Last year the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board enacted heavy royalty fees to be paid by online radio stations.  At this time, there was much outrage from webcasters claiming that the rates at which they had to pay royalties for the music was broken, and over time would destroy internet radio.  We’re now seeing proof of this as the negotiations in Washington appear to be in the same place they were last year: Dead in their tracks.  Pandora, one of the most popular internet radio sites out there, may be going offline soon if they don’t see a change in negotiations.  Right now their business is losing money fast, and it’s all because they’re having to pay per song, per listener.  Someone close to Soundexchange, the company responsible for gather royalties, noted that they had been surprised by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board had selected Soundexchange’s first suggestion, noting that it had been meant to be a starting point for negotiations and not the actually rates.  Now the Royalty Board isn’t to keen to change it.

This to me highlights a much larger problem that we have in Washington, and that is the enormous generation gap, a gap that cause bad legislation to come through regarding technology issues.  We need more people in Congress, or at least some sort of advisory board for Congress, that understands modern technology, how it works, and how it’s developed.  You have to wonder if they realize how many hits popular websites get, and how unrealistic it is to have the pay such large amounts for song per listener.  A regular radio station doesn’t even have to pay these licensing fees because of the fact that they’re basically free marketing, so why are internet and satellite radio any different?

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/18 at 01:54 PM  •   •  permalink

Having been born in the late 80’s, I don’t really have any recollection of the Cold War era.  Everything I know about it has been through history classes, reading Wikipedia, and action movies.  I know about the perception that the government built about what happened behind the Iron Curtain, about the dangers of communism world wide, and how being liberal could be your downfall during the McCarthy commie witch hunts.  But I don’t actually know what it was like to live in that environment, in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, and the shadow of a frightened United States government.  When the Berlin Wall came down I was too young to understand the significance of it.  I didn’t even know what “Soviet” was, other than my map said Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and that’s where the Russians were from.  I never lived under the threat of nuclear war.  Now I’m starting to wonder if I’ll get that “opportunity”.

The war between Russia and Georgia may cause a major reconsideration on how the West views Russia.  We have hard talk from Washington pledge to help the Georgians, Poland has finally agreed to hosting a missile shield location for the US, and Russia does not appear to be backing down in the conflict.  What are we looking at here?  Increased hostilities between the West and Russia?  They may not be Soviet anymore, but they still have one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and bitterness could certainly still be a factor after we helped them into economic collapse with the arms race.  If Russia is looking to expand back into the areas that gained their independence after that collapse we could be looking at a second Cold (hopefully cold) War.  Russia is angry at our support of Georgia, we’re angry that Russia has invaded Georgia, and neither of us seem to be backing down, or even attempting diplomacy beyond telling Russia to get out.  Russia maintains that it’s their right to “defend” the regions of Georgia that want to be autonomous.  Don’t we have too many world police already?

Anyway, I’m hoping this conflict can blow over without exposing us to a nuclear holocaust, which I’m sure it will.  In other news, John McCain is being sued for using an Obama supporting musicians music, unlicensed, in one of his campaign ads.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/15 at 12:00 PM  •   •  permalink

Sorry about the short post today.  As the day went forward I just started realizing that it was another slow day as far as noteworthy news goes, so I through this together so you’d have something to read at least.

The Air Force Cyber Command was being developed under the idea that the calling of the Air Force was to command the air, space, and now cyberspace.  They were going to be there to defend our freedoms on the internet, and attack those who would harm those freedoms.  How?  Well, they weren’t exactly sure of that.  Thus, the Air Force Cyber Command is about to be suspended before any more resources and man power go into a project that no one in the military is quite sure how to get working.  I’m personally not sure that it’s a good idea to abandon this project right now.

The future of warfare is going to involve the internet.  There will be cyber attacks coinciding with bombing runs, D.D.O.S. attacks along side invasions.  If we really want to defend ourselves we are going to need people who are trained in cyber warfare and know how to combat it.  Right now we’re seeing an example of this with the D.D.O.S. attacks against Georgian government websites that forced them to move temporarily to a Blogspot account.  It’s clear already that this is going to be something we’ll have to defend ourselves from, especially if we’re attacked by a country that has more of an internet infrastructure than Iraq.  We don’t have to imagine the trouble that would cause, because we’ve just witnessed it overseas. 

It’s not like it would be hard for the government to find hackers to take up this cause.  Hit up Defcon next year, just say that you’ll pay for computers to their specifications and that all they have to do is make sure that other hackers can’t attack them.  Put some stripes on their shoulder, give them an office, and let ‘em fly.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/13 at 12:44 PM  •   •  permalink

Not the one in Iraq.  I swear to God I’ll have my blog done in a bit.  I apologize for the wait here, I just haven’t gotten to my lunch break at work yet, and that’s when I’ll be writing it.

