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It’s Memorial Day and a little rainy here, so I pulled out the iPad to catch up on tech news. And I stumbled on to a piece of proposed legislation that scared the bejesus out of me. The so-called PROTECT IP act (S.968), now fortunately placed on hold in the US Senate by the same senator who prevented the misbegotten COICA legislation from moving forward, is something every Internet user should know about.
First, you want to know about PROTECT IP in order to call your Congressmen and Congresswomen to tell them you believe this bill is dangerous and ill-advised. Second, you want to know about PROTECT IP because a collection of academics and DNS experts has written the most informative and compelling description of PROTECT IP and the DNS itself I’ve ever read. The document in opposition to PROTECT IP is written for legislators and staff, so it has a primer on DNS technology and makes this crucial — and vulnerable — component of the Internet accessible to even newbies.
If you use the Internet (how’d you get here?), you need to read the Ars Technica story on PROTECT IP and spend an hour with the experts’ whitepaper on DNS describing why PROTECT IP is such a mistake.
We all have leisure activities, right? One of mine is to read the actual text of bills pending in Congress. Hey, I have an interest in the legislative process — and I submit you do, too.
The good news is the Library of Congress makes the full text and history of every Congressional action available online at www.thomas.gov. C-SPAN will occasionally refer viewers to the site as it broadcasts legislative debates. (And yes, I watch the debates, too.)
Think about this level of access. From the comfort of my home, I am able to watch legislators bloviate while perusing the actual text of the laws they are making. It’s live, instant, free — and free of journalistic “interpretation.” It’s source material for the body politic. It’s truly amazing.
The bad news? thomas.gov is impenetrable for the casual user. You need a degree in “Beltway” to be able to form a high-level understanding of a bill.
Consider H.R. 4853, the year-end tax bill that Congress is debating this week and which is center-stage at the moment in American politics. While everything is “there,” I defy you to gain an understanding of what the bill actually is from this link. thomas.gov gives you all the data — but in a disconnected, you-have-to-be-a-legislative-aide-to-use-the-website way.
We are so close with sites like thomas.gov to making the political process more accessible in ways that I believe fundamentally enhance our democracy. The Library of Congress needs to “bulk up” the website a little, Charles Atlas style, to get it over that last usability hump to make it accessible for the casual user.
I’ve really had my fill. I’m up to here (picture my hand patting my chest just below my neck) with the claims Martha Coakley is making about bringing “real accountability back to Wall Street and Washington.” The Attorney General is talking, in part, about the settlements she negotiated in the auction rate security scandal.
Here’s the ad she’s running ad nauseum:
Each time I see it, it rings less and less true, based on my direct experience.
The claims about getting “$1B back from banks” conveniently leave out the fact that the Mass. AG’s office left thousands of small-fry holders of ARSs high and dry in the Commonwealth’s settlement with the banks. She got her press conference announcing a settlement…freeing the AG, the Treasurer’s Office and the banks to get back to business as usual. And the claims of accountability don’t match up with the fact that nobody from her office has ever returned my calls or a letter about this in nearly two years.
Madame Attorney General, isn’t it time, as you say in your ads, that you or someone in your office responds to retail customers’ frozen ARSs? (On the off chance you didn’t see my letter from December, 2008, I’ve attached it to this post.) Isn’t it time for you to stop claiming you’re for the little guy when your office cut deals with Goldman Sachs and UBS that left us out in the cold?
There’s at least one voter in the Commonwealth who knows what the AG’s brand of accountability will mean.
And, no, I am not a Republican.
Dear Chairman Steele,
Last November, I made a $25 contribution to your party’s candidate. I also made a $25 contribution to the Obama campaign. Then, I wasn’t sure who would have been the better president.
Now, after months and months of non-stop invective from you and your party against President Obama, I am sure I did the right thing in voting for Obama.
Let me get something off my chest: when I gave you my contribution I asked you not to send me email…not to call me at home…not to keep sending me the vile propaganda and lies via snail mail that you are now sending at least twice a week. (We’ll get to the “survey” I’ve attached to this post in just a minute). I made the same request of the Obama campaign. They honored my request; you and your party of naysayers and obstructionists have not.
Instead, you keep sending me items like the “survey” I’ve scanned in and attached to this post. Maybe you thought that you could make wild claims like the one that the current administration is issuing “radical environmental regulations based on unproven theories and the demands of out of-touch left wing extremists.” Or maybe that some misguided Republicans might be pleased that your politicians “…have successfully blocked or amended many of their most radical proposals” while proposing and contributing nothing to the debate.
I get it…I really do. Negative works. Calling everyone names…calling their mothers nasty names…works better than actually governing…being a loyal opposition…contributing to the greater weal. Instead, for your party everything the other party does is wrong; only you can solve problems like Wall Street’s greed, a war based on lies and a sunken economy. Oh…I forgot. For those, we have Republicans to thank. As President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.”
I hope everyone reading this post takes a look at the “survey” you sent me. C’mon…do you think your voters are idiots? These questions are one-sided and are like waving the red flag at a bull. All you want is money…and if you piss people off at government…make them feel it’s working against them, so much the better for you and your power-hungry Senators (and so much the worst for us).
It’s too hard to pick the most egregious of the 19 questions on this “survey.” Clearly, you don’t give a damn about what people think…you just want them to read this, get angry and send you money. Still, what’s the point of a question like #16 (Are you in favor of the federal government taking a permanent ownership stake in the nation’s largest banks)? Aren’t Citibank and AIG dying to pay back TARP funds so they can get back to ripping off investors without government oversight? Didn’t the taxpayers line Goldman Sachs’s pockets with credit-default swap payments via AIG’s bailout? Isn’t it enough for you that Wall Street is too big to fail while the rest of us aren’t?
Seriously, Chairman Steele, if you want people to consider Republicans to be capable of running the country, start by working with the current administration to fix the problems we have. Next, admit to the failed policies of eight years of the Bush administration…including torture, warmongering and being asleep at the economic switch.
And please, please stop sending me twice-weekly appeals for money disguised as the worst kind of pandering direct mail.
I’ve been way too busy to blog.
But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck.
It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage wrought by the market meltdown of the last two weeks since 9/30. Going from bad to cataclysmic has wiped out years of parsimony, leaving my personal financial situation questionable. We’ve often heard the stories of people “wiped out” in the Depression of the 1930′s. Could that be happening here?
Then, on a happier note I searched on “UMA” because I’d just gotten a BlackBerry that switches from the cell network to Wi-Fi. I think this is amazing because seamlessly switching from one protocol to another is no mean trick.
Clicking around, I found this story on college students preferring Wi-Fi to beer.
Sorry, but no. I remember college without Wi-Fi. The only thing we preferred to beer was women. And since I founded a failed Wi-Fi hotspot company in early 2002, I know how popular beer remains with respect to being…uh…”online.”
Now the only question is, if you can’t afford beer or the college loans it takes to get that free dorm-room Wi-Fi, does this absolutely guarantee an Obama victory next month, just as Roosevelt was swept in after the Hoover administration’s market-based dogma ruined the economy? (Sounds just like the current Bush administration, doesn’t it?)
And, if it’s Obama (oh yeah, it’s gonna be Obama), does he drink beer? Hillary did…that’s why I liked her.
Now you get the SSAT-level analogy that politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi, right?
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