By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  February 3rd at 11:30 PM  | 

Barack Obama admitted what we’ve been saying all along: Net Neutrality was an attempt to regulate the Internet. Told you so.

More FCC: Data use continues to go up, and it probably makes sense to remove barriers to investment on expanding our wireless capacity in this country. We still need spectrum, but the build out matters after that spectrum is acquired, as well.

Of course, instead of being sensible the radicals just want to spend more money stupidly.

All this is perfectly good reason to want to gut the FCC by reforming the Communications Act, but again, I just don’t trust the current legislative process to succeed at this in one big bill. When was the last time we had one big bill that worked well? Not in many years. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not optimistic.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  February 1st at 03:30 AM  | 

How do we know that the NSA stuff is being driven by anti-Americanism? So much outrage about NSA and American allies, but so little about Russia, China, and American rivals. Heck, I’m not even seeing a peep about a Chicom firm Lenovo buying Google Motorola.

Now here’s a major reform idea I could get behind: merging FCC and FTC. By removing one entity, we reduce the added burden on business when two different regulators come after them for the same stuff. Getting rid of DoJ’s antitrust division would help, too. Because now even SEC is grabbing new tech powers.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 30th at 12:00 AM  | 

So the FCC is meeting soon, and that’s probably going to produce some news. Some of us are hoping for the best under the new FCC Chairman, but he may yet be a radical extremist who will try yet again on Net Neutrality, after the FCC has lost twice in court when attempting that power grab.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 27th at 08:00 PM  | 

It’s happening: the feds have arrested Bitcoin Foundation vice-chairman Charlie Shrem for money laundering. The key point seems to be that his service BitInstant was tied to Silk Road.

Good news: Microsoft and Google won and are getting some declassifications of aggregate data on FISA demands for data. Aggregate data from large providers won’t help the bad guys, but it will inform the voters, and that’s all that matters here.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 24th at 09:00 PM  | 

It’s neat how the New York Times is dredging up an old NSA website as news. I guess it beats writing about Obamacare breakins or Benghazi.

And it’s interesting how Democrats don’t seem to want to dig into the Healthcare.gov or Benghazi failures but seem ready to blame Target for crimes against them.

So the Obama administration wants us to believe that taking gun databases from the states is legal, Healthcare.gov is legal, but NSA is illegal. Sure, buddy.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 23rd at 04:00 AM  | 

Why is Amazon winning? It’s not Sales Tax. It’s because Amazon is doing everything they can to combine their great selection with getting your purchases to you as fast as possible. That patent going around for predictive shipping is being reported so terribly. People keep focusing on getting something at your house you didn’t order. That’s not the real point of the patent. Figures 4A-4C of Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 demonstrate the real goal. They want to get items that are likely to be ordered into the networks of their package carriers, down to the local hub or first three digits of ZIP code, then slap on the address of a specific person who did order it, and get the item to the person insanely fast.

I know I’ve harped on this a lot, but it really is a shame that people in favor of sales tax changes have made this all about sticking it to Amazon, because there are legitimate tax reasons to favor taxing interstate purchases. Preserving sales tax revenue that used to be there means not having to raise or implement income taxes in order to get the same revenue per capita.

By the way, Healthcare.gov is horribly, horribly insecure.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 21st at 03:30 AM  | 

What’s better than anarchists getting arrested for spreading terrorists slogans, including threats? Anarchists getting arrested and caned for the same.

Speaking of people who need arrested, even as Kim Dotcom continues his war on copyright, he’s also going to get into politics in New Zealand. I think we can guess the sole platform element of his party: DO NOT EXTRADITE KIM DOTCOM TO AMERICA.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 18th at 03:30 AM  | 

Bitcoin is not really as widely used as its shills want you to think.

Ajit Pai is the man and understand what it means for the courts to be used to quash innovation. As the courts refused to crush the VCR, I want them to leave Aereo alone.

By the way, Healthcare.gov is still at risk. Good thing it’s a miserable failure, though that doesn’t help the poor souls already signed up and at risk in the vulnerable systems.

