So, while Google may have seen the light on Net Neutrality (which is actually, amusingly enough, making the far left sound like me), they still have other issues going on. The WiSpy Street View spying issue is still ongoing, with South Korea raiding their offices and Germany pressuring the firm to be more transparent and responsive to privacy complaints about the program.
Because as I said earlier today, asking Eric Schmidt about privacy is like asking Phillip Morris about smoking. The conflict of interest is inherent. Everyone who hides his identity from Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and every other Google program is costing the firm money.
Meanwhile, the EU and the FTC are targeting Apple for an incredibly ridiculous reason. You see, Steve Jobs has kept Adobe’s proprietary, intellectual property-protected Flash framework off of iOS (which drives the iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone). Reasons given include CPU load which drains the battery, and no apparent need for it with the maturity of HTML 5 and CSS 3 technologies available in the Safari browser and its Webkit framework.
So naturally the governments are claiming that this open embrace of open, unrestricted technologies… harms competition. Yeah. Seriously. As far as I’m concerned, any government entity that forces Apple to license a closed, monopolized technology, or punishes Apple for failing to do so, loses all legitimacy forever in anything it ever says or does. That’s how irrational this is, to question the abandonment of closed technology in favor of industry standard, open technology as anti-competitive.
For crying out loud, Webkit is an open source framework. Anyone can grab the source and use it, even Adobe itself, thanks to its roots in KDE. Apple does virtually everything it can to open up Webkit and Safari, while Adobe has done nothing. And yet Adobe is the good guy here, per the FTC and the EU. What a joke. I cannot express enough how much this burns me up.
Meanwhile, at the FCC, the FCC has caught onto the latest buzzword that the rest of the Obama administration uses when it wants to grab power online: “Cybersecurity.” Hold onto your CAT-6 cables, because the government is coming, and it’s here to help.
The FBI isn’t here to help, though, unless you’re a big corporation making millions of dollars. According to TechDirt, the FBI has made missing persons a lower priority than copyright infringement cases, which aren’t even supposed to be criminal at all, but rather civil matters. This is a subsidy, pure and simple, but in this case is literally coming ahead of people’s lives and safety. Shame on the FBI.
Yet while the FBI goes nuts over copyright, TSA is going wild with file sharing as it saves half-naked pictures of travelers, despite promises that those pictures would not be stored in any form. That claim was of course laughable from the beginning, when even plain, old copiers store data these days. Do we miss the time before the TSA yet?
And to finish up tonight, let’s just get a reminder of the hypocrisy of Free Press. As much as they demand transparency for thee, they themselves tell plenty of lies and keep plenty of secrets. Free Press is having many meetings to lobby for its agenda that it’s not even bothering to disclose under the Lobbying Disclosure Act’s requirements. Oops. Good catch, Daily Caller.
Steve Maley
KnightsofMalta
Dan Spencer
Moe Lane
Dan McLaughlin
What Google Did with Street View
jgebo Wednesday, August 11th at 11:38PM EST (link)So I can tell you exactly what google did with the street view thing. Maybe this is already public knowledge, not sure..anyway, I found out because I recently moved.
Anyway, at my old house they must of recorded my wireless routers MAC address and its coordinates when they drove by. How do I know? Well, like I said I moved to a new city, but I still have the same wireless router and when I use my blackberry in UMA mode (connected to my wireless router) and launch google maps and ask it to show me my location, it brings up my old street address every time (until that is that the GPS kicks in, which takes a while for my blackberry). Anyway, this is what they did…not sure about the legality of it, just sure of the technicality of it.
The carbon footprint of the internet....... It's going to figure into the madness soon.
Kenny Solomon (Diary) Thursday, August 12th at 8:22AM EST (link)Has to happen.
The Left can’t help themselves.
Command and control.
Nudge.
The internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 a year – as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland, or more than half of the fossil fuels burned in the UK.
Around 300 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to every person in the UK flying to America and back twice over.
All carbon footprints are hard or impossible to pin down accurately, but the internet is a particularly complex case. This isn’t just due to the fact that the “net” consists of millions or even billions of machines owned by countless people and companies. There’s also another problem: even if we knew exactly how much energy all these devices consumed (which we don’t), we still wouldn’t know how much of that energy was spent on offline jobs (such as creating documents in Microsoft Office) and how much was spent on online jobs (such as emailing those documents to a friend or colleague).
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The authors of this UK Guardian piece are completely serious about quantifying the unquantifiable and so are the rest of the ICLEI people – the one-world government folks and the rest of the greenies, hell-bent on the smart grid with every single thing on the planet connected to it.