Current Events of the TechnoPolitical World 1994 to Present.
American Politics today. With a special focus on The Impact of Digital Technology on Politics, Civil Liberties , Elections, Lobbying, and Life. ( and some other stuff too.) {MY COMMENTARIES ARE THE WORDS IN THE BLUE FONT.}
~~ I have been following the debate over Net Neutrality since 2005 -- and I gotta a admit , I thought it was a dead issue, till it reared it ugly heard again --this time with "do no evil Google" now advocating some form of tiered internet. So here is my take:
THE FREE MARKET will keep the internet free and open. Someone will always step up as an ISP service that will offer unbridled internet for HOME connections. Wireless connections make the issues of "hardware infrastructure" of wired systems less of an issue , so hopefully the Free Market alternatives will mean there will always be an option of ISPs. However , you may have to pay a bit more to surf the net w/o restrictions.
The debate over net neutrality has taken center stage after the FCC called off its attempts to negotiate a compromise with key industry players, and after Google and Verizon issued a joint "net neutrality" proposal of their own. The issue has devolved into a political knife fight with the two sides divided sharply along predictable ideological lines.
As Google defends its flip-flopped betrayal of the principles of net neutrality, and AT&T jumps on board endorsing the industry-sided Google-Verizon proposal, four Democratic members of Congress have jumped into the fray to assert their opposition to the plan. Edward Markey, Anna Eshoo, Mike Doyle, and Jay Inslee wrote a letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, declaring that "formal FCC action is needed."
"Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores."
It rains . My INTERNET modem goes on and off repeatably.
Sometimes the surge is so strong , that because I only have USB ports on my computer, the surge causes my Windows to reboot.
I loose no data when this happens and the computer is unharmed. it is just a pain.
I understand ,, that now cable vision DOES NOT support /endorse using a USB to connect the modem to the computer,, but I have no choice........
..... AND UNLESS IT RAINS -- with water getting into a corroded Cablevision Telephone pole box some where --- unless it rain ,, I HAVE NO PROBLEM !!
No rain ,, no re-boot problem. there should be no problem when it rains --that IS CABLEVISIONs problem , not mine.
We just did a test here at my house , and sprayed water with the garden hose all over the tele-pole directly behind my house. MY INTERNET was un affected. Being the last rainy day - Tuesday May 18th of this week ---- the INTERNET did go on and off REPEATABLY all day , the problem is another tele-pole box somewhere.
ALSO -- it is very clear , that the cablevision box on the tele-pole behind my house is SHINNY BRAND NEW ! Meaning it was recently changed --- as I have been told by your tech support guys all the way through for 3 weeks now.
The problem of the INTERNET going on and off on ONLY rainy days , is clearly not in my house , not the box behind my house on the tele-pole ,, BUT ANOTHER tele-pole box.
This point point was agreed upon by a senior tech rep who spoke to me last Friday May 14 -- the day No ONE showed up for a scheduled appointment.
AGAIN --please forward this email to the highest ranking folks at cablevision who supervise BOTH field repair and customer service.
Signed
TP
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mailed-by
cablevision.com
hide details6:24 PM (30 minutes ago)
Mr. Technopolitical:
Thank you for taking my call today. As agreed I will arrange a tech to come to your home between 2PM and 5PM on Friday 5/28. The tech will replace the NIC card in your computer and replace the your present modem with a Docis 3.0 modem.
Please let me know if for any reason we need to change these plans. My phone details are attached below.
I think this a good , even great thing. OK , as pointed out below it may create a sea of data so large it will be hard to navigate,, but as also pointed out , there are tech firms already looking to solve that issue-- which is a little economic boost right there. ~~ technopolitical
The government has answers. Lots of answers. Wondering which airline is the most stingy with passenger snacks? No problem. Want to know how many people were injured by vending machines last year? Got that, too.
Agencies and departments already boast countless registries and databases of seemingly bizarre, seemingly useless information, but lawmakers continue to call by the day for the creation of new databases.
Since January, Congress has introduced bills that call for the creation of nearly 40 new databases and registries, by POLITICO’s count.
