Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House. The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks.

The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it.

I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA, so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT.

Yes, the FCC does need reform. Republicans want a transparent and accountable FCC, so naturally Obama Democrats are opposed. The Obama FCC and allies is out of control: shifting opinions of market forces as is convenient to justify power grabs, taking power in new issues needlessly, buddying up with George Soros-funded radicals at Free Press, and of course blocking spectrum transactions needed to service the growing market for wireless Internet. The FCC is out of control. Obama regulators know no bounds.

Someone came up with a clever idea recently: lease television antennas to people so they can watch free broadcast television over those channels. The clever part? Aereo would let you watch over the Internet what your antenna picks up. Naturally, this threatens some cable television revenues, if people actually have free stuff, so the broadcasters are suing. I hope they lose. These are purely free, over the air broadcasts.

PATENT WARS: Apple and Samsung lose some claims against each other in Germany, essentially drawing without injury. Google/Motorola Mobility however is at risk of some pretty bad worst-case scenarios over its loss to Apple in Germany.

Phone app development is creating jobs and wealth! Quick, to the Schumer-mobile! That job creation must be stopped, post haste!

Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House. The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks.

The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it.

I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA, so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT.

Yes, the FCC does need reform. Republicans want a transparent and accountable FCC, so naturally Obama Democrats are opposed. The Obama FCC and allies is out of control: shifting opinions of market forces as is convenient to justify power grabs, taking power in new issues needlessly, buddying up with George Soros-funded radicals at Free Press, and of course blocking spectrum transactions needed to service the growing market for wireless Internet. The FCC is out of control. Obama regulators know no bounds.

Someone came up with a clever idea recently: lease television antennas to people so they can watch free broadcast television over those channels. The clever part? Aereo would let you watch over the Internet what your antenna picks up. Naturally, this threatens some cable television revenues, if people actually have free stuff, so the broadcasters are suing. I hope they lose. These are purely free, over the air broadcasts.

PATENT WARS: Apple and Samsung lose some claims against each other in Germany, essentially drawing without injury. Google/Motorola Mobility however is at risk of some pretty bad worst-case scenarios over its loss to Apple in Germany.

Phone app development is creating jobs and wealth! Quick, to the Schumer-mobile! That job creation must be stopped, post haste!

I’m back. I ended up taking an extended Christmas break because well, I liked having a break, plus there wasn’t a whole lot going on anyway. But, back to work!

Lamar Smith and Chris Dodd still want to censor the Internet, by pushing the SOPA bill that we need to defeat. Why is it bad? Victims get no due process, ISPs have the burden of proof if government makes economically or technically unreasonable demands on them, and of course the largest reason of all is that it amounts to censoring the Internet without actually stopping foreign infringers of American copyrights.

Let’s make sure to watch the SOPA sponsor list. They must be primary targets this cycle if they don’t turn. I don’t care who they are. Marsha Blackburn is one of my favorite members, but Erick Erickson is right to call her out. This is a bad bill, a terrible bill.

Yes, the foreign leeches are annoying, but the problem is that SOPA doesn’t actually stop them. It attempts (poorly) to censor what Americans can see online. It doesn’t protect American property rights, but instead threatens them in an ostrich-like attempt to hide us from the rest of the world.

Activists are already at work. There’s also an alternative to SOPA that actually will work. The OPEN act promoted by Darrell Issa and Ron Wyden would use proven techniques for stopping foreign infringers; Apple uses it already against patent infringement. The ITC exists for a reason.

But, Chris Dodd’s MPAA and now the RIAA are demanding SOPA, not OPEN. They don’t care if the Internet is open; they think if they shut down the Internet in America that you’ll buy more CDs and DVDs. They want government to pick winners and losers, not just protect rights. OPEN protects rights. SOPA pits one industry against all others.

Kill the bill. Primary the offenders. For those of us thinking of focusing on races other than the Presidential race, that’d be a great project to work on.

I’m glad FCC censorship has its limits at least. Cable TV can show respected works without worry.

PATENT WARS: The great, peace-loving Soviet Google buys more patents in bulk, though the firm continues to insist it uses patents only defensively. Meanwhile Some make the case that Apple should fight Android less and instead offer up patent licenses, to cash in on Android the way Microsoft does.

