Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Congress is going to take another crack at delaying the analog TV shutdown by four months. The House is expected to take a second run this week at a bill that would give consumers more time to prepare for the transition from analog to digital television broadcasts. If it passes, the bill heads to the president, who will sign it, White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said.
In a scathing report released Tuesday, congressional investigators outlined a pattern of mismanagement, dysfunction and abuse of power at the Federal Communications Commission under the agency’s Republican chairman, Kevin Martin. The report — the result of a nearly yearlong, bipartisan investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee — accuses Martin of manipulating data and suppressing information.
Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken — putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court. Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Va., thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that “there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system.”
Executives from major Internet players are due for a grilling about online privacy in a Senate committee Wednesday, but the company likely to get the most scrutiny is a small startup called “NebuAd.” NebuAd has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates in recent weeks for working with Internet service providers to track the online behavior of their customers and then serve up targeted banner ads based on that behavior.