John McCain’s attempt to privatize the Internet

I've often written about net neutrality. See this post on the meaning of net neutrality and this post on the recently introduced "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009." Today, Senator John McCain made it clear that he is not in favor of a free and open Internet. He believes that access to the Internet should be entrusted to the telecoms. As reported by PC World,

McCain's bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom'.

What is McCain's rationale for this terrible bill? It's yet more free market fundamentalism:

"Today I'm pleased to introduce the Internet Freedom Act of 2009 that will keep the Internet free from government control and regulation," McCain said. "It will allow for continued innovation that will in turn create more high-paying jobs for the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeking new employment. Keeping businesses free from oppressive regulations is the best stimulus for the current economy."

Here's a bit more background on McCain's mindset, which consists of a war of misinformation (keep in mind that during the presidential campaign, McCain admitted that he didn't even know how to use a computer):

McCain was on the opposite side of the Net neutrality debate from President Barack Obama during last year's presidential campaign. During his White House campaign, President Barack Obama came out strongly in favor of Net neutrality, which is backed by companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and consumer advocacy groups, but opposed by telecommunications, wireless and cable companies.

In short, since U.S. citizens have retained such immense control over the television and radio airwaves (this is sarcasm and here's Exhibit A), we'll hand the Internet over to private corporations too. The solution to McCain's attempt to hand control of the Internet to big profit-hungry corporations is to require McCain to subject himself to cross-examination in real-time by someone like Lawrence Lessig, or any other rational person who is knowledgable about net neutrality. McCain would be one or two simple questions from being exposed as either naive or corrupt.

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Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", by Ray Comfort. If you don't know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he's trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

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Microsoft Stabs FireFox

I've long been an advocate of the FireFox browser. I've used it since it was first announced, and rarely use IE for anything but testing web designs and browsing Microsoft's own non-W3C compliant web pages. One of my reasons is that Internet Explorer has major vulnerabilities via its ability to directly run ActiveX code on the machine of users without asking permission. That is, it is a hacker's pipeline into your operating system. Well, a few weeks ago, a Microsoft Update quietly installed the .Net Framework assistant into any FireFox browser it found. Shoved that narrow shiv of vulnerability right into the heart of the generally more secure FireFox core. When it was noticed, the savvy segment of FireFox users were outraged. Not just because it was done, but because it was done in such a way that it couldn't be easily removed! Sure, it would let FireFox users see those rare sites dependent on ActiveX, but it would also let hackers run ActiveX on your machine! When I found out, I first Googled to find a way to remove it using regedit and about:config (two dangerous powerful tools). But a week later, updates by Microsoft and FireFox made it easier to remove. If you have it, remove it. Here's one of the articles about it from ZDNet, a generally Microsoft friendly environment. This article also contains removal instructions that assume you have recent updates. btw: If you didn't know. FireFox spell checks all blog entry fields as you type. And you can add nifty customizable Make Link tools for easy creation of links in comments to blogs and such. Just highlight text on a page, rt-click and Make Link to copy complete link code, ready to paste.

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Die, Caps Lock, Die

One of my peeves against propagated obsolete legacy is the caps lock key for computers. I hate it. In the 32 years that I've been using computers, I don't think that I've ever hit it intentionally. It is where it is because typewriters used it to mechanically lock down the shift key. But I have yet to meet anyone who types in all caps, except to indicate online screaming. Even then, it isn't hard to hold a shift key with a pinky while typing with the other 9 fingers. But now there is a fix! In every version of Windows since W2K, there is a secret patch that lets you convert any key to another. I've chosen to make CAPSLOCK into a simple shift. If I really need to lock caps, I can do it through software, or convert another useless key (e.g. scroll lock) into caps lock. I found the magical tool in JohnHaller.com's Useful Stuff essays: Disable Caps Lock. It's a simple registry tweak that he found at annoyances.org (where they have full technical details). Just download and launch the tweak. You get warnings, But it works! Just follow the directions and you'll never be bothered by caps lock again.

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New Direction in the World Wide Web

The U.S. Government is considering loosening the hold on the group created by the U.S. Government to oversee internet naming for the world. This recent PC Magazine article describes how ICANN Begins Moving Away from U.S. Control. One big milestone will be to allow alphabets other than Latinate (English) in website names. This is a big change; going from one-byte letters to unicode two byte letters to accommodate the thousands-of-letter alphabets of pictographic languages. You browser already can handle this. And the next billion new internet users won't need to first become fluent in the Roman Alphabet. But the change that has the business community abuzz is that they are opening up the Top Level Domains. You know, .com, .org, .us, etc. Back when they added .com and .org there was some sputtering about the lack of need. After all, we had .gov, .org, .edu, and all the country domains. Why have specific virtual realms for-profit and non-profit suffixes? Then the web took off, and "everyone" soon associated the commercial superdomain (.com) with "the web". Eventually, even government entities gave up on .gov, and made .com their native home, like usps.com. Now, businesses are worried that opening up these suffixes completely will get expensive. One likely suggestion being debated is ".food". Will McDonalds have to pony up to buy its suite of names in .food as well as in .com? What if someone opens up .burger? Want dot fries with that? It could get expensive and confusing to have dozens or hundreds of names for any given website. Will this become a new boom time for cyber-squatters, those who buy up names and hold them for ransom? And what about "www"? 15 years ago, there still was a subtle distinction between hyper-text transfer protocol (http://) and the Web (www). The former originally applied to text-only Bulletin Boards. But this has long evaporated, and www has become an artifact that remains mainly because it is easier to type than "http://" as an indicator to a browser of what you mean by a URL.

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