Free Republic

London's police chief today warns society against letting parts of the  internet become a “dark and ungoverned” space populated by paedophiles, murderers and terrorists. In a call for action, Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe says encryption on computers and mobile phones is frustrating police investigations, meaning parts of the web are becoming “anarchic places”. He was telling a New York law enforcement conference: “We can’t allow parts of the internet, or any communications platform, to become dark, ungoverned space where images of child abuse are exchanged, murders are planned and terrorist plots are progressed. “In a democracy we cannot accept...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

Federal officials are challenging new benefit rules at Honeywell Inc. that create monetary penalties unless employees and spouses take medical tests. A lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in response to complaints from two Minnesota employees sets up a potential court case over how far employers can go to shift health costs and influence worker behavior. The agency said in the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, that new health screening and penalties at Honeywell violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. “Employees will be penalized if they or their...

Clearly the UK is still a moderate Muslim country. He wasn’t beheaded, was he? (Note: this joke may be illegal in the United Kingdom. If you read it and chuckled, report immediately to the nearest police department that is busy ignoring Muslim sexual abuse of girls.) .... In a free country, eyes would have rolled and the queue would have marched on. But in the West offending Muslims is more vigorously prosecuted than actual Muslim terror. ... The court knew that they didn’t have enough material to work with so they played a waiting game and blinked. This time Big...

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

"You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out." This has become a recurring theme in Musk's public comments, and each time he warns of the AI bogeyman it seems even more dire. In June, Musk raised the specter of the "Terminator" franchise, saying that he invests in companies working on artificial intelligence just to be able to keep an eye on the technology. In August, he reiterated his concerns in a tweet, writing that AI is...

Students at a Mapleton Junior High School in Utah County were asked to take inventory of the things inside their family medicine cabinet and then turn that list into their health teacher. A parent, Onika Nugent, was not pleased with the assignment, so she posted the assignment on Facebook and sent a note to the teacher and the principal. She shared a portion of the letter she sent school officials: “I said, ‘Although it may be a good idea for parents to do an inventory of their medicine cabinet, I believe it is inappropriate for students to counsel their parents,...

Tech companies like Apple and Google want to make the data customers carry on their smartphones and computers more secure, safe from the prying eyes of spies and identity thieves alike. But law-enforcement officials--from the FBI to local police--see those same devices as treasure troves of evidence.... "I'd be surprised if more than a handful of members would support the idea of backdooring Americans' personal property," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and vocal privacy advocate, said.... And a House Democratic aide said that staffers have been in touch with the FBI on the issue but that Congress is unlikely...

FBI Director James Comey gave a strong speech today (Oct. 16) explaining why law enforcement should have access to data on encrypted smartphones. But he failed to cite any examples in which such law-enforcement access could have made the difference between life and death.... The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994 mandates that telecommunications companies must give police the ability to listen in on telephone conversations. CALEA covers landlines and cellular carriers, and was expanded in 2004 to cover Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers and broadband Internet service providers. For the past few years, the FBI...

By stoking these politics of envy and victimhood, it’s the politicians, at home and abroad, who grow powerful and wealthy. The disenfranchised languish as political pawns, never hearing the truth that life is about making correct personal choices in an imperfect world.The Obama administration is highly exercised about “inversion,” the practice by which an American corporation acquires a foreign company and moves its headquarters out of the United States to do more by a lopsided margin of 51-17 percent. Over the past six months, the movement has been dramatic: Now the two groups are about evenly divided. And two-thirds of...

Federal Court Says the Government Can Impersonate You on Social Media — and There’s Not Much You Can Do About It Imagine finding out you have a Facebook page that you didn’t actually create. It has your name, your private photos and all of your personal information — none of which you posted. That’s the discovery New York resident Sondra Prince made. Prince, formerly Sondra Arquiett, alleges that after she was arrested on drug charges in 2010, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used the photos on her confiscated cellphone to create Facebook profile in her name and without her consent....

Facebook said Thursday that future research on its 1.3 billion users would be subjected to greater internal scrutiny from top managers, especially if they focused on “deeply personal topics” or specific groups of people. But no outside body will review Facebook’s research projects, and the company declined to disclose what guidelines it would use to decide whether research was appropriate. Nor did it indicate whether it will get consent from users for projects like its emotion manipulation study, which set off a global furor when it was disclosed this summer. In essence, Facebook’s message is the same as it has...

The information leaked by Edward Snowden last year raised the public consciousness quite a bit about user privacy and security in using certain services (not to mention the hope that companies won’t be that willing to acquiesce to government requests for user information). In recent weeks, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been emphasizing a new focus on user security and encryption. Both Apple and Google have implemented stronger data encryption so it’s harder to compromise user data. The problem is, however, that it would be harder for law enforcement to access that data too. And FBI Director James Comey isn’t...

According to a recent article in Zdnet, Microsoft will monitor users in the new Windows 9 Operating System in order to determine how the new OS is used, thus decide what tweaks and changes are need to be made. During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren’t as evolved as the new ‘Asimov’ monitor. The new system is codenamed ‘Asimov’ and will provide a near real-time view of what is happening on users’ machines. Rest assured, the data is...

John Hopkins Medicine researchers will track the physical activities and daily diet of 50 overweight freshman from Lakewood High School as part of a pilot project using Fitbit – an electronic wristband that records activity and sleep patterns. The effort, funded by a $100,000 grant from insurer Florida Blue, is focused more on teaching healthy habits than weight loss, and is expected to be one of the first studies involving adolescence and wearable heath-related technology, Reuters reports. Researchers told the news service the pilot project eliminates the need to bring students in to the doctor’s office, and they’re hoping to...

The FBI director on Thursday criticized the decision by Apple and Google to encrypt smartphones data so it can be inaccessible to law enforcement, even with a court order. James Comey told reporters at FBI headquarters that U.S. officials are in talks with the two companies, which he accused of marketing products that would let people put themselves beyond the law's reach. Comey cited child-kidnapping and terrorism cases as two examples of situations where quick access by authorities to information on cellphones can save lives. Comey did not cite specific past cases that would have been more difficult for the...

Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg September 24, 2014 The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender. Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to...

The Seattle City Council passed a new ordinance Monday that could mean $1 fines for people who toss too many table scraps into the trash. Under current Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) rules, people living in single-family homes are encouraged but not required to dispose of food waste and compostable paper products in compost bins. Apartment buildings must have compost bins available, but residents of apartment buildings aren’t required to use them. And businesses aren’t subject to any composting requirements. Under the new rules, collectors can take a cursory look each time they dump trash into a garbage truck. If they...

The Commerce Department has been handing out grants to fund a way for Americans to use a single password anytime they shop, bank, pay bills or engage in any other online activity that requires logging in and verifying identity.In effect, President Obama’s administration is trying to bring an end to Americans having different passwords for each online account. Almost $3 million in grants were given out for the project this week through the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, as part of its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace project."The grants announced will help spur development of new...

The CIA’s ongoing defiance of congressional authority continued during a closed-door meeting last week after Director John Brennan refused to tell lawmakers who authorized the illegal surveillance of Senate Intelligence Committee computers, which were used to compile a report on the agency’s interrogation practices.