Congress is in a frontal assault on the first Amendment again. –

Most likely? Color me comforted. If the Democrats in Congress wanted to ensure that the FEC would not investigate political speech by bloggers, they would have written their exemptions to include bloggers instead of just traditional media outlets. The purposeful lack of exemption for bloggers looks ominous indeed — and could be used to harass smaller, unfunded bloggers out of the realm of political debate.

Even if bloggers were included in the exemption, why should the law discriminate between two similar corporations producing similar intellectual property simply on the basis of product when it comes to free speech? As Reason points out, the Supreme Court stated that such discrimination violates the First Amendment, and probably the 14th as well. What about NBC, owned (at the moment) by GE, which produces a myriad of products and services unrelated to speech. Should their media subsidiaries get that exemption, and if so, why? Surely NBC has a much more obvious incentive to bolster GE and avoid reporting on its problems, and the politics that impact them, than a blog has in backing a candidate or a bill in Congress.

This isn’t about “good government” or clean elections. It’s an attempt by Congress to step around the First Amendment and regulate political speech that threatens incumbents, just as McCain-Feingold attempted.

The Bill that attempts this is the DISCLOSE Act for your edification. Yet again Congress is attempting to circumvent the Constitution. impacts to blogs like this one? Directly probably none — for the moment. We are not a political blog. However we do advocate certain positions that could be considered political speech. So stay tuned.

Linky.

I pose that question for a couple of reasons. But they are all wrapped around security and the sanctity of your personal information. –

Researchers at VeriSign’s iDefense division tracking the digital underworld say bogus and stolen accounts on the Facebook are now on sale in high volume on the black market. Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, the social networking site that says it has sophisticated ways to defeat fake accounts.

During several weeks in February, iDefense tracked an effort to sell log-in data for 1.5 million Facebook accounts on several online criminal marketplaces, including one called Carder.su.

That hacker, who used the screen name “kirllos” and appears to deal only in Facebook accounts, offered to sell bundles of 1,000 accounts with 10 or fewer friends for $25 and with more than 10 friends for $45, says Rick Howard, iDefense’s director of cyber intelligence.

Source

and…

MINNEAPOLIS - Facebook is now sharing your personal profile information with third parties. For now, it’s just a few web sites, like the music site Pandora, and the consumer review site, Yelp.

Facebook is automatically sharing that information, without your consent. If you don’t want to share, you have to opt out.

University of Minnesota law professor and privacy expert Bill McGevern says it’s an important line in the sand. And for Facebook, with 600 million users, the stakes are high.

“Facebook is trying over and over to get this shared so Facebook becomes the center of the web,” said McGevern.

Facebook want to make money by selling user information.

Source

Either legally or otherwise your data is being proffered for sale. Are you sure you know who you are sharing that data with via third parties that you have no relationship with? Do you even know what is being done with the data? You ought to care, as it may mean you losing the next job or promotion. Forty-five Percent of Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Research Job Candidates, CareerBuilder Survey Finds To be blunt about it, if you have a rant on FaceBook about anything you might as well write LOSER on the bottom of your resume.

I have never held a Facebook account as I read the TOS first and found it lacking. Besides these days it is both cheap and easy to setup your own site on the web where YOU have total control of both the content and how it is shared. Consider this post a friendly hint. But you have been forewarned.

One Vignette says it all —

“You wouldn’t believe how badly they treated her,” an insider friend told me of Sarah Palin not too long ago. I assumed this person meant the Republican establishment. One can only imagine what they’ve been up to.

So Thursday night the former Alaska governor posted the following on her Facebook page ^[1]:

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it’s important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York’s 23rd Congressional district. It’s my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a “time for choosing.”

Palin has been sending a couple messages recently. First, she has, since stepping down as governor, started to communicate with the people not through the press but around the press. In other words, she’s speaking directly to the people through social media. She has had a couple well-timed and well-placed op-eds that have helped define policy arguments. However, most of the time she’s talked to the people via social media. (It should be noted that she’s been silent on Twiiter for some time — something I hope she’ll change soon.) This has had the benefit of letting the press know that she does not need them. Rather than go the Obama route and deny what is perceived as the one “enemy” to her aims, Sarah denies nearly everyone. And why not? The press trashed her with risible lies. Why give a dying breed ratings when she can reach the people herself?

