You Bought His Ticket; He Took You for a Ride
Perhaps there is some true justice in the revelation today that Barack Obama, apologist to the world for American greatness, has just given a huge part of that scientific and engineering eminence to a world body that has no legal claim to all that which has come from America’s technological genius. Yes, Silicon Valley, it’s true, your messiah is telling you, “You didn’t build that.” How does it feel to have your legs cut from beneath you by this global leveler who has no regard for the huge amount of endeavor and intellect that has gone into this world-changing technology you have created? More or less, he’s telling you that you and all your brilliant accomplishments are no more than co-equal with every other being on this earth, for example, Barack Obama’s destitute, impoverished brother living in the slums of Nairobi. Yes, in Obama World, that man is your equal in every way. Learn to live with it, dude.
With a scratching of his pen, and perhaps a few regal utterances into his phone, this man who would be king has rendered your amazing technological accomplishments irrelevant and of no consequence, handing over American superiority in computer technology and information systems to a world body that has little regard for ensuring America’s continuation as the incubatory mother of all that is out there on the cutting edge of everything.
Short version: the messiah you computer geeks believed to be a second coming is selling all of you geeks you down the river; or as is more commonly associated with Barack Obama, throwing you under that muchly over-used bus. How many millions of dollars did you fools funnel to this man who now sells you down the digital river, where you are no longer Americans, but rather subjects of a world body not particularly friendly, if not openly hostile, to American technological superiority?
I hope you’re ready for millions of you to be replaced/displaced by the poor in third world nations you were always so concerned about, whose plight you always so piously proclaimed. Of course there’s always the option of your relocating from California to Tajikistan’s global networking headquarters, or some other similarly appealing enviro to pursue your digital dreams.
Hey, geniuses, you bought the guy a ticket and he took you for a ride.
Crossposted from American Thinker
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden
People called Jimmy the worst president for giving away the Panama Canal. I think this tops that.
Andy, you said it well. China, Korea and Japan have back engineered everything we have built for years. So I guess Obama thinks, why make them go to all that work, just give then specs outright and like kindergarten…share. Except for the fact it was American geeks who did the designs and builds, American investment dollars that funded it and correct me if I am wrong but are not all those “inventions” patented and copyrighted? So is Obama going to just open the copyrights office and patent office to every third world turd who wants to make a buck off the backs of American ingenuity? Again? Well the liberal, Silicon Valley, California, et al, geek world loved Obama in both elections and gave mightily to his campaigns so here you go. You reap what you sow.
Who knows how much damage this will do?
Oh, but that doesn’t matter as long as some braindead schwanzstucker in the Oval Office gets to feel good about what he does.
I am SO glad I did not vote for that clown.
I have been a computer geek since 1968 — that is mostly what I did in the Army — and I am still employed in the field at the geek level. I like the work and I don’t want to be a manager.
I know exactly one computer geek who voted for Mr. Obama. Maybe the rest of us are just lucky but somehow, I don’t think so. If zuckerberger, Bill Gates, and their ilk like the current administration, I’m sure that is nice for them but the great majority of U.S. computer geeks have to live in the real world. I didn’t take one but I would be surprised if a national IT poll would show much support for this idea.
FWIW, in the 1990s I worked for a large software house. When the U.S. went into Iraq, the owner of that company — worth about $2 billion at the time — called some people and ended up talking to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He spent a lot of time there making private enterprise work for the team on the ground. If you are skeptical, I can provide a name for you to check. My point: maybe he was the only one but not all of the senior level IT guys are raving liberals.
FWIW, ICANN’s primary job is assigning domain names. What bad thing comes of sending ICANN offshore?
Richard. I do agree with you being in IT myself. I was mainly referring to the California folks (and Microsoft in my state) I had worked with until retirement. I am quite conservative as are all my IT associates. Good points in your post. Thank you.
What bad thing comes of sending ICANN offshore?
