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Today, the Supreme Court slapped down every federal and appeals court for getting beyond ‘their skis’ on the travel ban. But the ban itself was not really the issue here. The SC sent a message to every federal judge, to stay on the case on hand, and not ‘make stuff up’. The SC does not like to overturn their own decisions, there has to be a major compelling argument to do so. So, this district federal judge is about to have his head handed to him by the SC in one or two years. It’s like watching a bad TV show or movie, you want to look away, but can’t. While the players on both sides focus on the political, the real issues here are engineering and technical, and can be solved. I fully expect advances in data transmission, and compression to fix moving the content issues, that ISPs are whining about. In many ways, this situation echos the railroad wars after the civil war. History does not repeat, but the echos… If the big boys (ATT Comcast etc.) do not build, some one else will, and they will be the winners.

Paul neatly summed up the state of play to date. To add a little context and background, you have to understand that this is settled law. The Supreme Court decided back in the late 90’s that the FTC(federal trade commission) not the FCC would be the primary regulator of the Internet.  It was Congress who passed, and Bill Clinton as president, who signed the law which was challenged in our court system. Those who challenged lost. President Obama illegally move jurisdiction over to the FCC, and was  slapped down by the Supreme Court for it. That is were we are today. There is much more, but the SC decided this on 1st amendment grounds. To put it bluntly, information wants to be free. The FCC by treaty and law, can control certain kinds of information and speech.(Treaty passed into law in 1932?) But the internet, being a cluster of new technology, is not covered by treaty and law, so the FCC can not regulate it. That’s it in a nutshell. Hope it helps.

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HiFlyer, Cybertooth, SueW

This is mostly about the large number of  illegal XP copies still being run in the pacific-asia region. It is somewhat ironic that the largest number of victims of WannaCry/WannaCrypt were reportedly coming from Russia and China. At this point, any business or large operation running XP and or server 2003 is simply nuts.

Lets not forget the PR aspect here. For three years Microsoft has been hammered for the way they have tried to move users to Windows 10. Combine that with hand waving away best practices with massive personal cuts, and  MS has a mushrooming nightmare on their hands. If they did not patch, then they would be signing their own death warrant. It is not Microsoft’s fault that we and they are caught in the middle of a major fight between two state actors. But it would be Microsoft’s fault, if  having the means to protect their products, they did nothing. Woody’s right, MS had no choice.

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Cybertooth

Look, a bad situation just got a lot more complex. Woody just wants us be ready for it. For what it’s worth, my I.T. team brought me and my staff the exact same message Woody did. If there is a silver lining to all this, it is every  tech company got a major head slap this week.  Best practices exist for a reason, and  throwing away years of hard earned knowledge comes with a price. (As my I.T. guys reminded me over and over, while discussing  updating policy.)

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HiFlyer, woody

Context people, context. This is part of a huge claw back of midnight regulations that the Obama administration put in place just before they left office. To say this, and the other  rules they put in is cr*p, does a gross injustice to cr*p. Congress never voted on this, no one never had a say on this rule. Which under our Constitution is illegal. Data collection is not going away, the national security aspects alone deem that. Congress, the Trump administration will deal with this, in the open daylight, not with a room alone with a pen, as the Obama administration did.