Imagine if we ended the arbitrary scarcity of top level domains (think of .com, .net, .us, .ly, etc.). ICANN wants to expand our choices, but some in government want to hinder and slow down the process. I’m torn. On one hand it’s an obvious cash grab on the part of ICANN and the registrars, as they know deep-pocketed big businesses will buy up many more domains to try to protect their expensive brands. On the other hand, for the rest of us, the expanded choices will reduce costs. So in this case, self-interest on the part of registrars seems to benefit the public. The invisible hand moves.

Some people give lawyers a bad name. Righthaven was one of those firms, trolling around the internet making suing people a business model. Moe Lane says they’re getting “force choked,” and I’m not about to cry about it, despite being a strong proponent of copyright.

Online terror group Anonymous won’t quit. Like any other crime syndicate, they make threats against innocents at will, and make attacks that harm bystanders. Even when they try to do “good,” by attacking members of the fringe, fascist, racist, literally Nazi-loving political party in Germany, the Nationalist Party of Germany or the NPD*, they mess up badly. By breaking the law, they’re making the Nazis out to be victims, which is counterproductive.

I’m back. I ended up taking an extended Christmas break because well, I liked having a break, plus there wasn’t a whole lot going on anyway. But, back to work!

Lamar Smith and Chris Dodd still want to censor the Internet, by pushing the SOPA bill that we need to defeat. Why is it bad? Victims get no due process, ISPs have the burden of proof if government makes economically or technically unreasonable demands on them, and of course the largest reason of all is that it amounts to censoring the Internet without actually stopping foreign infringers of American copyrights.

Let’s make sure to watch the SOPA sponsor list. They must be primary targets this cycle if they don’t turn. I don’t care who they are. Marsha Blackburn is one of my favorite members, but Erick Erickson is right to call her out. This is a bad bill, a terrible bill.

Yes, the foreign leeches are annoying, but the problem is that SOPA doesn’t actually stop them. It attempts (poorly) to censor what Americans can see online. It doesn’t protect American property rights, but instead threatens them in an ostrich-like attempt to hide us from the rest of the world.

Activists are already at work. There’s also an alternative to SOPA that actually will work. The OPEN act promoted by Darrell Issa and Ron Wyden would use proven techniques for stopping foreign infringers; Apple uses it already against patent infringement. The ITC exists for a reason.

But, Chris Dodd’s MPAA and now the RIAA are demanding SOPA, not OPEN. They don’t care if the Internet is open; they think if they shut down the Internet in America that you’ll buy more CDs and DVDs. They want government to pick winners and losers, not just protect rights. OPEN protects rights. SOPA pits one industry against all others.

Kill the bill. Primary the offenders. For those of us thinking of focusing on races other than the Presidential race, that’d be a great project to work on.

I’m glad FCC censorship has its limits at least. Cable TV can show respected works without worry.

PATENT WARS: The great, peace-loving Soviet Google buys more patents in bulk, though the firm continues to insist it uses patents only defensively. Meanwhile Some make the case that Apple should fight Android less and instead offer up patent licenses, to cash in on Android the way Microsoft does.

Imagine if we ended the arbitrary scarcity of top level domains (think of .com, .net, .us, .ly, etc.). ICANN wants to expand our choices, but some in government want to hinder and slow down the process. I’m torn. On one hand it’s an obvious cash grab on the part of ICANN and the registrars, as they know deep-pocketed big businesses will buy up many more domains to try to protect their expensive brands. On the other hand, for the rest of us, the expanded choices will reduce costs. So in this case, self-interest on the part of registrars seems to benefit the public. The invisible hand moves.

Some people give lawyers a bad name. Righthaven was one of those firms, trolling around the internet making suing people a business model. Moe Lane says they’re getting “force choked,” and I’m not about to cry about it, despite being a strong proponent of copyright.

Online terror group Anonymous won’t quit. Like any other crime syndicate, they make threats against innocents at will, and make attacks that harm bystanders. Even when they try to do “good,” by attacking members of the fringe, fascist, racist, literally Nazi-loving political party in Germany, the Nationalist Party of Germany or the NPD*, they mess up badly. By breaking the law, they’re making the Nazis out to be victims, which is counterproductive.

Some government mistakes slip by with only a few of us shouting about them. The Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, is not one of those. People across the Internet are getting loud against the House bill and its Senate counterpart PROTECT IP, the one I’ve been yelling about for months, but many businesses are supporting.

Yes, I’m going to be that guy, saying I was into the band before you ever heard of him. But, instead of being disappointed that the band’s gone mainstream, I’m glad we’re now at the point where Darrell Issa is changing his Twitter avatar in protest of the bill.

