By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 24th at 09:30 AM  | 

We’re at war online. Iran, North Korea, and Russia are the sources of sustained attacks on our government and our economy. They steal from us, they disrupt our operations, and they’re no better than the pirates of old. On the sea, such attacks would eventually mean war, but on the Internet they get a pass.

Individuals do tend to get nabbed after the fact, as they build massive botnets for credit card fraud and Bitcoin mining, but it’s not enough to sit back passively and wait to get attacked before doing anything.

We need to be proactive, and that means putting together all the information we can about attacks past, present, and future. We need to be able to deal with attacks before the spin up fully. We need to pass along warnings before it’s too late. And that means we need legislation to prevent trial lawyers from making a mess of all of this. So that’s why it’s time to pass CISPA.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 5th at 10:15 PM  | 

I have a charity event I’m participating in tomorrow (I’m the one doing The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II), and I’d like to have slept for it, so this may be briefer than usual.

Looks like a push for real patent reform is brewing. After the lawyer- but not innovation-friendly America Invents Act was signed by Barack Obama, we’ve been left with a need to fix the actual problems with the US patent system. the i2Coalition and Google are backing anti-Patent Trolling ideas. There’s got to be a way to continue to reward small-time inventors without allowing the fakes to abuse the system.

Do Americans have a duty to diminish the security of their communications to ease government spying? Some seem to think so, as we’re reminded of in the flap over Apple’s iMessage being more secure in its encryption than government would like. Let me remind you though that any back door that government can exploit, China and Anonymous can, too.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  May 26th at 12:56 PM  | 

Take the world’s most paranoid/delusional Stalinist regime, add nuclear ambition and stir. Turn the whole mess over to a 29-year old who, by rights, should be playing video games in his parents’ basement; what’s the worst that could happen? This, for starters, from the Telegraph (UK): 30 North Korean officials involved in South talks die ‘in traffic accidents’ In its annual study, Amnesty International claimed | Read More »

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  October 13th at 10:00 AM  | 

What a scary world we live in. Who would have guessed that in the 21st century one of the world’s largest military powers, a nuclear state no less, would contemplate handing the reins of power to an untested neophyte? The exact details of his birth have been kept under wraps. The details of his elite private education are shadowy, too. He’s the ultimate product of | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 29th at 02:59 AM  | 

A key story from today centers on John Dingell and his criticism of Chairman Julius Genachowski and the Obama FCC. Hillicon Valley reports that Dingell is criticizing the Commission harshly for failing to justify its Title II Reclassification plans to Deem and Pass Net Neutrality regulation of the Internet, and is telling them to stop and let the Congress do its job. Seriously, this is | Read More »