Going from a private company to a government bureaucracy that is unaccountable to anyone is a bad thing.
errr … no. At this time, ICANN is a non-profit corporation who manages internet domain names under a contract from the NTIA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. The plan is to allow the NTIA contract to expire in 2015 and let ICANN keep doing the job by itself. So it would go from a government-bureaucracy-has-an-approval-role to a sort of private-but-responsible-to-the-whole-world non-profit thing. It appears that the administration thinks has been accused of using control of the internet to spy on other countries so the concept here is to give up any control of the internet. Maybe I’m dull but For the life of me I cannot see how the US government can use a DNS server or even THE DNS server to spy on the whole world so I don’t know what political advantage they could get from this. If you know how it works, this change makes no difference to anyone. On the other hand, if NTIA decided to keep doing it, the cost to the US taxpayer is negligible. ICANN is not totally untarnished, they make a lot of money from those companies who sell domain names and they recently made a ton of money when they allowed new domains like .sucks and .xxx. Let me see if I can communicate the various roles in the current system. I have low expectation of success but I will try anyway. 1. A TLD operator like Network Solutions submits a change (create a domain name, change a domain name, delete a domain name) to ICANN. 2. ICANN verifies the request — for example, we cannot add a name if someone is already using the name. You cannot delete a name unless it belongs to you. 3. ICANN sends a recommendation to NTIA — we recommend that these verified changes happen. 4. NTIA verifies that ICANN has followed the agreed policies and procedures 5. NTIA authorized Verisign to make the change 6. Verisign updates the root zone file where all of the names are stored 7. Verisign distributes the root zone file to the 13 root DNS servers.… Read more »
Your explanation does make sense but I don’t see any gain at changing the way things are running now.
The gains are actually in keeping things ‘as is’, mostly. The fallout from all the NSA revelations has had a number of countries talking (and mostly just talking) about ‘separate’ internets.
Whatever that might mean in a technical sense isn’t clear, but by basically simplifying a rubber-stamp US government backed oversight process to one run by an international board, it lessens the ‘US controls the internet!’ scare-tactics. And keeping things as they are (technology wise) is actually in our best interest. So, in some sense, this is actually a win. A win forced by a losing situation due to the intelligence fallout from Snowden’s leaks, but a win nonetheless.
My two cents.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell Richard, and anyone else who is interested. ICANN assigns the IP addresses to every piece of tech they want. So when the authority goes to the UN or offshore, we go from a relatively controlled number of IP’s, to a situation in which IP’s are assigned to every single blue tooth system out there. Not used, just assigned. This results in increased costs to the consumer. Now, guess which Nation has the greatest consumption of blue tooth tech? I’ll give you 3 tries, but you’ll only need 1.
No bluetooth does not require an IP address. Bluetooth is a relative short range protocol (~30 ft, or 10 m for you metric heads). Unless you meant were smartphones.
But here’s the thing. The IPv4 address space is already all spoken for. The last netblocks that were available were assigned out last year. And yeah, since we created this here internet thing, we got ourselves plenty of IPv4 addresses. Most of the big US tech and telecom companies have a good amount of IPv4 addresses at their disposal. But not infinite, and is one of the main reasons why we usually run NAT at most places.
The next version of IP, IPv6 has more addresses than we’d ever need. Literally. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, allowing for 3.4×10^38 addresses in total. You don’t see IPv6 addresses very often here in the US, since we at this point have enough IPv4 addresses to go around. It’s more in Asia (ie: China and India) where IPv6 addresses are seen since they are all out of IPv4 addresses.
Obama generously gives away what’s not his in the first place, keeps an iron grip on his personal property and finances. In other news, water is wet and the sky is shockingly blue…
Here’s my suggestion. The Glorious Leader carries more money in his jogging shorts (his own money, not the federal budget) than I make in a damn good year. If he wants everybody to pay their “fair share,” he can start by giving away all of his extra money until he is financially equal to the lowest man on the federal totem pole. No more private jet, multiple (big) houses, or chauffeured limo. Then I’ll *consider* following his fine example. Until then, “President” Obama can fuck himself.
Even IF he did that, it would be his personal choice and it wouldn’t influence me at all. Nor should it. And that’s the problem for The Emperor: so long as Americans have choices, we will choose what is in our best interest and that of our families. What the Little Dick-Tater, tyrant, rat bastard is doing is using the gov’t to consolidate power and dictate our best interest to us, as he sees fit. It is the STATE that must be preserved and served. Individuals and individual liberty are anathema to the need of the STATE.
While many of the foundations of the protocols of the internet indeed are a product of Americans (and to be more specific off-shoots of a crazy DARPA project to investigate a “packet-switched network” vs the “circuit-switched” one that Ma Bell had), we have never closed the door to non-Americans providing good ideas.