The bill has serious problems. As I previously warned it tampers with the delicate balance of interests present in the DMCA, but on top of that Title I is nothing but a framework for censorship in America that can and is designed to be triggered not through judicial trials, but through mere injunctions. And further, if an ISP or other targeted company cannot technically or economically manage to comply with the government’s orders to censor, the burden of proof is on the ISP to show that as an “affirmative defense.”

This bill goes too far. Kill it. Issa says he will introduce his alternative. I hope it follows the model of the UIGEA: cut off funding to lawbreakers. Censorship is not needed.

Patrick Leahy wants more criminal penalties for online attacks. Not having read the bill, I don’t know if there’s something dangerous in there, but the core concept is one I strongly support. We need to put the bad guys in jail. Regulation of the good guys is not the answer.

Chuck Grassley continues to demand transparency on LightSquared, threatening to block the two new FCC commissioners until he gets that transparency from the administration.

The Supercommittee continues to get lobbied by everyone imaginable. Two tech-related efforts are from our SOPA pals in the music industry, who actually appear to agree with me on incentive auctions to allow television spectrum to be voluntarily made available to alleviate our high-speed wireless Internet spectrum crunch. Politics, strange bedfellows, etc. etc.

Public Safety Alliance also agrees with me, not surprisingly, that we need to take the “D block” of spectrum and allocate it to first responders as a civil defense effort. 9/11 taught us this is needed, as spectrum inconsistencies were a problem in the response to the 9/11 attacks in New York. Further, this is spectrum the market does not want, as attempted auctions of the D block have failed, even as other blocks sold successfully. I’m a conservative, not an anarchist. I believe government has a role, and civil defense is part of that role. There’s no harm in assigning the D block to national civil defense efforts, but there’s plenty of good.

As Republicans prepare legislation to reform the FCC, the FCC responds by changing up its lobbying arm, the Office of Legislative Affairs. Hmm.

And yes, FCC reform is needed, as Lee Terry points out. Or as Rick Boucher said, with shades of Gray Davis, “The chair needs to understand that his entire role in life is to carry out Congress’s will.”

Yup, Net Neutrality’s in trouble. Free State Foundation’s been solid on the issues in my view, as has Media Freedom. So including both in one link is a trick I enjoy.

Some government mistakes slip by with only a few of us shouting about them. The Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, is not one of those. People across the Internet are getting loud against the House bill and its Senate counterpart PROTECT IP, the one I’ve been yelling about for months, but many businesses are supporting.

Yes, I’m going to be that guy, saying I was into the band before you ever heard of him. But, instead of being disappointed that the band’s gone mainstream, I’m glad we’re now at the point where Darrell Issa is changing his Twitter avatar in protest of the bill.

The bill has serious problems. As I previously warned it tampers with the delicate balance of interests present in the DMCA, but on top of that Title I is nothing but a framework for censorship in America that can and is designed to be triggered not through judicial trials, but through mere injunctions. And further, if an ISP or other targeted company cannot technically or economically manage to comply with the government’s orders to censor, the burden of proof is on the ISP to show that as an “affirmative defense.”

This bill goes too far. Kill it. Issa says he will introduce his alternative. I hope it follows the model of the UIGEA: cut off funding to lawbreakers. Censorship is not needed.

Patrick Leahy wants more criminal penalties for online attacks. Not having read the bill, I don’t know if there’s something dangerous in there, but the core concept is one I strongly support. We need to put the bad guys in jail. Regulation of the good guys is not the answer.

Chuck Grassley continues to demand transparency on LightSquared, threatening to block the two new FCC commissioners until he gets that transparency from the administration.

The Supercommittee continues to get lobbied by everyone imaginable. Two tech-related efforts are from our SOPA pals in the music industry, who actually appear to agree with me on incentive auctions to allow television spectrum to be voluntarily made available to alleviate our high-speed wireless Internet spectrum crunch. Politics, strange bedfellows, etc. etc.

Public Safety Alliance also agrees with me, not surprisingly, that we need to take the “D block” of spectrum and allocate it to first responders as a civil defense effort. 9/11 taught us this is needed, as spectrum inconsistencies were a problem in the response to the 9/11 attacks in New York. Further, this is spectrum the market does not want, as attempted auctions of the D block have failed, even as other blocks sold successfully. I’m a conservative, not an anarchist. I believe government has a role, and civil defense is part of that role. There’s no harm in assigning the D block to national civil defense efforts, but there’s plenty of good.

As Republicans prepare legislation to reform the FCC, the FCC responds by changing up its lobbying arm, the Office of Legislative Affairs. Hmm.

