Politechan

From the law on unintended consequences, or from the huffery and puffery that goes before new tax changes we have this nugget about Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer challenging the proposal of Barrack Obama.
 
“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said, according to Bloomberg News. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the [...]

 
Unable to do anything productive due to her own mental deficiencies, Congresswoman Sanchez has rounded up some other mental midgets to introduce the ‘ the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, HR 1966.’  Under this bill that will be laughed out of the first federal court in which it would appear, it would be a crime to [...]

The ink hasn’t even dried on Barney Frank’s new Internet gambling bill and other members are jumping up and down trying to tax any company who actually dares to take a bet.  A new bill by Rep. Jim McDermott, the Internet Gambling Regulation and Tax Enforcement Act, HR 2268, “will allow the United States Government to [...]

Barney Frank’s internet gambling bill has been filed in the hopper on the House floor and you can now see the full text of HR 2267 once the GPO finishes adding it to the Library of Congress database.  The bill has 15 Co-sponsors but there has yet to be a similar bill introduced on the Senate [...]

Well, we’ll know tomorrow when we see the register of what was introduced today, but the on again off again online gambling bill is finally about to make an appearance after many months of promises.  
 
The new bill would exempt operators that are licensed and regulated from the ban enacted in 2006, Frank said.
The Massachusetts [...]

While the Congress is about to start dickering with an Internet gambling bill, one state is taking the decidedly opposite approach and calling for ISPs to implement a block on traffic to known gambling sites.  Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety is using a federal law for ‘common carriers’ to call on ISPs to block services [...]

Congressman Towns (D-NY) and Congressman Issa (R-CA) have fired off a series of letters attacking peer-to-peer file sharing and the Justice Department’s lack of an effort to combat it.  Rather than fight the always losing battle of complaining about music and movies, this time they seem more concerned about ‘classified materials’ being exchanged by file [...]

Blogging Stocks is reporting, along with several other sites about the new ‘desire’ amongst state and local governments to get a piece of the sales tax pie from giant e-commerce sites such as Amazon.  A bill could be introduced as early as this week that would rewrite the rules for mail order and Internet sales [...]

The whole bill is out, for those who want to take a look.  Also here.  But the real meat of the bill is in S.773.  This is where you’ll read about ’shutting down the Internet’ and all the other scare stories that are floating around.

There is an interesting pice today from CNN.  
The U.S. military has spent at least $100 million defending its computer network from and responding to cyberattacks, according to a top official responsible for network security.
This goes for everything from the bored script kiddie to nation-states and their sophisticated arrays of computer hacking systems.  The Pentagon [...]