Democrats want to pass a new law mandating a private-public partnership to track where you and your phone are at all times, in the name of 911 calls. But remind me again how all the Snowden stuff is about privacy and not anti-Americanism and a rollback to 9/10/2001 thinking again. Sure, guys. Sure.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 15th at 08:00 PM  | 

FCC lost in court. Net Neutrality goes down again as the Open Internet order gets gutted. Some are worried about the future possibilities of the decision giving FCC too much flexibility in interpreting its own scope, particularly with respect to Title II Reclassification (see my post for an explanation of that term).

I expect that they’d want to try Title II Reclassification no matter how the court tossed Net Neutrality though. Which is why we need to start talking the idea down and tell them to stop and rethink things.

All you need to know about why Net Neutrality is bad though, is the Ronald Reagan line: Net Neutrality supporters are from the government, and hey are here to help.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 14th at 03:00 AM  | 

Can someone explain to me why the government feels the need to target a private company in the press? This reminds me of Russia. This isn’t justice, this is a vindictive Obama administration asserting power for the sake of power. They’re Marxists who wish to take down private industry because it is successful. If this were about mere antitrust, there would be no need to jockey in the press. But the surface allegations are mere pretext. That’s why they aren’t content to win. They have to attack and to destroy.

The FCC continues to be lawless as well, having rushed its prison phone power grab. But you won’t see any administration lawyers running to the press to condemn that.

So it turns out it wasn’t just Target that got its register systems broken into over the Christmas shopping season. Oh boy. Cue hysterical Democrat bleating to blame the victims some more, instead of standing up to the Anarchist wing of their own party, as was seen in the former Occupy “protests.”

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 11th at 03:00 AM  | 

Here we go again. The last couple of times, they wanted to use “statistical sampling” to replace the Constitutionally-mandated direct enumeration in the Census. Now they want to use online polls to do the Census.

Let’s be clear: The Obama FCC is terrible, and generally threatens innovation, but I absolutely oppose efforts to do a comprehensive Communications Act bill. It’s nothing against Fred Upton and Greg Walden on this, as they’ve generally been pretty good on these matters. But any huge bill like this is going to get set up by every lobbyist in DC, and it will invariably grow a grab bag of special interest giveaways. A comprehensive Communications Act would become a ‘we have to pass it to find out what’s in it’ moment. Don’t do it. Pass one reform at a time. Find incremental reforms.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 6th at 10:00 PM  | 

They told us for years that Mitt Romney was a terrible person because of his ties to private equity. Now Julius Genachowski, Obama’s first FCC chair is going into private equity, and not a peep from the radicals.

Erick Erickson’s already covered all the reasons Peter King should be excluded from polite political society, but I just want to remind as well that Rand Paul’s grandstanding isn’t all that great. Snowden is an unrepentant criminal and traitor and it’s a shame that Paul is just sucking up to his father’s crazier fans. I guess he really wants their campaign donations more than he wants his dignity.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 3rd at 09:30 PM  | 

If the whole card skimming scam keeps up, ATMs are going to be a real problem. At least, the unattended kind. In fact we’re probably already at the point where it’s getting to risky to be using ATMs at less intelligently monitored locations, like gas stations or hotels.

Remember Net Neutrality? Mike Wendy rightly says it’s “Undermining Free Speech, Private Property, Free Markets and the Will of the People:. Let’s hope the FCC loses in court, again over this.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 31st at 05:30 AM  | 

So I took Christmas off, but don’t forget: even as Democrats play blame the Victim, you should get your debit card or credit card replaced if you used it at Target recently. The attackers got your PIN even.

The traitor Edward Snowden very interestingly says he won, which seems to mean he thinks it’s himself against we the people. He’s sure not on the side of liberty, when he’s on the side of the child pornography den Tor. And yet, He’s still desperately trying to feel his Russian paymasters. Not even loyal to them.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 22nd at 03:00 AM  | 

As I mentioned Friday night, I had so much to cover I was breaking up Tech at Night into two parts. This is part two.

Remember when I called out Wikileaks for abandoning their ally Edward Snowden in Russia? They claimed he had settled there and their job was done, but I knew better. Well, here’s the proof that they’ve used him up and thrown him away: he’s still trying to get out of Russia, this time to Brazil. Spying for Wikileaks doesn’t even pay.

Remember when Snowden was supposed to be all about defending American civil liberties? Now he’s sticking up for Russia against Norway. Huh. Almost like we’d expect a traitor that fled ultimately to Russia to do, eh?