By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 19th at 05:30 AM  | 

Had some work to do Friday night, so this this became Tech at Sunday Morning!

I still don’t see it passing the House after Mike Enzi’s winners and losers talk poisoned the well, but conservative governors want MFA passed for good reason. Ask Scott Walker.

Remember when the T-Mobile/MetroPCS deal flew through the Obama administration without a hitch? I think we now know why: it meant the end of the MetroPCS challenge to Net Neutrality. How convenient.

Stealth recording technology. What could go wrong? Of course, if you don’t like Google Glass, the real thing to do is to let property owners ban it on their own property. Problem solved.

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

More proof people don’t care about privacy: Google announces a service is ending, and the competitor I use to prepare Tech at Night becomes flooded to the point of unusability Wednesday night. People just don’t care what Google is doing.

The Street View WiSpy scandal didn’t scare people off, even as Texas hits Google for those offenses. Glass excites them. The shift toward human biases doesn’t raise questions. People love Google’s services, and privacy doesn’t enter into the equation. So keep regulation out.

Make sure you catch my recent RedState post on Aaron Swartz, and how the blame casting against his prosecutor is not only unfair, it’s wrong.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 9th at 02:30 AM  | 

A lot of conservatives seem to be getting behind a Hatch-Rubio bill to increase immigration for skilled individuals. No wonder Harry Reid wants to block it for partisan reasons. Have to put politics over anything else. Can’t let Republicans do a good thing.

Though I think the Senate priorities are pretty messed up. Jay Rockefeller is talking about workforce standards in the context of cybersecurity legislation. Talk about using any excuse to grow government. At least guys like John Thune recognize the need for the government and private business to work together against foreign Internet threats.

I mean, we can’t rely solely on NSA doing its best to do the right thing on its own.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 29th at 03:30 AM  | 

Apologies. I’ve had some technical issues tonight, and after twice nearly losing my list of links to work through… I’ll do my best, but I’m not really feeling it at this point. So sorry if I’m subpar tonight.

Two Google wins going on. Larry Page talked with FTC on antitrust and now the left is shrieking that sanity may prevail on this. Google isn’t a search monopoly. Amazon, eBay, IMDB, sites like these ensure it. Even if Bing and Duck Duck Go are having trouble breaking through, domain-specific search matters, a lot, and Google has to compete with that, or die.

That said, it’s ridiculous that Google was allowed to hack people’s browsers, store information surreptitiously, and instruct the browsers to send that information to their servers at later times. This directly against the expressed wishes and policies of the users involved. All they have to do is pay Obama his 20 pieces of silver, and they even get to keep the data.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 20th at 02:00 AM  | 

Remember when AT&T tried to get T-Mobile’s spectrum in order to give Verizon some more competition? And how Sprint opposed that because it would heighten competition? Well now it’s turnabout. SoftBank is attempting to buy a majority of Sprint, which will in turn take a majority of Clearwire. That will give Softbank control of a large amount of US Spectrum. So AT&T wants regulatory review. Heh.

To be clear, I think it’s a good thing that firms are doing what they can to get spectrum and compete, even if I laugh at the revenge attempt going on here. In fact I think it would have been very interesting to see Softbank/Sprint/Clearwire vs AT&T/T-Mobile vs Verizon. But we’ll see what shakes out in the end.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 13th at 12:30 PM  | 

Funny how Google says they can’t fix Googlebombs when the fact is, Google is constantly improving its search algorithms. After all, the Bush-era Googlebombs of WhiteHouse.gov disappeared pretty quick after Obama was elected.

Stuff like this is why I don’t expect Google’s regulatory problems to go away in the event of a Romney win. Google has left its systems open (Blogger, Search, Youtube) for the left to abuse the right, and has been slow to react. It’s going to be very easy for the left wing of the GOP to get talked into expanding government to come after them, unfortunately.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 6th at 03:30 AM  | 

Even the Obama regulators occasionally do things right. It was right for FCC to let the regulation die that forced cable companies to license original content to competitors. Though as The Hill points out, it may have done so out of a fear that the courts would force the issue anyway, not out of any desire to deregulate. Naturally House and Senate Democrats can’t abide the least bit of deregulation.

But don’t worry, they’re still making mistakes, too. They can’t free up spectrum until 2015, moving at a snail’s pace in a fast moving industry. And FTC’s antitrust attacks on Google are ludicrous. The standard for antitrust is high: if I recall correctly you have to show market power, being wielded, in a way that harms customers. I’m not sure that, relative to Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, that such points can be made at all.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 4th at 01:00 AM  | 

Everyone else is talking about the debate, but I’m going to touch on cybersecurity tonight. There was a great overview of what the issues and stakes really are on Monday’s Coffee and Markets. Francis Cianfrocca doesn’t post as much as he used to at RedState – he, not government, is building his business – but he sure knows what he’s talking about when it comes to government, military, and critical infrastructure cybersecurity. And he and I are in agreement that the Obama plan is wrong.

Kay Bailey Hutchison is also saying that a new Senate report on the topic also makes the case. “For months now I’ve been saying that it would be a mistake for the Administration to give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) control over our nation’s cybersecurity. This report affirms my position, and I urge the Administration to take the report into account and not issue an Executive Order that significantly expands DHS’s role in cybersecurity.”

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 11th at 02:00 AM  | 

Out of control. It seems like only defeating Barack Obama in an election will truly stop this administration. Sure, for now they’ve been scared off of the Internet Tax, but with Net Neutrality and the Cybersecurity Executive Order still brewing, the Obama administration has more power grabs up its sleeves than we should ever have allowed.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 1st at 02:00 AM  | 

Governors Robert Bentley, Mitch Daniels, Dennis Daugaard, Bill Haslam, Paul LePage, Rick Snyder, and Tom Corbett are part of push for the Marketplace Fairness act. I’ve come across a July letter to John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi. I find it odd they’d do so now, unless they think they have no chance under a potential Republican Congress. Could that be the case? I wonder.

And yes, those are all Republican governors, some of whom were part of the 2010 landslide. It’s only Republicans I’m seeing back MFA, not Democrats. Democrats are fine with just passing new taxes or raising old ones. They aren’t as hard up to maximize collections of old taxes as Republicans are.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 26th at 01:30 AM  | 

Hey, digital libertarians? Hope you’re ready to move on from Barack Obama, His administration thinks the First Amendment is an obstacle to greater government on the Internet, and not something that must be respected or protected by the courts when it gets in the way. This of course turns the First Amendment on its head. I guess in the Democrat parallel world Tim Wu and | 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)  |  April 26th at 02:20 AM  | 

In an example of lucky timing, the GSA scandal proved why Darrell Issa’s DATA act was needed. Transparency in government allows for oversight. So the bill passed the House by voice vote. I first floated a while back the idea that this sudden, strident CISPA opposition was roote d in a desire to distract the public from the much stronger and more dangerous Lieberman-Collins bill | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 21st at 12:30 AM  | 

CISPA is still a harmless bill devoid of new mandates of power grabs, but I’m actually short of new things to say about it this week. Lieberman-Collins is the real threat. Watch the other hand. Let’s start with some spectrum instead. Verizon is under fire for trying to buy spectrum from Comcast and other cable companies, even as it tries to sell other spectrum. Note | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 14th at 10:00 AM  | 

Good evening. I’m considering shifting Tech at Night to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But I might not. I’ll have to think about it. So, more CISPA. The comparison with SOPA is absurd. I put out a challenge for anyone to refute the claim first by the Republicans and now by Facebook that there are no new mandates in CISPA. No takers so far. That’s because | Read More »