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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 28th at 12:00 AM  | 

Good evening. I’m not seeing anything huge as we pass the middle of the week. But, you never know what will become important, so let’s take a look at what caught my eye so far this week. Even as Mary Bono Mack seeks to legislate on the news, or at least introduces a bill to make people feel better, Apple explains that the “location tracking” | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 26th at 12:30 AM  | 

California’s Democrats, having refused to get tough with the unions who coincidentally will fund their re-election campaigns, are still determined to raise taxes. So they continue to push for an unconstitutional Amazon Tax on the Internet that just might cost the state more than it brings in, in the long run. They’re playing with “thresholds” to try to focus the bill on specific companies like | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 23rd at 02:30 AM  | 

It’s the calm before the storm. House Republicans have taken every ordinary measure to work with the President and get the regulatory excesses under control. The administration has refused though, and now the House is preparing to get tough. This buildup applies not just to the FCC, but also to the EPA and other runaway parts of the executive, but here I’m focused on the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 21st at 12:00 AM  | 

Good evening. Darrell Issa is stepping up the pressure on the FCC. He wants to tie spectrum reallocation incentives to Net Neutrality repeal. Many of us want to be able to reallocate spectrum from television stations to multipurpose wireless data, since we as a society are demanding more and faster data these days. If Darrell Issa makes the FCC’s ability to facilitate that, contingent on | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 18th at 11:00 PM  | 

In a startling turn of events, I’m starting tonight’s edition of Tech at Night at 6pm, roughly 8 hours earlier than I have been starting it lately. Imagine that. Top story is a shocker. I mean, I had no idea the Democrats would get this far out there. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, wants to pass a national sales tax solely on Internet transactions. The | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 16th at 03:30 AM  | 

Happy weekend, all. To get personal, had some real excitement on my end. Preemptively replaced my chair before it fell apart, since the last one I let fall apart collapsed while I was sitting in it. I was lucky the only injury I took was a smack on each arm. But, the new chair had the LUMBAR PAD OF DOOM which started killing my back. | Read More »

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

That’s one of the most boring and least unique Tech at Night titles ever, but I’m going to war with the links I have. Slade Gorton’s priorities are horribly wrong. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. On Tuesday the Greg Walden subcommittee held hearings on “Use of Spectrum with Public Safety.” I’ve already explained why I think the D Block of wireless spectrum | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 12th at 03:30 AM  | 

In case you missed the great news Friday, Net Neutrality was repealed in the House. The resolution now must go to the Senate, where under the Congressional Review Act it cannot be filibustered, so it only needs 51 votes. And while I do hope that the House will follow up by attempting to repeal the redistributionist data roaming regulations passed last week, other work must | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 8th at 08:00 PM  | 

Today, the House of Representatives voted to repeal Net Neutrality. H.J. Res 37, a resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act to reverse the FCC’s Net Neutrality order, passed the House under H.Res 200 by a 241-178 vote. Republicans voted 236-0 for repeal, while Democrats voted 178-5 against repeal. The five Democrats? Boren of OK, Conyers of MI, Costa of CA, Peterson of MN, and Shuler | Read More »

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

The final House vote is coming to repeal Net Neutrality via the Congressional Review Act. I’m pretty interested to see how many Democrats we can get in the House, because it may give a clue of how many Democrats we can get in the Senate. Remember: under the CRA we only need 51, not 60. I hope we don’t have to fire up the CRA | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 5th at 03:30 AM  | 

I’m late. No excuses. Let’s go. So the courts threw out Verizon’s challenge of Net Neutrality, rejecting the very clever argument made by Verizon that it wasn’t premature. So now we wait for the actual publication of Net Neutrality to take place. Well, to a point. The Republicans aren’t waiting and will vote this week in the full House to repeal Net Neutrality under the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 2nd at 03:30 AM  | 

So yeah, Tech at Night. I should start it at some point shouldn’t I? Hours of Spelunky are fun on a Friday evening, combining the action of a classic NES game with the exploration, power growth, and vindictive shopkeepers of Nethack, but I have things to cover tonight, so let’s go. We’ll start with my own post, going over how Eric Schmidt really stepped in | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 31st at 03:30 AM  | 

Hello! As is my right, I’m going to start tonight by shamelessly promoting my own piece arguing for the assignment of the D block of wireless spectrum to civil defense and public safety. I keep calling it civil defense because we learned about the need for this after 9/11, and if the actions of the first responders after those attacks wasn’t wartime civil defense, I | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 28th at 11:30 PM  | 

Remember when I seemed to write about Net Neutrality four times a week, which was really something when I was only posting three times? Well, the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is probably going to get that much discussion for now. Of course there’s nothing new yet. Discussion is all there is until government actually starts acting. My job is to find the interesting discussion, I suppose. So | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 25th at 11:30 PM  | 

After that flurry of activity online, we seem be having a bit of a slow Friday. It’s no wonder: we have a long fight ahead with respect to the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, a process that Mike Wendy calls Legalized Extortion. And when property rights are made contingent on acceptance of a goverment-dictated consent degree, it’s hard to argue with the thrust of Wendy’s point. Scary thought | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 24th at 03:30 AM  | 

So the top story this week is going to be the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA. There’s a lot being said about it, about unions, about competition, but the story I’m seeing emerging is that this deal is about spectrum. AT&T sees in T-Mobile a way to get the spectrum it needs going forward. In fact, even power grabbing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said to | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 21st at 11:30 PM  | 

So, read any good Tech posts lately? OK, I couldn’t think of a better way than that tonight to introduce a pair of RedState posts on the top story of the moment: AT&T’s announced plans to acquire T-Mobile USA from the Germans. It seems that there are two major conservative perspectives on this deal. One was described by LaborUnionReport on Sunday: if the non-union T-Mobile | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 19th at 03:30 AM  | 

Long week on my end, but thankfully it’s over as soon as I’m done writing this. But the top story is danger at the FCC. The regulator is still threatening to overstep its bounds and circumvent the Telecommunications Act, which strictly limits the amount of power the FCC has over Information Services. So now they want to redefine high-speed Internet access as something new and | Read More »