And yes, FCC reform is needed, as Lee Terry points out. Or as Rick Boucher said, with shades of Gray Davis, “The chair needs to understand that his entire role in life is to carry out Congress’s will.”

Yup, Net Neutrality’s in trouble. Free State Foundation’s been solid on the issues in my view, as has Media Freedom. So including both in one link is a trick I enjoy.

Censorship’s the big word right now. The FCC’s under pressure to ban pro sports blackouts, and the Supreme Court may end national profanity rules. However I consider those things small. Few people have access to television broadcasts. Most of us aren’t actually censored by these regulations.

We all have access to the Internet though; that’s how a nobody like me is able to shape the debate against well-funded leftist groups. So I’ll freely admit it: It’s a self-serving thing for me to oppose Internet censorship. I don’t want the Obama administration to have the power to collaborate with private leftist groups to steal people’s domains, and force all ISPs to cooperate with that effective creation of a national censorship blacklist.

They want to call the little guys “E-PARASITES,” using copyright as cover to censor whatever the heck they want. Because once you let the government start blanking out parts of the Internet, then what’s to stop them from blanking out oversight of that censorship? Nothing. Just ask Australia, which censored the internet “for the children,” but then started banning oversight of the censorship, as well as unrelated content like American anti-abortion websites.

The committee vote on SOPA / E-PARASITES is coming, and I’m hearing that the witness list for the bill is stacked 5-1 in favor of the bill. In the Republican House, we’re rigging the hearings in favor of giving the President more regulatory power over the Internet. It boggles the mind. Please consider contacting the Judiciary Committee and asking them to oppose this censorship power grab.

If the US Government starts monkeying around with DNS, the world will ignore it, the same way we ignore Chinese attempts to censor the Internet. We will lose our position as world leader of the Internet overnight.

The forces of regulation never give up. They constantly press for more government intervention in the media, more control and less freedom. This is the face of media reform, and I hope Republicans defeat SOPA as one aspect of it in the House.

The Democrats in the Senate beat us on Net Neutrality, and we now rely on the courts to act to protect private industry against that power grab. I hope we don’t have to do the same for SOPA. We truly can’t wait.

I’m especially interested to see whether House Democrats like Maxine Waters dance for their Hollywood (MPAA), Music (RIAA), Banking (MasterCard), Union (AFL-CIO), and Pharmaceutical (Pfizer) corporate masters and back SOPA, as much as I’d like to see Republicans stand up to these guys.

Credit to Google: they seem to be learning. Opposing SOPA, making good on its promise and re-opening the sources to Android, and of course Obama fan Eric Schmidt’s novocaine-fueled rant against big government are all great signs that the company really may be once burned, twice shy since the FTC came against them. Was Search Neutrality all it took to get Google to realize regulation hurts it more than it helps, or was Schmidt taking a lesser role with the firm also a factor?

I called it, I called it, I called it. Sprint got the iPhone and now Sprint’s phasing out unlimited data, just like the “evil” Verizon and AT&T. Clearly Sprint is benefiting greatly in the marketplace from the iPhone, and that popularity has an impact on its network. Just imagine how much it’s hurting T-Mobile that they can’t offer the phone.

Censorship’s the big word right now. The FCC’s under pressure to ban pro sports blackouts, and the Supreme Court may end national profanity rules. However I consider those things small. Few people have access to television broadcasts. Most of us aren’t actually censored by these regulations.

We all have access to the Internet though; that’s how a nobody like me is able to shape the debate against well-funded leftist groups. So I’ll freely admit it: It’s a self-serving thing for me to oppose Internet censorship. I don’t want the Obama administration to have the power to collaborate with private leftist groups to steal people’s domains, and force all ISPs to cooperate with that effective creation of a national censorship blacklist.

They want to call the little guys “E-PARASITES,” using copyright as cover to censor whatever the heck they want. Because once you let the government start blanking out parts of the Internet, then what’s to stop them from blanking out oversight of that censorship? Nothing. Just ask Australia, which censored the internet “for the children,” but then started banning oversight of the censorship, as well as unrelated content like American anti-abortion websites.

The committee vote on SOPA / E-PARASITES is coming, and I’m hearing that the witness list for the bill is stacked 5-1 in favor of the bill. In the Republican House, we’re rigging the hearings in favor of giving the President more regulatory power over the Internet. It boggles the mind. Please consider contacting the Judiciary Committee and asking them to oppose this censorship power grab.