Set aside whether you love of hate Palin. She does not seem to affect people any other way. The key is the delivery vehicle. Total news cycle bypass. It has also permitted the former governor to tap into a huge funding base. Long term –

• If you have the presence, a politican does not have to toe the news cycle. Fact they won’t even have to have their positions filtered. They just blast it out in a Twitter link to the relevant page on a data source on the Internet.
• It forces the news organizations to play catch up. Not once in a while but every time something is sent out. The politician’s base is receiving those Twitter and RSS feeds in real time the same time that a E.J. Dione or Krauthammer are. The reader can now make their own minds up on the position. The Press gatekeeper function is gone.

Whither then do things go? Well we are already seeing it. The news weeklies are almost gone. The cycle is too long to be relevant. We are also seeing the effect in the major dailies as well. Any winners? I can think of one class — think tanks. Organizations like Cato and Brookings. The voter might have received the latest missive from the politician. But…. the internet has fostered the idea of fact checking in much of the public. However most do not have the time to do the data mining to validate the concepts. Hence the think tanks have an opportunity if the democratize^ their content relevant to current events.

Its the classic story of supply chain collapse. Most of America is already used to the idea of not reading a pulp paper. So do us all a favor there MSM — die.

Linky.

^ As is typical, much of the content provided by think tanks are couched in the language of the Washington Beltway. To make such content palpable to rank and file Americans a serious scrubbing effort needs to occur.

No I don’t mean the business is for the birds. I mean that the data transport is USING birds! From hack a day –

Yes, you read that correctly: electronic mail carried by birds. [Ferdinand] tipped us off to this story, which involves combining new and old methods in transferring data. The Unlimited Group, a firm in a remote section of South Africa, transfers loads of encrypted documents to a second office 50 miles away. A pricey broadband connection would take between 6 hours and two days to transfer a standard load (4GB) of data between these locations. On the other hand, Winston (seen above) can complete an equivalent flight within 45 minutes. A memory card is strapped to his leg, and using his wit and instinct, Winston finds his way home. For those without their calculators on hand, Winston’s bandwidth is between 7x and 63x faster than what they had before. If his flash card were to be upgraded to 16GB, that would be an instant fourfold increase on top of current gains. As [Mark] pointed out on the Daily Mail website, homing pigeons still need to be taken back to their departure point.

This solution still has its advantages over a courier: they are lower in cost, they work over longer hours, and have potentially faster delivery speeds. Multiple pigeons can be transported back at once, and released with data as needed.

The birds are the perfect employee. They work for bird seed and make no health care demands. Oh and if you need more bandwidth, you just lauch two birds at the same time. You get data redundancy at the same time.

What I have not figured out is, if a chicken hawk takes down a bird. Is that a dropped bit or a checksum error? By the way the longest pidgeon flight on record is 900+ miles, Pensacola to Philadelphia in 12 days.

Linky.

Whoa you say. “I thought that was the 7 words you could not say” according to George Carlin. Well it is right now. Of course dear reader but we have to keep up with the times. There is a organization branded Little People of America that wish to add the word midget to the list of banned words. –

After this offensive program aired, a few people in LPA decided to take action. After informing people about the program and encouraging them to call those involved we hoped that our message would be heard. We contacted NBC, Mark Burnett Productions, All detergent and Donald Trump to inform them that they sent a negative message out to the general public. Through their program they sent the message that it was okay to use the word “midget” and make derogatory comments about people of short stature. We asked them to post a short statement regarding the previous week’s episode at the beginning of the episode that followed. We found it very important that this issue was addressed during this next episode or the opportunity to educate and repair the damage would be lost. The statement we asked to be posted was simple, to the point, and we hoped would rectify some of the damage caused to our organization and its members. The statement said the following:
 
After learning that last week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice was offensive to many people we would like to inform the general public that dwarfism is a medical condition and in many cases is considered a disability.  The word “Midget” is considered highly offensive by the dwarfism community.  It was not our intent nor should it be that of others to portray people with dwarfism in a harmful way.  Like other disabilities, dwarfism can impact any family.  Therefore Little People of America was created and continues to lend support for people and families who are affected by dwarfism.  If you would like to learn more about Little People America and support our cause, please visit our website:  www.lpaonline.org

