Here is the actual quote

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

Into this world steps the perfect super villain in Kim Dotcom. The founder of Megaupload even looks like Kingpin. Dotcom is facing up to 50 years for piracy. Think about that though, 50 years for piracy. We give rapists and murderers less time than that.

This is the world in which we now live, now think about this, by posting this, we are going to be monitored by homeland security as well. Yes that’s right, Homeland Security has permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.” This data is then shared with both private sector businesses such as the RIAA an MPAA and international third parties according to RT.

So by posting this link into our Facebook and Twitter feeds we are now on the Homeland Security list.

That’s the legal system here in the United States circa 2012.

This was possibly the best of what the internet has to offer on display as interests from all over the net came together to stop this madness. The fight is not won yet, but this battle definitely goes to us.

The public learned a lot more about the bills over the last few days, but you can bet that the MPAA and the RIAA are not done with legislation yet. We can all agree that piracy is a bad thing, but how you stop it is something that has to be looked at a lot closer. Here are the main problems I have with the approach these bills took.

1. It is no more the governments job to limit my access to web sites any more than they can tell me what to read. This is first and foremost a First Amendment issue.

2. It’s  a worthless law to begin with, blocking sites will not stop pirates, but drive them further underground. IP addresses will change hands and people who want to find pirated info can.

Here is an example from a simple whois lookup for Thepiratebay. That or you can just download Tor which the US State Department helps fund to aid foreign citizens under “repressive regimes” Kind of ironic don’t you think.

Thepiratebay.org Server Details
IP address: 194.71.107.15
Server Location: Germany
ISP: Resilans AB

3. We have laws already in place to combat these and they work pretty well, just ask Megaupload.

The last reason may be the most damning as you must only make laws that solve a problem that are as draconian as the problem itself.

Forget the free speech issues or prior restraint, these bills are the equivalent of trying to stop speeding by putting random brick walls in place on freeways. Would that work, Certainly it would, but the damage caused by the fix is greater than the problem.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 earlier this month. In this video, Walter Isaacson, author of the upcoming official Steve Jobs biography, talks about why Jobs refused life-saving surgery. Catch the entire interview with Walter Isaacson Sunday on 60 Minutes.

We have been saying for years that Google’s famous mantra of “Do No Evil” went out the door long ago when it started answering to shareholders. That is the job of a corporation, to make money for its stockholders so there is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but the PR mantra of “Do No Evil”  no longer applies.

It isn’t just the fact that they read your email to target advertising to you, but they are now starting to cop to some of the “evil” things they have been doing.

For a period of several years, Google allowed Canadian pharmacies to advertise their wares in the United States, despite laws prohibiting advertisements from non-U.S. pill-pushers. Google claimed it had no idea this was happening, and once it discovered the illegal ads, it put an end to the practice. However, in papers filed with the DOJ, the ad giant admits that it knew it was breaking the law all along, but pocketed the money just the same.

So they have been lying about this all along. Add to that the wi-fi spying practices, the persistent cookies for toolbar users even AFTER they opt out, collusion with typo squatters, supposed inability to stop copyright infringement on YouTube, and more.

Google started out doing no evil, but as of late, with it recent change in attitude toward Google labs, abandoning development of features for other platforms than it’s own, etc.. it has become as evil as Microsoft ever was. The world is just now starting to notice.

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We tried and have yet to figure out how to install IE or Firefox on a chrome book. Isn’t that what caused MS so much trouble a few years back? Every other OS has to allow competing browsers on their system. The browser is just the beginning of the problem though as there are many programs that will fit into this anticompetitive stance. Image viewers, music players and it goes on and on, without local storage if Chrome becomes a major player there are going to be major problems coming from the EU and the feds.

The pricing model may be the only thing that keeps the EU out for now as these are seriously overpriced netbooks. We are seeing full size laptops with better hardware at Wal-Mart for less money out of the box so that will keep adoption way down for a while, but if these netbooks were priced fairly at around 199.00 adoption would be huge and quite scary for many reasons.

We get the feeling that Google is not ready for full adoption and is aware of these issues or these would be subsidized at a much lower price. Time will tell how this plays out, but for the short term it doesn’t look good for Chrome to become a major player.

We’re big fans of Microsoft’s latest OS, but we’re bigger fans of making Windows better–so we’ve rounded up the best Windows 7 downloads. They’ll let you customize it in any way possible, give it features that Microsoft removed or neglected to include, and more. So get ready to download–you’re about to take Windows 7 to a new level

The Best Windows 7 Downloads

Charting the Big three (Microsoft, Google, Apple) in their perceived evil.

1. apple engineer looses iPhone prototype
2. passerby finds phone
3. passerby figures out its a prototype of a new device
4. passerby shops it around.
5. Gawker Media agrees and purchases device
6. Gawker publishes story, contacts apple to return phone
7. Apple accepts phone back
The end…..
8. WTF?????  Prosecutors raid reporters home

Welcome to the police state of California.

This is where we have to start reporting the story. 1-7 could happen to any person and company in this business, even us. Other than step 5 if someone were to give it to us, of course we would write about it, we might be tempted to buy it, but we have a policy against paying for stories.

Where the line was crossed was when the police raided the reporters home.

As the Storm Troopers trample all over the constitution, somewhere Steve Jobs is smiling.

In our opinion, there is no way that this is not a case of Apple manipulating the system. Apple fan boys can scream foul all they want, but try this experiment: call your local police department and report your cell phone stolen, but given back to you after you asked. See if the results are anything like this. There are murderers, rapists, and child molesters walking the streets in every city in the world, and the police are wasting time, effort and money on this issue as well as trampling the constitution.

The constitutional issue here seems pretty clear. The police seized a lot and went way too far. Its as if one person on Yahoo committed a crime and law enforcement shut down Yahoo, confiscated the servers and backups and read EVERYONES correspondence.

That seems extreme, but is exactly what happened here.

An easier analogy is let’s say your neighbor steals a lawnmower, you then borrow your neighbor’s lawnmower, put it in your garage, mow your lawn, and then find out he stole it from the neighbor three doors down and return it to him. Then he decides you didn’t ask his permission first to use it and calls the police and reports it stolen. The police come and clean out your whole house, take your car(s), all your furniture, all your appliances, all your food, all your tools, dishes, silverware etc. and leave you with an empty house, when the only issue was the stolen lawnmower that you returned already.

The police who searched Jason Chen’s home seized the following: A macbook, HP server, two Dell desktop computers, iPad, ThinkPad, two MacBook Pros, IOmega NAS, three external hard drives, and three flash drives. They also seized other storage-containing devices, including two digital cameras and two smart phones.

That seems a bit of overkill for an iPhone. In our opinion, Gizmodo, as sleazy as what they did was, it was not illegal. They under the law had no intent to possess stolen property. Gizmodo’s motive was to obtain information about the upcoming product, not to obtain a cool cell phone to use. The payment was intended to procure that access. Certainly they intended from the start to get the phone, check it out, write about it, and send it back to Apple. Unless a contract surfaces between the seller and Gizmodo, we only have the circumstances to go by. So where is the element of intent necessary to prove the crime of buying stolen property?

Thus, the speed that the San Mateo County DA’s office moved on this is truly astonishing (especially since Chen’s house is in Alameda County, so multiple counties are involved), as is the heavy-handed approach.

Why they took the case which is wrapped in about 200 different civil rights and constitutional issues and of which they only have a marginal jurisdiction over (the phone was lost in Redwood City) is also quite odd. The presence of the specialized computer crime department (REACT), under direction of the tech industry, is also alarming.

Rather than recusing itself, Apple is still on the steering committee of REACT. REACT is obviously the entity supplying the information on high-tech crime to both the DA and San Mateo Sherrif, and will (out of necessity) have to have daily contact with Apple to determine what (if any) the damage of the crime actually is. REACT also looks to be the actual law enforcement entity gathering evidence, though it doesn’t appear to enjoy having the spotlight on this case, and has been shielding itself behind San Mateo County.

Corporations manipulating the law for their interests are as old as the Borgias, but at least Standard Oil would hire private thugs to go smash the presses, not pass the bill to the taxpayer.

This will go down as the most expensive phone in history, and most of the cost will be directly paid by the California taxpayer as this case winds through the courts, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court, as this plainly touches 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendment issues.

Indirectly, Apple has done itself untold damage by destroying 30 years of marketing itself as the company for the "anti-establishment".

They are connected to REACT, and they had best hope that they didn’t drop a dime on Chen by manipulating the San Mateo DA to act as a warning; "Don’t mess with our IP, or else"!

The San Mateo DA had better be clean too – or Wagstaffe and his boss (James Fox) can start cleaning out their desks, and maybe hiring their own counsel.

There are no good guys in this case, just differing levels of slime. We haven’t commented until now on this case, simply because it was being journalistically covered everywhere and we are not usually in the business of regurgitating the company line. This however has gone way beyond that and into our wheelhouse where not only cool technology is concerned, but Gestapo police state activities, as well as corporate evil.

The scariest thing about all of this is that in the last few weeks, of the big 3 technology companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple) lately, Microsoft seems to be the least evil company today. I never would have thought that could happen.