 26, a constitutional amendment passed in November, that the tax violates. Put simply, Proposition 26 doesn’t let the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 13th at 11:30 PM  | 

The cyberterrorist groups Anonymous and its apparent splinter group Lulzsec are getting bold. The latter gang of criminals is attempting to blackmail the United States Government after attacking government networks, which is just insane and I hope will lead to mass arrests. While the former is attacking the Spanish government after arrests made there, and suffering further damage from mass arrests in Turkey. I hope | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 13th at 01:00 PM  | 

State governments are timid beasts. So often the country will refuse to move in a new policy direction unless one state jumps out ahead and acts first. In the past, California was often the dynamic frontrunner. Now, Texas is increasingly the example that other states ought to follow. When it comes to the Amazon Tax, or the plan to change the tax laws in Texas | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 11th at 03:30 AM  | 

Free Press is getting the heat. It’s been exposed through FOIA that the far left front group was secretly coordinating media strategy with people at the FCC, including Commissioner Michael Copps. So when Copps makes a statement about media regulation, Free Press’s pet issue, I have to assume they wrote it for him. Media Reform is their code for nationalization of the press, after all. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 4th at 03:30 AM  | 

I am so sick of California. While it’s good that the “privacy” bill didn’t make it out of the Senate, it’s not so good that the Amazon tax is going on to the Senate. Texas: Don’t be like us. Defeat your Amazon tax in SB 1. And the hacks go on: Anonymous attacks.. Iran?, its apparent offshoot lulzsec attacked PBS and Sony, but leaves itself | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 2nd at 03:00 AM  | 

Lots to cover tonight, thanks in part to skipping Monday for Memorial Day. But of course I’ll start with my own post on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, explaining from the ground up why the George Soros/Sprint arguments contradict themselves. Government should get out of the way, especially state governments like California’s getting too big for their britches. It’ll be better for all of us who buy | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 26th at 03:00 AM  | 

This week I already called upon Rick Perry to veto the Texas Amazon Tax, and now I’m left to hope that California Democrats will be less stupid than Joe Straus. Sigh. Meanwhile the posturing around the AT&T/T-Mobile deal continues. We find from a press conference with COMPTEL CEO Jerry James that the Rural Cellular Alliance is joining with radical left, George Soros/OSI-funded group Public Knowledge | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 24th at 02:00 PM  | 

I like Texas. The state has many great things going for it, including a friendly tax and business climate. However Texas has to keep working to stay on top, so when South Carolina is backing down from its refusal to work with Amazon, and Tennessee has dropped its Amazon tax bill, it’s disappointing and frustrating to see Texas moving forward with punitive taxation against an | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 21st at 03:00 AM  | 

Ah, Claire McCaskill. Her not particularly active Twitter account said this week that she wants to be careful about regulation of privacy online, lest those regulations cause us all to have “less access to amazing stuff.” True statement I think. Too bad she refused to stick to her guns on the radical left’s key policy, Net Neutrality. On that issue, McCaskill told MyDD government regulation | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 3rd at 03:30 AM  | 

Curse Firefox. I’m getting to this much later tonight than I would have, thanks to a stinking Firefox 3.6 rendering bug, plus Firefox’s refusal to make it easy to work around Firefox rendering bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer makes that easy with conditional comments. Firefox has no such feature, pretending it’s always right. Which is fine, except when Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 render the same | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 30th at 01:30 AM  | 

Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together: At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and | Read More »