Ben Bernanke.

Time wanted to give it someone actually deserving, but Bernanke was too big to fail.

[Quote:]

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

Pranksters almost immediately began using the service to link to controversial or ironically intended websites, such as the official site of the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. GOP.am apparently started blocking such links at some point Tuesday morning, and the GOP.am homepage was taken offline.

The website is back online late Tuesday morning PST, and the company that designed the site in collaboration with the Republican National Committee plans to add an automatic filtering system to help with the high volume of what its president calls “pornographic, lewd” or “hateful” URLs being added to its service.

I’m curious why the RNC has a giant list of porn URL’s. And more importantly, why they’re not sharing it.

[Quote:]

The New Zealand government has reintroduced its controversial “three-strikes” Internet law, Bill 92A. Previously defeated after widespread outcry, the new 92A was introduced minutes before Parliament recessed for the holidays, and makes no substantial improvements over the initial proposal. Under the revised proposal, if anyone in your house is accused of three acts of infringement (without any proof of wrongdoing), your entire household loses stands to lose Internet access for six months, and/or pays a NZ$15,000 fine (the previous version of the bill would have taken away your family’s internet for life). The major change in the bill is the opportunity for a counter-notice, if you believe the accusation is false.

It contains no real penalties for false accusations, so count on it being abused.

[Quote:]

But AT&T has a much bigger problem on its hands. The problem is that the wireless data explosion is just beginning. This 3% of AT&T users who are supposedly accounting for 40% of bandwidth use? Pretty soon that 3% is going to become 30%.

The whole point of having these mobile devices is to consume data. This is not just about the iPhone. There’s the Droid, and the Pre, and soon there will be the Nexus One and a zillion other Android phones. Plus all the tablets. This is the future. We are going to carry these devices and use them as our televisions, our radios, our newspapers.

The appetite for bandwidth will be insatiable. The network operators that will prosper will be the ones that can keep up with the demand. The ones who don’t will get left behind. Sure, for now companies like AT&T can hang on to customers with exploitative contracts and exclusivity deals. But at some point, and I think it will be soon, the network operators will have to compete, for real, based on quality of service.

The fact that AT&T is already bonking, here in the first five minutes of a 60-minute game, is terrifying. It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

Irresponsible? Pointless? Yes, that sounds familiar.