August 7th, the day before the Olympics started, a conflict started between Georgia and Russia.  Georgia, who gained their independence from the former USSR in 1991 attacked the capital of the separatist region of South Ossetia, hoping to over take it and bring it back into the fold of Georgia as a more unified nation.  In response, Russia began an air strike, naval, and cyber campaign against Georgia on behalf of the region.  Since then Russia has launched an invasion force from Abkhazia, another separatist region along Georgia’s norther border.  Much violence has ensued, and it’s left more than 200,000 people homeless.  Countries around the world have called for a cease fire, and Georgia signed a cease-fire treaty for the EU, one that Russia discarded claiming that Georgia had ignored the cease fire by using helicopters in a bombing campaign.  Russia has announced that it will support a cease-fire on the conditions that Georgia disarms and withdraws forces from Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

I just want to say a few things about this conflict while it’s still going on.  What we have here is a country that managed to become independent from the Soviet Union during their break up in the early 90’s.  Later, around ‘95, we had these two areas that had major separatist movements that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of roughly 250,000 ethnic Georgians who were citizens in the area.  Through the use of violence they managed to gain a kind of de facto independence from Georgia, however they are still technically a part of the nation.  Now, we have Russia north of these two regions (both regions are pro-Russia) who has launched a full on offensive in Georgia when Georgia tried to bring a separatist region back into the fold.  We have Russia saying that the lack of Western nations denouncing the move “raises very serious questions about sincerity and their attitude towards our country”.  Our country, they said.  Russia then moves a full invasion force into Georgia from the northeast region of Abkhazia, a force that we are supposed to assume was amassed over the course of a couple of days.  These actions are the ones that have been denounced by Western nations, and Georgia is saying that Russia is attempting an ethnic cleanse of the region, attempting to over power the small country and bring it back into the fold that is Russia, and was the Soviet Union.  Russia’s actions here look a little suspicious to me.

As a friend of mine said, it’s hard to be on either side of a conflict where people are shooting at each other, but I can’t help but feel for Georgia in this case.  While it could be said that they started the conflict by moving into South Ossetia, it is not Russia’s place to defend the separatist region that is part of Georgia, and even less they’re place to refer to South Ossetia as “our country”.  I have a hard time believing that the level of action we’ve seen in this conflict wasn’t to some level planned by Russia, especially considering the cyber-attacks that we’re seeing on the countries government sites.  This had to have more prepared for than the quick response that occurred over the weekend.  This appears to be a direct military action by Russia, possibly to try to reincorporate the entire country of Georgia.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/11 at 12:58 PM  •   •  permalink

I am starting to wonder about John McCain’s campaign, and exactly what they’re trying to accomplish with all these negative ads.  McCain recently released two new ads: a new celebrity ad, this time sans the celebrities, to paint Obama as a celebrity who is out of touch with what Americans are suffering, and an ad that seems to be directly taken from one of Obama’s main planks.  Now, it’s easy to see why McCain would want to attack Obama for having achieved celebrity status.  McCain has been on capital hill for more than two decades and is yet to achieve the level of popularity Obama has gathered over the course of a couple of years.  It’s very easy to see why McCain might be bitter about this.  After all, in his two decades he’s clearly the underdog maverick right?  It’s not like he married some woman with a huge amount of money, or had a military background to back him up, or years of working on Capitol Hill building his reputation.  He’s the underdog!  Unlike Obama, who’s new on the national political scene, black, no military experience, and hasn’t had long to really build the national connections that are so important.  Not an underdog at all…

What I think is great about McCain’s new ad, the one that isn’t an attack on Obama’s celebrity status, is that it seems be a plagiarism of one of Obama’s biggest stances.  The stance that Washington is broken, and that we need to take action now to fix it.  Unfortunately for McCain, Obama has an advantage in that he hasn’t been sitting in the moral swamp that is Capital Hill for more than four years, and therefore hasn’t really shown that he’s part of the old political machine.  McCain, who now claims that he’s the one to fix a broken Washington, has been sitting in this ethical quagmire for twenty-six years now, and hasn’t fixed anything.  Even when he was working towards “ending” the influence of lobbyists, he was involved in an ethics scandal know as the Keating Five.  While cleared of corruption charges, it certainly shows that even from early on McCain had gotten his feet wet with old politics, the exact thing he claims he will be fixing if he’s elected.  One must wonder why McCain is only now realizing that Washington has become a haven for corrupt, partisan dealings and needs to be fixed, and why he hasn’t taken this stance for the past twenty or so years.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 08/08 at 11:07 AM  •   •  permalink