By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 13th at 11:00 PM  | 

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 | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 10th at 10:00 PM  | 

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 | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 2nd at 12:00 AM  | 

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 | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 24th at 02:30 AM  | 

It’s easy to see why there’s sudden, strong opposition to the Marketplace Fairness Act, as yet another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, backs the bill. I again state my opposition to the lousy language backing the bill, including “fairness” and “loophole”. Yes, that language is being driven by marketplace losers, but both sides of this debate are ponying up cash. I favor the bill on its | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 12th at 02:30 AM  | 

US attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom have been delayed until 2013. It is unconfirmed whether the delay is related to the need to send a reinforced tanker to New Zealand in order to have a vehicle strong enough carry his weight back to the United States. In the meantime, the hubris (and food) filled man is trying to dictate terms to the US. That won’t | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  February 5th at 02:00 AM  | 

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. | Read More »

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

So, while Google may have seen the light on Net Neutrality (which is actually, amusingly enough, making the far left sound like me), they still have other issues going on. The WiSpy Street View spying issue is still ongoing, with South Korea raiding their offices and Germany pressuring the firm to be more transparent and responsive to privacy complaints about the program. Because as I | Read More »