Now personally I am torn which I will explain. But I also think there are better ways to achieve change. To attempt to ban a word is to waste effort of the greater society. First anyone who is a dork is going to continue to use the word midget or any of the other 7 words banned. Second, offense of one person in any group may not be considered an offense by another member of the same group. That applies to Blacks, Whites, Jews, Gentiles, Irish, Japanese, Tall People, Short People. I mean come on, I think we as a society have progressed enough that if you are going to insult someone at least be original enough to personalize the insult to that individual. It has more impact. [Not that I wish to see people going around insulting people.] The point being a blanket insult lacks effort and a reflects more against the thrower.

To the LPA specifically. Ladies and Gentlemen, withdraw the complaint. The FCC has more pressing issues to get this country into the 21st century. Your complaint lies specifically with Trump take it there. It is where it belongs. I would also raise one other observation. Were I in similar shoes I would take offense to ‘Little People’. My stature in society is not my physical size but my contributions to those around me.

Linky.

When you hear a newspaper executive claiming that his industry is an essential bulwark of society and that it stands threatened by a new technology that is, as of yet, unready to shoulder the same responsibility, you may be inclined to empathize. And indeed, that much is true enough as it goes.

But when that same newspaper executive then goes on to claim that this predicament has occurred through no fault on the industry’s part, that they have merely been undone by new technologies, feel free to kick out his teeth. At that point, he’s as fraudulent as the most self-aggrandized blogger.

Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was bought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s well before the internet ever began to seriously threaten any aspect of the industry. That’s well before Craig’s List and department-store consolidation gutted the ad base. Well before any of the current economic conditions applied.

In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money. We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.

Such short-sighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers – confident that American consumers were mere captives – offered up Chevy Vegas, and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan.

In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place.

When locally-based, family-owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly-owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed.

Economically, the disconnect is now obvious. What do newspaper executives in Los Angeles or Chicago care whether or not readers in Baltimore have a better newspaper, especially when you can make more putting out a mediocre paper than a worthy one? The profit margin was all. And so, where family ownership might have been content with 10 or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more, and the cutting began – long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed.

But editorially? The newspaper chains brought an ugly disconnect to the newsroom, and by extension, to the community as well. A few years after the A.S. Abell Family sold The Sun to the Times-Mirror newspaper chain, fresh editors arrived from out of town to take over the reins of the paper.
They looked upon Baltimore not as essential terrain to be covered with consistency, to be explained in all its complexity year in and year out for readers who had and would live their lives in Baltimore. Why would they? They had arrived from somewhere else, and if they could win a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain.

So goes David Simon’s prepared remarks before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on the Future of Journalism, May 6, 2009. What is telling is that he clearly points out that its is not so much that reporters stopped producing a good product (though there is a case to be made here too. But that’s another post.) but that the Suits sitting the boardroom shifted from being concerned about journalism and more concerned about the results required to satisfy the Wall Street institutions.

Let me tell you, the man has a case. Nor is Journalism the only industry to fall prey to this. I worked in telecom for 30 years. You can see the shift in the old headquarters of the regional Bells and independents. Paintings of the CEO’s of those firms on the wall with a small plaque with their name and educational attainment. Picture after picture with names like MIT, Princeton, Georgia Tech, Cal Tech, Worcester Technical, engineering schools all. As you get to the present day the paintings turn to pictures. But something else changes too. The schools are Northwestern, SMU, U of Penna, Harvard, Ball State, business schools all.

That transition marks a change from being concerned about the product you deliver to the profitability that can be obtained, usually at any expense to customer service and product quality. We are poorer for it. But don’t blame the companies, they are just reacting to consumer demand for better - cheaper. Sadly the cheaper is delivered but the better ends up lost in the soup of corporate dysfunctional desires.

But the prescription is probably not workable either —

But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued. And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax-based incentives for bankrupt and near-bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or even donate unprofitable publications to locally-based non-profits should also be considered.

