The New York Times on China’s hacker underground:
Three weeks ago, Google blamed hackers that it connected to China for a series of sophisticated attacks that led to the theft of the company’s valuable source code. Google also said hackers had infiltrated the private Gmail accounts of human rights activists, suggesting the effort might have been [...]

[Read more →]

It’s something of a cliche among privacy researchers that “anonymity loves company“: Anonymizing mix networks (e.g. Tor) are more secure and more anonymous the more people are using them. Glossing the geekalicious details, the basic idea is lots of different encrypted communications, going to and from lots of different people, get chopped, scrambled, and sent [...]

[Read more →]

Via some outfit called VoIP News, I’m intrigued to learn that my insidious paymasters at Cato number among the 15 greatest enemies of net neutrality. Scary!  Turns out Cato is a “hired voice of reason” which, along with CEI “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.” [...]

[Read more →]

Speaking of (1) old stuff I’d meant to comment on, and (2) journalistic objectivity… Saul Hansell is, on the whole, a solid tech reporter, but golly, what do you think his view on net neutrality regulation might be?
F.C.C. Seeks to Protect Free Flow of Internet Data
In a move to make good on one of President [...]

[Read more →]

Richard Koman at ZDnet on proposed legislation to block FCC net neutrality rules:
The amendment is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to assert Congressional control of an executive function. They try to get around this by controlling “expenditures,” and I certainly don’t know the Supreme Court holdings on such approaches, but it seems to me that controlling [...]

[Read more →]

If I can amplify a bit on a post at the Cato blog earlier today, I want to clarify that I fully agree some of the ISP behaviors that net neutrality proponents have identified as demanding a regulatory response really are seriously problematic. My point of departure is that I’d rather see if there are [...]

[Read more →]

And not even resting that much, but as I noted earlier, expect to see a good deal more of my blogging over at Cato@Liberty these days. Here’s a long one on the recent call for more regulation of behavioral ads—which, believe it or not, I only mostly disagree with.

[Read more →]

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say “net neutrality is crap,” but John Dvorak’s column sums up the substance if not quite the tone of my feelings on the issue—which is to say, it’s a  disconcertingly nebulous solution to a thus-far largely hypothetical problem. It’s certainly understandable that people think it’s important [...]

[Read more →]

The stories appear so frequently these days that it’s practically a new genre: The lawsuit over some patent claiming monopoly on a bang-your-head-on-a-desk obvious procedure, emerging from the shadows to threaten a technology that’s long been ubiquitous.  The most recent instance is likely to get some play outside the tech press because it’s resulted in [...]

[Read more →]

Sometimes I swear the Times runs articles just to make my head hurt. Consider this op-ed by one Robert X. Cringely, who does actually appear to be a fictional character dreamt up by Arthur Sulzburger (or other, darker forces) to be the instrument of my torment:
Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft [...]

[Read more →]