In fact, most of the actual internet protocols and standards have already been international sit-down-in-a-big-committee affairs for decades.
Let’s take “802.11ac”, for example. It actually refers to an IEEE standard that after much gestation in the sausage factory of international standards, was unleashed unto the world and yea we have rejoiced because we now have faster wifi. It follows a long line of wifi standards in the 802.11 family, with all the trappings of more bureaucracy than is really necessary, but is comforting to any middle manager at a Fortune 100 company. You might be worried that dirty foreigners might be sitting on cryptographic standards committees, putting in backdoors. Nope, we got our folks from the NSA chairing things like that, so nothing to worry about!
Heck, the HTTP and HTML stuff, you know, the very stuff that powers this here website was made at CERN… by…EUROPEANS. OMG.
Seriously, ICANN is itself pretty much a joke. They are where you go if you want to make some money for yourself with domain names. And it’s been a move that’s been in the works for many years.
I mean, I suppose we could watch over whether we should have a .museum top level domain or not (and yes, there is a .museum now), but you really want to spend our tax dollars on the bureaucracy to do that? ICANN isn’t going to do anything to piss people off because that would be bad for their pocketbooks.
To characterize ICANN as some sort of massive tech advantage we have is laughable.
Our advantage is in our engineering schools, our capital markets, our creativity, and our willingness to shake things up.
I suppose I should have anticipated getting the geeks on my ass simply by using the term geek.
Sorry about that, Geeks, but those of you taking issue are missing the larger point of this sorry-ass president surrendering just one more aspect of American technological superiority in this world. Can you not see this as a preliminary submission paving the way for more to come?
How intellectually dull do you have to be to fail to perceive that huge threat to our nation’s future?
It’s encouraging to know that many geeks are conservative, if that is in fact true, and if so, welcome here.
Trust us, it is not by calling us “geeks”. It’s because your analysis is wrong 🙂
Wouldn’t you be afraid if our tech advantage was solely under the control of the government? That it’s just a few pen strokes and, poof, Sputnik the sequel. Or whatever “sputnik” is in Mandarin or Hindi.
In reality, it’s not. The tech industry thrives because it is fairly unregulated. It does depend on our maintaining our lead in engineering and science education and stable capital markets. But it most certainly does not depend on whether ICANN is under US control or not.
While the process for ratifying standards is international, we have a lot of weight, not through government participation so much (although the NSA guy chairing a crypto committee is true), but through the fact our companies are the ones that set the agenda through their size or innovations.
The reality is that the US government’s role in our tech superiority is pretty small overall, because the industry itself is not very regulated.
The role it does play, the basic R&D that was the DARPA project that launched this whole internet thing, for example, is something we need to keep doing, even if it seems totally pie in the sky BS now.
If there’s something we have a pretty good record with, it is turning pie in the sky BS into undeniable realities:
* Aviation
* Landing on the moon
* Transistors
* Computers that don’t take up the whole building
* Microprocessors
* Computers that don’t take up the whole room
* Wireless cellular telephony
* This internet thing we’re on
Peotrooper, I am a computer geek. I don’t think that moniker is offensive. In this field I have pretty broad shoulders so y’all pile on.
I agree with tm, this is a tempest in a teapot. I also agree with NR Pax, right now the US government plays a role in the process and there is no advantage to making this change, neither is there any appreciable cost if we don’t change it.
I am convinced that the change is done for political reasons specifically aimed at mollifying other countries, and making points with his base in US, “see? we are agreeable and we don’t throw our weight around. That’s how we democrats roll.” Other countries made political hay because the NSA swept up all the world’s emails and Mr. Obama was embarrassed. For the life of me I don’t know why he was embarrassed, every one of them would have done the same if they had thought of it — and if most of the worlds network links went through their countries.
Anyway I think that is just about 100% waste of time — an infinitesimal amount of tax dollars will be saved, no security advantage is taken or given, and no political advantage is gained or lost, no technical advantage is taken or given. This is approximately the same job and the post office assigning house numbers.
If domain name management gets unreliable, the big guys (mostly US companies) can bring huge pressure to fix it. Most likely, google or microsoft or IBM would probably just take over the job, it just isn’t that much trouble / cost. Maybe we could get NSA to do it 🙂
Former VP Al manbearpig Gore’s glorious contribution to humanity…