Lastly, I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions with regard to the newspaper industry, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can sit down and openly discuss protecting their copyright from aggregators and plan an industry wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment, and institutional memory that has been squandered.

Absent this basic and belated acknowledgment that content has value — if indeed it still does after so many destructive buyouts and layoffs – and that content is what ultimately matters, I don’t think anything else can save high-end, professional journalism.

Problem one is the legacy news orgs need to ditch the millstone that is the printing press. It is an albatross of capital absorption that has lived past its time. Better to provide a subscription - Kindle model similar to what telecom does with cell phones (as much as I hate it, its viable.)
More on Correct to a Point

A lot has changed since angry consumers sought revenge on mass marketers by taping postage-paid return envelopes to bricks and putting them in mailboxes. A new generation uses online mobs to launch swarm-style attacks aimed at shutting down Web sites or at disrupting business in ways that an individual never could. Sites such as whocalled.us collect data about certain marketers to warn other consumers.

Ever received such a call? We have. Its a mere annoyance. And their repeated calling makes for problems for many hence the tactics above. But that is not all –

Michael Silveira decided to strike back. The 22-year-old laboratory technician, who doesn’t own a car, says he was getting unsolicited sales pitches as often as twice a day on his cellphone.

So last week, Mr. Silveira began calling back an auto-warranty company that has become the focus of an Internet crusade. He left it voice-mail messages that contained nothing but a recording of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Using phone numbers for Auto One Warranty Specialists Inc. that users posted to a Web site called Reddit.com, Mr. Silveira joined dozens of activists who have peppered the warranty company with messages including elevator music, threats and offers of rude services.

“I thought, if you get a bunch of people together, you could blow up their voice-mail boxes,” says Mr. Silveira.

The recipient of their efforts is David Tabb, the 42-year-old president of Auto One, an Irvine, Calif., warranty company with 60 employees. He says Reddit users overloaded his phone lines with computerized calls, changed voice-mail greetings on his company’s system, and even threatened arson. People have been conspicuously honking outside his home, he says. To cope, he redirected some of the numbers that activists had been calling.

Now being obscene or making threats is a tad over the top. At least in our view. So don’t do it. You could land in hot water legally. And don’t assume you can’t be tracked down if you do. With the assistance of the phone company(s) it is highly likely you will be if it is accompanied by a criminal investigation.

But that is not the whole story of course. As it is right now, 1st Amendment stands tall in saying you can’t stop them from calling. But there is a far cry from that standard. If I am walking down the street and and some guy is on a soapbox bellowing out some missive I can politely ignore him and keep walking. Neither party was harmed in the fact that I chose to ignore him. The speaker still retained his right to bellow his missive.

However the phone is not a manifestation of the fellow in the soapbox. By design phones are not multithreaded like the environment of the fellow on the soapbox. They only allow a single conversation at a time. By rote they block all other callers. When a robocall comes through I am effectively blocked from receiving the conversations I wish to hear. It would be equivalent to, once having reached within 50′ of the fellow on the soapbox, required to stop and listen for 1 minute. No one would stand for that actually or legally. So why do we persist in this fiction via the phone?

So a little bit of advise for those who want to swarm the robocallers –

• No obscene comments or threats. The idea of the music was a nice touch. Might I suggest the winning tune toward the end of the movie Mars Attacks?
• Make sure evey phone you have is on the federal do not call list. If your state has a registry also add your phone numbers there too.
• Look at your phone bill and make sure the number is listed there. Keep a copy. Its evidence they called you. If you end up in court it will be requested anyhow so be prepared.
• Assess whether it is worth your time. Acquiring personal satisfaction can be a time consuming business.

Welcome to the world of the Wild West of Telephony.

Linky.

…They roll out Fair Use claims and DMCA take down notices. They do so in many cases without a scintilla of legal support to their claims in the anticipation that they won’t get push back. Case in point —

I’m sick of people knocking embarrassing videos off YouTube with bogus copyright violation claims.