~~ I am a big baseball fan , so i just could not resit posting this , even though it is more techno , than political -- but its BaseBall and that is all that really counts. It is also really very interesting.~~`
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Major League Baseball awarded geolocation patent
By Ben Klayman - Fri May 15, 2009 5:41PM EDT
CHICAGO (Reuters) -
Major League Baseball has won a patent for technology that blocked certain fans from viewing local games online, and it may open the door for the U.S. sports league to profit by licensing it to media companies.
Baseball's advanced media business was awarded a U.S. patent last month for online geolocation technology, a system that uses two or more electronic methods (such as wireless and satellite) to pinpoint the geographic location of a subscriber, the sports league said in a statement late Thursday.
The sports league filed for the patent, its first, in 2004 as a way of excluding certain fans from watching its games streamed live online.
MLB wanted to block reception of games in a subscriber's local market as a way of protecting the hundreds of millions of dollars its 30 clubs receive in rights fees from such regional sports networks as the New York Yankees' YES or Boston Red Sox's NESN.
"This was a clear example where necessity really was the mother of invention," Bob Bowman, chief executive of baseball's advanced media arm, said Friday in a telephone interview.
Baseball now could approach any company using multiple geolocation technologies to determine a subscriber's location and ask for a licensing fee, analysts said. The other options would be for those companies to try to work around baseball's patent or challenge it in court.
~~~ The Internet is a very interesting place. Just be careful.~~~~
Most Attacks Come from Legit but Hijacked Sites
Web attacks are routinely hosted by actual sites infected and acting as zombies, security firm warns.
John E. Dunn, Techworld.com
Sunday, May 17, 2009 01:10 PM PDT http://www.pcworld.com/article/165014/attacks_come_from_legit_hijacked_sites.html?tk=rss_news
Artwork: Diego Aguirre
The number of legitimate Websites being hacked to host malware has hit startling highs in recent days, new figures from MessageLabs have revealed.
Data taken from the days between May 4 and 8 showed that 84.6 percent of Websites blocked by the company for hosting malicious content were 'well-established' domains that have been around for a year or more.
During the same period, 10.2 percent of blocked domains were less than a year old and only 3.1 percent were less than a week old.
At first glance this, this runs counter to the assumption that malicious Websites more commonly exist for only days or hours in some cases, the better to avoid detection and filtering. This is termed "fast-fluxing," cycling websites through a maze of bogus sub-domains.
However, according to MessageLabs, the likely explanation is that a move to genuine domains means that the fast-fluxing has now migrated to use a different part of the domain tree.
"The bad guys will compromise the DNS and add sub-domains," said MessageLabs' Paul Wood. The recent figure represented a high mark, admitted Wood, but still represented a gathering storm.
"People need to be extra vigilant and understand that even sites they know and trust can be compromised through attacks such as SQL injection attacks, while businesses need to ensure they take the necessary precautions to block all the latest malicious sites," said Wood.
"With the ever advancing world of cybercrime, nothing can be taken at face value."
~~ Don't let you computer become a ZOMBIE !!!! Use care online, update your anti-virus and spam-ware regularly. Do not visit stupid websites that load these viruses. ~~~~
Zombie computers 'on the rise'
By Maggie Shiels Technology Reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8032886.stm Page last updated at 09:03 GMT, Wednesday, 6 May 2009 10:03 UK
Twelve million computers have been hijacked by cyber-criminals and detected by security vendor McAfree since January, the firm has said.
It reports there has been a 50% increase in the number of detected so-called "zombie" computers since 2008.
The true number of newly-hijacked PCs is likely to be higher than those detected by McAfee alone.
The figures come as a report from Deloitte said a global approach to cyber-security is needed.
"Doing nothing is not an option," said Deloitte's Greg Pellegrino.
~~ TWO Nice articles over at CNET today. One for those of you who want to understand how online rip-offs happen. ( Beside the crazy over-charges from our ISPs for hi-speed bandwidth we never really get.)
And another for those of you who still use P2P file share programs. Which I really do not any more. Simply too many virus bugs in cyberspace, and too much data on my computer that I value.
http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10233216-83.html
FAQ: Demystifying ID fraud
http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10233216-83.html How does the data get stolen from my computer? There are many ways sensitive data can be pried out of computer users. In a typical social-engineering phishing attack, a consumer opens an e-mail that looks like it was sent by the consumer's bank, Amazon, PayPal, or some other trusted source. With a bogus excuse, such as suggesting there was a security incident and the user needs to verify his or her account details, the e-mail will prompt the recipient to provide username and password via a link to a Web site that looks legitimate but isn't. The consumer enters the information and continues on, not knowing that the data is now being sent to criminals. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
news analysis The U.S. House of Representatives has scheduled a hearing Tuesday to examine a bill that would force peer-to-peer applications to provide specific notice to consumers that their files might be shared.
