Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, locked in a tight race in Iowa with front-runner Hillary Clinton, dominated conversation about the state's caucuses on Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Monday, the social network said. From midnight to noon CST (0600-1800 GMT), 42.2 percent of conversations about the caucuses were about Sanders, the senator from Vermont, compared with 21.7 percent for Republican front-runner Donald Trump and 13.1 percent for Clinton, according to Facebook. Iowans begin choosing candidates at 7 p.m. CST (0100 GMT on Tuesday), with results expected within a few hours. The contest is the first of the state-by-state battles to pick...

Company Developing ‘Tech Tattoos’ That Track Medical, Financial Info « CBS New York http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/01/29/tech-tattoos-chaotic-moon/

Starting today, Windows Insiders will get access to a new commitment option in Cortana for Windows 10. Commitments is very similar to the existing flight and delivery tracking in Cortana, but it's designed to pick up on emails where you promise your boss to finish a particular project in time. "Cortana will look for emails where you've said you're going to do something," explains Microsoft's Marcus Ash in an interview with The Verge. If you send an email to a friend or colleague with content like "I'll get back to you by next week" or "I'll have this finished by...

=San Jose's Garbage Trucks May Do Police Surveillance With License Plate Readers The government of San Jose, Calif. has come forward with a proposal to mount license plate readers to the city’s garbage trucks in an effort to expand police surveillance beyond department cruisers. Have no fear, innocent citizen, for the trash companies may be stepping up to help our friends in blue. San Jose, California happens to be America’s tenth largest city - that makes it pretty difficult for the police force to keep up with everybody. In a story by the local San Jose Mercury News, the new...

I stepped from the warmth of our source's London flat. That February night in 1977, the air was damp and cool; the buzz of traffic muted in this leafy north London suburb, in the shadow of the iconic Alexandra Palace. A fellow journalist and I had just spent three hours inside, drinking Chianti and talking about secret surveillance with our source, and now we stood on the doorstep discussing how to get back to the south coast town where I lived. Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad...

Windows 10 is amazing. Windows 10 is fantastic. Windows 10 is glorious. Windows 10 is faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any Windows operating system that has come before it. Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been, addressing nearly all of the major problems users had with Microsoft’s previous-generation platform in one fell swoop. But there’s something you should know: As you read this article from your newly upgraded PC, Windows 10 is also spying on nearly everything you do.

The first thing that made me suspicious of their true motives was who they are 'partnering' with...Facebook. It wasn't that long ago when Fox News called them the most liberal organization in the country and that's still true to this day. Add to that, the other polling organizations which they will use to help in their selections of who'll be worthy to run are ABC News, NBC/Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Monmouth and possibly Public Policy Polling. These organizations and ,by extension, Fox News and are responsible for keeping Bush as number one.

Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments will not be made available in Europe due to concerns about its use of facial recognition, it has been revealed. The app, which allows users to share mobile-phone photos with friends without posting them publicly, was launched in the US this week. The Irish data regulator said that users must be given a choice about whether they want it, with an opt-in. There is currently no timetable for such a feature, said Facebook. Richard Allen, Facebook's head of policy in Europe said: "We don't have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop...

A police force has defended scanning the faces of 90,000 festival-goers this weekend and checking them against a list of wanted criminals across Europe. Leicestershire Police, which used facial recognition technology on revellers at Download, said it had now destroyed the information it gathered. It was believed to be the first time the software had been used at an outdoor event in the UK... ...A cashless payment system was put in place for the first time in a bid to cut crime. Thousands of revellers braved the rain at Download, held at Donington Park, to see headliners Slipknot, Muse and...

When your iPhone updates to iOS 9 in the fall, you'll be able to track your reproductive health -- including how often you have sex and whether or not you used protection. As part of its upcoming iOS 9 release, Apple will launch a new set of HealthKit features that will let you log information about menstrual cycles and specific physical changes, such as basal body temperature, cervical mucus quality, and spotting. There will also be a way for people to track sexual activity in the pre-installed app. You can even input ovulation test results. Apple keeps that data private...

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., allegedly told his tenth-grade students to find their parents’ sex toys and condoms and take selfies with them for extra credit. A local CBS affiliate reports that two of the students’ mothers, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, had heard about the assignment from a counselor at the school. “It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” Cobene said. According to CBS, the school administration has tried to play off...

One of the primary contentions, yesterday evening, of Establishment Republicans and Democrats in defense of the NSA's massive data collection program, was that the program was not only free from abuse (something we know is not true), but that it's ultimately useful in targeting real threats to the American people; maybe not yesterday, maybe not today, but perhaps some day in the future it will ensnare an entire sleeper sell of Jihadists mid-phone call to Iran, giving an unsecured credit card number to their yellowcake suppliers. The data collection, you see, is done only on those whose backgrounds demand it....

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping fund the creation of an implantable antenna for health care, which could be used for “long-term patient monitoring.” The government has so far given $5,070 for a graduate fellowship to work on the project, which begins June 1. The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices...

Experts in health care and information technology agree on the future’s biggest opportunity: the creation of a new computational model that will link together all of the massive computers that now hold medical information. IBM is today staking its claim to be a major player in creating that cloud, and to use its Watson artificial intelligence to make sense of the flood of medical data that will result. The new effort uses new, innovative systems to keep data secure, IBM executives say, even while allowing software to use them remotely. Big Blue is certainly putting some muscle into medicine. Some...

The superintendent of the Watchung Hills Regional High School District in New Jersey has confirmed that she sent an email to fellow superintendents Tuesday about her concern that education publishing giant Pearson is “monitoring” children’s social media accounts for possible leaks about the Common Core-aligned PARCC tests.

DENVER — Within an hour of FOX31 Denver discovering a hidden camera, which was positioned to capture and record the license plates and facial features of customers leaving a Golden Post Office, the device was ripped from the ground and disappeared.FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne confirmed the hidden camera and recorder is owned and operated by the United State Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the U.S. Postal Service.The recording device appeared to be tripped by any vehicle leaving the property on Johnson Road, but the lens was not positioned to capture images of the front door,...

With EVs and other fuel-efficient vehicles saving consumers money at the pump, Oregon will be the first to issue a per-mile road tax to refill its coffers. Automotive News reports the state will offer two options to its motorists: pay at the pump, or pay a 1.5-cent rate per mile traversed. The latter will be conducted through a device that plugs into a vehicle’s OBD port, then gathers mileage data to determine how much the motorist will pay in tax. Right now, the program — set to begin July 1 — will be implemented by the Oregon DOT in partnership...

The Los Angeles Police Department began exploring the deterrent approach a few years ago with a new model called predictive policing that deployed officers and patrol cars to areas where data suggested crime was more likely to occur. Criminologists say the use of helicopters is a natural, if highly unusual, expansion of that policing strategy. So far, LAPD officials say, the stats show the strategy is having a positive effect. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD's Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights.

The U.S. Department of Justice secretly spies on millions of cars by gathering and storing information about motorists in order to build a national database to track movements, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The database was originally used by the Drug Enforcement Administration to hunt vehicles involved in drug crimes by tracking license plates, but according to the WSJ, the program expanded to hunt for criminals sought for crimes that were non-drug related. DEA officials have been on record saying they track vehicles near the U.S.-Mexico border to help fight drug cartels, but the new...

The United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA,Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate...