Facebook giving people in Africa free Internet; Poor US kids are still waiting...

I can't believe so many people are on Facebook. I read their privacy policy and hit the decline button.

Via CNN Money:

The social network is teaming up with the French satellite company Eutelsat (ETCMY) to launch a satellite that will provide internet access to people in sub-Saharan Africa. The satellite will launch next year and service will start in the second half of 2016. It will reach 14 countries in West, East and Southern Africa.
Facebook (FB, Tech30) will use the satellite to bring free Internet access to rural areas. The company is using satellites, lasers and drones to get the “next billion” people around the world online as part of its Internet.org initiative. It has already connected people in nearly 20 countries.
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Obama's FEC forced to retreat on regulating political speech on the Internet...

It was likely unconstitutional anyway...

Via Washington Examiner:

The Federal Election Commission, facing punishing criticism for suggesting that political activity on the Internet should be regulated, rejected talk of new rules Thursday, a victory for GOP commissioners who feared Democrats were targeting conservative sites, even the Drudge Report.
During a public meeting, Democrats on the FEC said they were responding to the public outcry in saying that no new rules are required.
Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said the FEC received 5,000 comments demanding the agency keep their hands off the Internet. In response, she proposed a resolution that directly barred Internet regulation.
“I wanted to make clear that I was listening to what people are saying out there and I think we should allay those concerns if people are concerned that we are about to do that,” she said. Her resolution said: “I further move that the Commission direct [counsel] to exclude from the rulemaking any proposal affecting political activity on the Internet.”
Republicans on the commission had raised concerns that Democrats on the commission were targeting conservative political and news websites like Drudge, and could regulate them.

Keep on reading…

Video of the Day: An Announcement from President Obama

Via SenTedCruz

Demos on FEC want to suppress free speech on the Internet...

Democrats mostly rule the the mainstream media. but the Internet has opened up the possibility for anyone to reach a mass audience. A good example of this is the success of the Drudge Report and many blogs.  Democrats don't like this and are trying to use the FEC to tamp down the conservative voice on the Internet.

The Washington Ex miner:

In a surprise move late Friday, a key Democrat on the Federal Election Commission called for burdensome new rules on Internet-based campaigning, prompting the Republican chairman to warn that Democrats want to regulate online political sites and even news media like the Drudge Report.
Democratic FEC Vice Chair Ann M. Ravel announced plans to begin the process to win regulations on Internet-based campaigns and videos, currently free from most of the FEC’s rules. “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the internet and other emerging technologies is long over due,” she said.
The power play followed a deadlocked 3-3 vote on whether an Ohio anti-President Obama Internet campaign featuring two videos violated FEC rules when it did not report its finances or offer a disclosure on the ads. The ads were placed for free on YouTube and were not paid advertising.

Bill and Hillary Clinton feared Internet would fuel a "vast right-wing conspiracy”

I don't know about a "vast right-wing conspiracy," but the Internet has wrestled control of information from the lying mainstream media. 

Via Breitbart:

Just ahead of a possible Hillary run for the presidency, the Clinton Library released a new load of documents from President Bill Clinton’s years in the White House. One of those documents attempts to explain Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” claim in which the Clinton administration accused Republican staffers of colluding with “extremists” on the Internet to hurt the Clintons.

On January 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton appeared on NBC’s Today Show. During her interview with Matt Lauer, she claimed that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” had been trying to destroy her husband “since the day he announced for president.”

That interview drew a lot of raised eyebrows and became a joke for years afterward. Hillary’s accusation became such a hot-button issue that Clinton’s White House felt it had to defend itself and drew up a full 28-page report to “prove” that there was, indeed, a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” This conspiracy was brewing, supposedly, among conservative think tanks, in conservative newspapers, and on that newfangled Internet thing, as all were colluding with the GOP to undermine the President.

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Educational Obamacare Video: Learning to "Internets" with Dana Loesch

Published on Mar 28, 2014

Dana Loesch teaches people how to use the internet in the wake of the latest Obamacare delay.

The NSA really likes your cookies...

The latest Edward Snowden revelation...

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.
For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.
The revelation that the NSA is piggybacking on these commercial technologies could shift that debate, handing privacy advocates a new argument for reining in commercial surveillance.

Obama's CMS withheld a damaging security report to get sign-off for launch...

In the private sector, people are quickly fired for things like this. Don't hold your breath waiting for the Obama administration to hold people accountable.

Via Fox News:

The top operational officer for the problem-plagued ObamaCare exchanges said in testimony before a House committee he found it “disturbing” that he was never made aware of significant security issues with the exchanges before they launched.
Henry Chao, the Deputy Chief Information Officer and Deputy Director of the Office of Information Services at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said in an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee Nov. 1 that he was never given a Sept. 3, 2013 memo that detailed six security problems, including two designated as “open high findings.”
The committee released the interview Monday as part of its investigation into the problems with Healthcare.gov.
The committee said in a press release Chao expressed disbelief when he was first shown the memo, which was authored by CMS Chief Information Officer Tony Trenkle.
He told the committee he was surprised the CMS’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) allowed him to tell CMS Director Marilyn Tavvener in a Sept. 27 letter that the website was ready for launch without showing him the security memo.
Keep on reading…

Brazil, Russia, India and China forming new Internet to avoid NSA spying...

Brazil, Russia, India and China forming new Internet to aid NSA spying. Do you blame them? Of course, Russia and China will be spying on the new Internet. 

BRICS countries are close to completing a brand new Internet backbone that would bypass the United States entirely and thereby protect both governments and citizens from NSA spying. [...]

Brazil is set to finalize a 34,000-kilometre undersea fiber-optic cable by 2015 that will run from Vladivostok, Russia to Fortaleza, Brazil, via Shantou, China, Chennai, India and Cape Town, South Africa.

According to the Hindu, the project will create, “a network free of US eavesdropping,” which via legislative mandates will also force the likes of Google, Facebook and Yahoo to store all data generated by BRICS nations locally, shielding it from NSA snooping.

“The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off,” notes Washington’s Blog. “Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s second largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th.

Change: Crusading site Groklaw is shutting down over concerns about privacy and government surveillance...

See what Obama hath wrought?

Citing concerns about privacy and government surveillance, Pamela Jones is shutting down her site Groklaw, which for years took on what she and vocal fans saw as wrongheaded legal action in the tech domain.
"There is now no shield from forced exposure," Jones said in final blog post Tuesday. Groklaw depended on collaboration over e-mail, "and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate."
Jones, a paralegal, started her site a decade ago taking on the SCO Group's legal attack on IBM and others involving Linux and Unix intellectual property. She rebutted the company's position, detailed the arcana of the lawsuit proceedings, and shared legal filings on which the case rested. Volunteers attended some hearings in person, and collaborative efforts found just any hole that could be poked in SCO's case. The site archives show hundreds of posts since its start in May 2003.
As SCO's case fizzled, Groklaw

What really amuses me is seeing all the liberal talking heads have to defend NSA spying on ordinary Americans and violating their privacy and constitutional rights. 

Senator Ted Cruz makes the case against Internet sales tax bill...

Senator Ted Cruz continues his awesomeness in the op-ed piece at RCP.

[snip]Consider this: Online and catalogue retailers with gross sales of $1 million -- a level that is mom & pop size in many places -- will be forced to collect sales taxes for the country’s 9,600 state and local tax jurisdictions. Just as Obamacare punishes small business with taxes and regulations for employing more than 50 people, this legislation would punish small businesses for making more than $1 million in sales. For many businesses it may be more beneficial to make less money than to keep track of all the different taxes.

Small and medium-size businesses would be subjected to monthly or quarterly tax returns to all 46 states who collect sales tax; in addition, one amendment likely to be added to the bill would also include all 565 federally recognized Indian tribes in the definition of “state,” so businesses would need to collect applicable taxes for them, too.
As if that wasn’t enough, each of the nearly 10,000 jurisdictions gets to have its own tax rates and sales tax holidays with thresholds and caps. Each state can give sellers their own “tax app” and it’s up to the seller to pay for integration into their in-house systems for ordering, fulfillment, and accounting.

Keep in mind, each state still gets to have its own audit, forms, tax base, and definitions. That means every online seller could be subject to dozens -- or eventually hundreds -- of audits each year.

So, how is this fair? After all, brick and mortar stores aren’t subjected to all these rules.

And, how is it fair for a Texas business to collect taxes to support California Gov. Jerry Brown’s big spending? Or to underwrite New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny statism or Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s anti-Second Amendment agenda?

Make no mistake: Big business supports this bill because it will drive smaller competitors off the Internet and out of business.

And it wouldn't help small brick-and-mortar retailers, as its proponents claim, because the sales they are losing today are mostly going to big-box stores and giant online retailers -- both of whom are already paying sales taxes.[snip]

Read it all...

Obvious: White House Supports Internet Sales Tax Bill

 Image via The Heritage Foundation



Well, it is a tax....


Via The Weekly Standard:

The White House today endorsed the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would be a tax hike for purchases made over the Internet. The White House claims the tax would "level playing field for local retailers."

"The Administration strongly supports S. 743, which will level the playing field for local small business retailers that are in competition every day with large out-of-state online companies," reads the Obama administration's statement on the policy.

[snip]The Administration strongly supports provisions in S. 743 that would directly address those concerns by granting only those States and localities that have simplified their sales tax systems the option to require all retailers, including those located out-of-state, to collect sales and use taxes already owed under law.  The Administration also is pleased that S. 743 provides an exception for small online businesses and requires States to make available, at no cost to retailers, software that helps calculate the State sales tax on remote transactions, as well as administrative services.[snip]

UN plan to seize the Internet advances...

Calling this a bad idea would be the understatement of the day...

Via WSJ:

Who runs the Internet? For now, the answer remains no one, or at least no government, which explains the Web’s success as a new technology. But as of next week, unless the U.S. gets serious, the answer could be the United Nations.

Many of the U.N.’s 193 member states oppose the open, uncontrolled nature of the Internet. Its interconnected global networks ignore national boundaries, making it hard for governments to censor or tax. And so, to send the freewheeling digital world back to the state control of the analog era, China, Russia, Iran and Arab countries are trying to hijack a U.N. agency that has nothing to do with the Internet.

For more than a year, these countries have lobbied an agency called the International Telecommunications Union to take over the rules and workings of the Internet. Created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, the ITU last drafted a treaty on communications in 1988, before the commercial Internet, when telecommunications meant voice telephone calls via national telephone monopolies.

Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations.

Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla. The Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around the world, with some 500,000 new users a day. [...]

Keep on reading…

Obama's FCC wants to tax your broadband Internet

If it moves, Obama wants to tax it...

The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service.

The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access.

The FCC issued a request for comments on the proposal in April. Dozens of companies and trade associations have weighed in, but the issue has largely flown under the public's radar.

Heroes: Bipartisan group of lawmakers oppose efforts to give the United Nations more control over the Internet

If the Obama administration supports more U.N. control over the Internet, they are idiots. Now I am worried...

Via The Hill:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced a resolution on Wednesday urging the Obama administration to oppose efforts to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

Proposals to give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet could come up at a conference in Dubai in December. The move is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, but is opposed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well as the Obama administration.

The proposals would give the UN more control over cybersecurity, data privacy, technical standards and the Web’s address system. They would also allow foreign, government-owned Internet providers to charge extra for international traffic and allow for more price controls.

Internet Inventor Al Gore Comes Out Against SOPA

I never thought I would be on the same side of an issue as Al Gore, but the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) goes way too far.

Former Vice President (and Apple board member) Al Gore has some strong words against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The bill “would very probably have the effect of really shutting down the vibrancy of the Internet,” Gore said at a CareerBuilder event Thursday night.

SOPA, if passed, would give the U.S. federal government a wide array of powers for disabling a website it found to be in violation of copyright law. Many Internet users and tech companies, including Yahoo, Google and eBay, consider the bill dangerous to the structure of the Internet as we know it.

Gore certainly, if belatedly, agrees. “In our world today there is hardly anything more important than to save and protect the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet,” he said.

Obama spending $400 million to bolster your "human right" to high-speed internet

How about a human right to keep our money away from greedy politicians who want to redistribut our wealth?

(Judicial Watch) — Following a laughable United Nations declaration that high-speed internet access is a basic human right, the Obama Administration is investing north of $400 million to expand broadband into poor, rural areas of the U.S.

The president has long asserted that broadband access is essential for communities to compete on a “level playing field” and he’s included it among the necessities to improve the lives of rural Americans. The agency in charge of distributing the money — the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) — took it a step further this week, asserting that high speed internet connections will help low-income residents in a variety of unimaginable areas.

For instance, it will “improve healthcare and educational opportunities,” according to Obama’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Broadband will also help the poor “connect to global markets,” Vilsack said, and it will provide “much-needed services to rural businesses and residents.” The investment, presumably on the part of the government, will also “increase jobs” in rural areas, Vilsack assures.

The PROTECT IP Act is a danger to internet, social networking sites, bloggers and website owners

Via Forbes:

Don't Let Hollywood Break the Internet With the PROTECT IP Act!

The PROTECT IP Act would allow copyright owners – movie studios and other content providers – simply to accuse a website of infringement, which could lead to that site being shut down by court order and entire links to the site being wiped clean from the Internet. Any website with a hyperlink, such as Twitter, Facebook or a blog, would be subject to liability. More, non-infringing sites could be inadvertently shut down under the proposal. Indeed, the law is so far-reaching that it would force Internet providers like Comcast to block all access to the allegedly illegal site.

Under this law, websites could easily be shutdown for political reasons because of false copyright claims.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Senator John Kerry: Cutting Government Spending Will Wipe Out Future Internets or Something

But..but...I thought Al Gore invented the Internet.

(Hillicon Valley)- Senate John Kerry (D-Mass.) warned Tuesday that spending cuts could wipe out future government achievements, like the invention of the Internet, which Kerry credited to Washington.

“A lot of people don’t think about that. But the fact is the government invented the Internet,” Kerry said in a 30-minute floor speech.

WTH? Obama Planning To Give Commerce Department Authority To Create Internet ID for Americans

An Internet version of a national ID card? What could possibly go wrong?

STANFORD, Calif. (CBS News) — President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.