~~Not really surprising. At least spammers work hard to stay current. They do have a tough job. But you got to really wonder : Who reads spam ? And who in their right -cyber-mind would buy from a spam email ?
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Spammers Trying To Cash In on Swine Flu Frenzy
Nick Mediati, PC World
Apr 30, 2009 1:19 am
Worried about Swine Flu? If so, don't let your fear and anxiety dupe you into clicking dubious links in emails. Spammers are increasingly using Swine Flu in subject lines and messages to take advantage of people's fears of the rapidly-spreading Influenza strain, according to McAfee's Advert Labs Blog.
~~ The more people go online the more crime there will be online. Just a fact of human history, crime follows where people go. This just means the Netizens got to be careful in cyberspace. When you walk in a rough neighborhood , you stay on guard. The Internet is a rough neighborhood.
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Reports of Internet crime jump 33 percent!!
The total reported dollar loss from such scams was $265 million.
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29960044/
updated 4:58 p.m. ET,Mon., March. 30, 2009
WASHINGTON - A group that monitors Internet crime says complaints jumped 33 percent in 2008.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center said it received more than 275,000 complaints last year, up from about 207,000 the year before.
The total reported dollar loss from such scams was $265 million, or about $25 million more than the year before.
About one in three complaints were for nonpayment or non-delivery. The other most common complaints were for auction fraud or credit and debit card fraud.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center is a partnership of the FBI and a nonprofit group that tracks white collar crime.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
New Web address endings could be start of turf wars 4/7/2009 2:30 PM By Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
A sea change may be coming to cyberspace with Web addresses ending in anything from .a to .z. That has businesses increasingly worried they will have to spend millions to guard their brand names.
The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes officially "generic top-level domains" could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system.
It looks like some lawyers may be realizing that suing so-called "gripe sites" (more commonly called "sucks sites") might not make very much sense (thanks to Bill Squier for sending this in). The lawyer basically points out what plenty of folks have been saying for years: these sites are usually perfectly legal. They don't violate trademark law, and almost every time such a case goes to court the company loses -- only adding more attention and legitimacy to the gripe site. Instead, the lawyer suggests ignoring the site is often the best course of action:
The best course to deal with a gripe site often is to do nothing at all. The site itself actually might have a little impact on a company's business and the ferocity of its venom might obscure the reality that it is only one of millions of sites that has little traffic and that is visited only by the disaffected, whose business is ultimately lost anyway. Also, if the target pays no overt attention to the site, its operator may lose interest in this particular cause and direct his or her ire to more recent, emotionally appealing, or reactive targets. Non-action can be the most difficult course to take where there is a demand that something must be done.
DoInk is a free online drawing and animation tool that runs right in your browser. You can treat it like Microsoft Paint and use it to do just a quick doodle, or take advantage of its layer cloning and vector-based designs to create relatively advanced animations.
I chose the latter, and put together a pretty slick looking animation in just a few minutes. Adding additional frames is simple and intuitive, and the app saves everything you're working on in the background (and in the cloud) so there are no local files to worry about. You can also hop between projects at any time, just like you would in a software app
* Political WORK History *
* 1983-1986: New York Public Interest Research Group / Straphangers Campaign, New York, NY.
* 1986-1991: Greenpeace U.S.A, New York, NY,
* 1991-1992: Environmental Planning Lobby, Albany & Westbury, NY.
* 1992-1995: New York Public Interest Research Group / Straphangers Campaign, New York, NY.
* 2000: Nachas Healthnet Incorporated. Brooklyn, NY 11219.
* 2006 - 2008: Washington Heights-Inwood Coalition.
/*/*/
Education:
1998-2003: Yeshiva University, New York, NY. Political Science Major. Writing Arts Minor. B.A., January 2003.
* 1995-1998: Rabbinical College of America, Morristown, New Jersey. Judaic Studies B.A., August 1998.
