By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 27th at 09:30 AM  | 

Oops. Went to bed before putting up Tech at Night last night. Sorry about that! Special morning edition instead!

Even as House extremists are effectively calling it racist to free up spectrum in America, the IIA has it right that we need the FCC to be serious about this.

So here’s an action point for anyone interested: tell Mitt Romney that he needs to appoint strong, reformist regulators not just to stop the bleeding in all regulatory agencies, but actually to roll back the disastrous Obama years. Repeal and replace. It’s not just for Obamacare anymore.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 22nd at 06:30 AM  | 

Wow: For a year FCC was tracking the movements of its speed testers without telling them! Privacy! Transparency!

Meanwhile the administration continues to try to do things on its own, without bothering to check that part of the Constitution that says how a bill becomes a law. Remember, the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act failed in the Senate. It has no business becoming an executive order. It also turns out that they are also looking to grab power when it comes to spectrum, which isn’t great news given the FCC’s obstruction and opposition to the use of efficient market allocation.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 13th at 03:30 AM  | 

It is done! Privacy is saved in America? The huge looming threat of Myspace has been defeated by FTC! Don’t you feel so much safer now that the dynamic, active regulators of the Obama administration have clamped down on a competitor of Facebook?

Shame on me. Remember when I went with the claim that Anonymous took down GoDaddy? Well, It may have been an opportunistic claim.

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

I guess legislatively it’ll be slow going the rest of this year, thanks to the elections. So Tech at Night just may be shorter for a while to come. That’s good for my sleep schedule, I believe. Though the aftermath continues of Harry Reid’s failure to ram through the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act, as John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and other Republicans criticized Harry Reid for | Read More »

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)  |  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)  |  June 14th at 01:30 AM  | 

When Jim DeMint and Steve Scalise first started talking about reforming the regulated relationship between broadcasters and cable companies, oh the fits that were thrown. Even a certain conservative group jumped out in front complaining. But look: these regulations are worth big bucks to the side they favor, and the negotiation deadlocks they produce don’t help the public, they only force everyone to deal with | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 9th at 03:00 AM  | 

You want more proof that every single private industry privacy debate in DC is completely wrong headed? MSIE 10′s do not track default is unpopular. People don’t care. They value cheap/free stuff and convenience over privacy protection. Other countries are looking to tax American businesses online. Does Barack Obama have the guts to fight for us? Or will he bow once again?

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 7th at 02:30 AM  | 

Commerce. “The business of America is business.” Innovation online is growing business, and the most important takeaway you could ever get from Tech at Night is that we need to stay out of its way. BfA seems to agree. And some honest government action on spectrum could be a great start, but we probably won’t start down that road until after January 20, 2013 at | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 5th at 01:00 AM  | 

Privacy? You want privacy in the digital age? Start by repealing campaign finance laws before you wag your socialist finger at the private sector. Al Qaeda also denied 9/11 involvement at first, but we knew the truth. Also, how can Anonymous deny involvement in an attack when they claim to be unorganized? It’s these slipups that let us know the truth about them: they’re an | Read More »

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

Gotta love it when Tech at Night is delayed because Comcast, despite telling me they’d auto-bill my card, choose not to do the auto-bill and instead just shuts off my Internet out of the blue. Lovely. So anyway, I’m unfortunately now low on time to create lengthy narratives, so we’ll do what we can. So, Steve Scalise, a rising tech star in the House, is | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 10th at 12:30 AM  | 

The masks are slipping on Cybersecurity. The CISPA debate has died to a dull roar now that the House is done with it, while the Senate may or may not pass it, and the President has promised a veto. And yet, still not outrage against Lieberman-Collins, despite Jay Rockefeller (who introduced a version of the bill the previous two Congresses) admitting he’s anti-business and anti-profit, | Read More »

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

So, LightSquared. It’s a funny turn this whole thing has taken. Way back at the start, when I was excited for LightSquared’s potential as a 4G competitor, I was told that they were the next Solyndra. Then, when the Obama administration and LightSquared both reacted badly to requests for oversight, I was convinced. Now, though, defenders on the right are cropping up again for LightSquared. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 3rd at 01:30 AM  | 

CISPA’s proponents bent over backward to respond to reasonable complaints, but the extremists are still complaining. Anonymous and Mozilla (much of which is foreign, no?) are whining, but nobody ever points to any specific, offending verbiage of the bill. Am I the only one who reads tech bills before complaining about them? Even Democrats are having to start acknowledging Republican expertise in tech leadership, though. | Read More »