If the US Government starts monkeying around with DNS, the world will ignore it, the same way we ignore Chinese attempts to censor the Internet. We will lose our position as world leader of the Internet overnight.

The forces of regulation never give up. They constantly press for more government intervention in the media, more control and less freedom. This is the face of media reform, and I hope Republicans defeat SOPA as one aspect of it in the House.

The Democrats in the Senate beat us on Net Neutrality, and we now rely on the courts to act to protect private industry against that power grab. I hope we don’t have to do the same for SOPA. We truly can’t wait.

I’m especially interested to see whether House Democrats like Maxine Waters dance for their Hollywood (MPAA), Music (RIAA), Banking (MasterCard), Union (AFL-CIO), and Pharmaceutical (Pfizer) corporate masters and back SOPA, as much as I’d like to see Republicans stand up to these guys.

Credit to Google: they seem to be learning. Opposing SOPA, making good on its promise and re-opening the sources to Android, and of course Obama fan Eric Schmidt’s novocaine-fueled rant against big government are all great signs that the company really may be once burned, twice shy since the FTC came against them. Was Search Neutrality all it took to get Google to realize regulation hurts it more than it helps, or was Schmidt taking a lesser role with the firm also a factor?

I called it, I called it, I called it. Sprint got the iPhone and now Sprint’s phasing out unlimited data, just like the “evil” Verizon and AT&T. Clearly Sprint is benefiting greatly in the marketplace from the iPhone, and that popularity has an impact on its network. Just imagine how much it’s hurting T-Mobile that they can’t offer the phone.

So while there have been a number of genuine online attacks lately against the Senate, the CIA, PBS, Bioware, and more, the headlines have been full of reports of aftershocks. What seems to be going on is that existing account credentials leaked from previous attacks are being plugged into other sites, including Paypal.

Anyone who reuses passwords is vulnerable to these secondary attacks. Be careful out there.

These punks are overreaching though. Now the NSA is getting involved. These guys had a mission in life to track down and make life tough for Soviet spies. These no-life kiddies don’t have a chance.

If the Senate won’t move forward with Congressional Review Act repeal of Net Neutrality, then let’s just defund Net Neutrality. Good going, House Republicans.

I absolutely oppose efforts to exempt Facebook ads from campaign finance requirements. If the “paid for by” details are burdensome on Facebook, then they’re burdensome elsewhere. Repeal it for everyone, not just for one favored website. To do otherwise is unfair.

Speaking of unfair, evidence has come out that Google’s ad sales team is favoring Barack Obama’s re-election campaign over Republicans. The firm denies it, of course, but Google denies everything that’s true but harmful before coming out and admitting it later. So let’s watch this.

Reports continue that Sprint Nextel will make a deal with LightSquared to give its customers 4G LTE access. Currently Sprint gives 4G access through Clearwire’s WiMAX network. This doesn’t sound like the move of a company expecting to defeat AT&T and T-Mobile through the government, then getting to buy T-Mobile itself.

More on that deal: The Internet Innovation Alliance has a great comment in with the FCC busting the myths of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, explaining how the merger instead will improve competition, lower prices, and benefit customers in the marketplace.

Competition is strong already, though. The Nielsen company proves it again by showing how much data use is going up even as data prices are going way, way down. The cost per megabyte is down over 40% over the last year alone, Nielsen says, going from $0.14 to $0.08.

Closing the night with a whole bunch of copyright and patent matters.

While I agree with the CREATE conference that copyright infringement is a bad thing, I simply cannot support the continued but selective criminalization of copyright. If the iTunes Match deals between RIAA members and Apple are found to infringe on copyrights, will RIAA executives or Steve Jobs go to jail? Of course not. that’s only for high school and college kids.

We certainly wouldn’t jail RIM’s bosses if RIM infringed on Dolby’s patents. Why not? The civil courts work just fine to protect intellectual property. Criminalization is an unnecessary and dangerous expansion of government that picks favorites without actually improving the protection of rights in America.

Another dangerous act that would reduce the rights of inventors in America is the America Invents Act. I support Dana Rohrabacher in his efforts to lead the fight against that bad bill, which would change patent law so that the first person to invent an idea would no longer get the patent. The first person (or mega patent mill) to file the patent wins, regardless of whoever actually did the work first. Apparently it’s good because they do it this way in socialist Europe. Yeah, right.

We may be finding out how Apple got so much support for iTunes Match though. Hardcoding iOS to block recording of concerts sounds like a way the record companies would throw a bone to the actual artists.