The latest culprit is CNN, a network that was recently embarrassed by a video of reporter Susan Roesgen cutting off tea-party protestors in Chicago, and assailing them with silly liberal talking points. The blog Founding Bloggers showed up on scene and caught her in further arguments with angry citizens who noted her biased coverage. I posted the Founding Bloggers video on Thursday.

Patterico is a blogger out in CA. He is, it looks like, standing there like a matador waving the cape. Hoping of course that the CNN lawyers take the bait. (Patterico is a legal eagle by trade. Legal is the only profession I know that can create their own customers.)

The issue of course is that companies are throwing their legal weight around and trampling on the law. Fair Use is there for a reason, and doubly so as it applies to political discourse. To not be able to use exhibits of others materials to counter such claims eliminates the public discourse in such matters. Imagine if the Democrats were to issue a fair use claim against the Republicans (and in reverse) on use of a campaign ad. It would be most surreal scene indeed.

Read the whole thing here.

Don’t say I didn’t warn a bunch of people that this problem was coming. I don’t care what you do, some folk just don’t comprehend or care to listen. You know the type — they cut you off in traffic and when you get in an accident with them they blame YOU. Well this is sort of what is happening with the DTV effort. Hawaii cut a month early and the DTV helpline lit up like a Xmas tree. –

By MARK NIESSE
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HONOLULU — At noon Thursday in Hawaii, a message appeared on analog TV sets across the islands: “All full-power Hawaii TV stations are now digital.”

The state shut down old-fashioned broadcast signals, more than a month before the rest of the country is set to make the now-contentious switch.

Even before the change, residents lit up special TV help center phone lines set up by the Federal Communication Commission. More than 300 calls came in Wednesday, and 10 lines were lighting up Thursday.

On home screens, the shutdown message flashed for about a minute in white text on a blue background. Then, a seven-minute announcement video began a broadcast loop that will continue for several weeks on major island stations.

Technicians are calling it the “analog night light.”

Now I want to be fair. As much as I blame the Governemnt for some of the debacle, much of it must go to the citizenry. Errors by the government? Unclear expectations to the MFR’s of sets. A policing policy that fined retailers but did not clarify the specifics of what was required for notification for analog sales. A notification process that did not ramp up fast enough. Its been in operation for 2 years. But PSA saturation really did not kick in till June of last year. Other problems were TV spots that linked to websites for their own good. (Hey this is coming go elsewhere for the information, which we don’t provide.) For the citizens, hey that PSA is up there for a reason. Give a listen willya?

The biggest problem? Too many voices. Had the FCC asked a Tom Cruise or Clint Eastwood to do the PSA as a 1 minute spot and that is ALL that ran. Some of the overlapping confusing would have been gone. A simple, state the date. Here are your actions based on three known quantities. Finally here is your solution. That can be done in a 1 minute PSA. They shove more information than that in a 1 minute commerical and sell millions of brand X quite well.

Sigh….

Linky.

This is a Telcom/Tech blog that also covers the impacts that tech engender. Rarely do we inject politics into the fray unless it serves the first purpose. In this case it goes to the nature of the quality control of the Fourth Estate, the press and why they are black, white and dead all over.

The setup. Of course the discussion is about the whole Chicago politics dust up. Watch the whole thing but pay particular attention at about the 3:00 mark onward. –

Now lay aside whether this discussion is about Obama or Blagojevich. That’s for another time and blog. But consider the ramifications of what the one news editor admitted — he knew of no involvement based on instinct. Gut, feeling, heart tugs. To be fair, many times gut is all you have to go on. But we are talking here of a member of a news organization that has resources to back that ‘instinct’ up. Or at least they should be. Bottom line, this is indicative of a quality control problem that runs much deeper than whether there is bias in the media.

Lacking the gum shoe effort to find the facts, any reporting agency can be bamboozled and flimflammed. Once that occurs too often then the quality suffers, readership declines and we reach the state of affairs that much of the journalist profession is in now. Can the Fourth Estate pull out of its dive? I think so. But they have to get the quality control issue resolved first. But don’t turn to the Jschools. Making the job of reporting a ‘profession’ has not stemmed the issue. The various entities need to look elsewhere. But I offer up no solution. Inquiry is supposed to be their stock in trade. They should be able to find it on their own.

HT: Hot Air.