Free Republic

With performances from Peter Capaldi, imagine. marks the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's notorious book The Prince. Imagine Who's Afraid of Machiavell. This video has been recorded at the international conference on 'Machiavelli's The Prince: Five Centuries of History, Conflict, and Politics' at Brunel Unive. Celebrating the 500th Anniversary of Nicolo Machiavelli's seminal work The Prince The BBC's Tim Wilcox discusses Machiavellian ideals vs modern Italian politics.

The present crisis in relations between Russia and the US is an unnecessary development borne out of erroneous moves by both sides to the latest conflict. The Crimean annexation by Russia should have been regarded as a win-win-win-win by all (Crimea, Ukraine, Russia, and US respectively) had the leaders of all countries-involved been thinking out of the box. But they have not. They have been bathing in cold-war hostility, and have seemed to enjoy the feeling and the euphoric enthusiasm that accusations, filled with hate-speech and hostile actions, are capable of generating.

RT’s YouTube channel, which in June last year reached 1 billion views to become the most-watched YouTube news channel in the world, experienced a shutdown of services on Tuesday, exactly two years after a similar incident. Viewers attempting to access the RT YT channel were denied access and told: “This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations.”

One of the most impressive entries for this (last?) year’s contest is a tiny 8086 PC emulator/virtual machine written in only 4043 bytes of code. It’s a fully functional 80s-era PC emulator that can run vintage copies of AutoCAD, Windows, Lotus 1-2-3, and SimCity.

The Iranian Fars news agency claimed in a report on Sunday that the head of the Saudi intelligence service recently met with several senior Israeli security officials, including the head of the Israeli Mossad. According to the report, the meeting took place in Geneva on November 27. Fars based its claims on a whistleblower with access to Saudi classified information

In between the menopausal robot and the almost-talking dog, The Jetsons painted a somewhat bleak vision of our future. Their saucer-like housing was placed atop giant hydraulics. Why? To lift a suburban family out of the ever-rising smog! That said, there was, and still is, an appeal to those floating condos, a certain aspirational quality that one’s humble dwelling could be a self-contained high rise.

California Republican and member of the House Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, joined C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Wednesday to discuss U.S.-Iranian policy, saying that the U.S. should use tactical nuclear devices rather than putting boots on the ground if it were ever to attack Iran.

The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps. This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass surveillance by...

Last week I wrote about our large-scale plan to use new technology we’re building to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. Today I’m pleased to announce a step in that direction: working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately there’s a pilot release of the Wolfram Language—as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled as part of the standard system software for every Raspberry Pi computer.

Code Names for NSA Exploit Tools This is from a Snowden document released by "Le Monde": General Term Descriptions: HIGHLANDS: Collection from Implants VAGRANT: Collection of Computer Screens MAGNETIC: Sensor Collection of Magnetic Emanations MINERALIZE: Collection from LAN Implant OCEAN: Optical Collection System for Raster-Based Computer Screens LIFESAFER: Imaging of the Hard Drive GENIE: Multi-stage operation: jumping the airgap etc. BLACKHEART: Collection from an FBI Implant DROPMIRE: Passive collection of emanations using antenna CUSTOMS: Customs opportunities (not LIFESAVER) DROPMIRE: Laser printer collection, purely proximal access (***NOT*** implanted) DEWSWEEPER: USB (Universal Serial Bus) hardware host tap that provides COVERT link over...

He claims the "Taxi" star, who officially died of cancer in 1984, faked his own death "to get away from being Andy Kaufman." A mysterious woman's claims that she is the daughter of Andy Kaufman have helped to revive long-standing rumors -- fueled in life by Kaufman himself -- that the comedian may have faked his own death. The far-fetched admission, reported first by The Comic's Comic and Defamer, occurred Monday night at the Andy Kaufman Awards, held annually at the Gotham Comedy Club. The woman was introduced by Michael Kaufman, Andy's brother, who first explained how years ago he'd...

Amid torrent of revelations that the NSA finds mass surveillance easy, the IETF ponders how to harden the Internet. Will the usually obscure Internet Engineering Task Force – that open-to-anyone group of engineers who design and keep the ‘net functioning – step up and fight back against mass surveillance? That possibility is now in the air, following a talk in Vancouver today by cryptographer Bruce Schneier (see “Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying is Making us Less Safe”). He laid partial responsibility of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance on the IETF’s doorstep. “Fundamentally, surveillance is a business model of the Internet....

I originally thought it was a hoax when I heard about it this past January. It sure sounded like one. But it’s for real: The World Trade Organization has given the otherwise unexceptional Caribbean nation of Antigua permission to sell US copyrighted content, without any payment to copyright owners.

PETERBOROUGH — An iconic figure in the Peterborough publishing industry, Wayne Green, died Friday at the age of 91. A ham radio enthusiast who created 73 magazine in the early 1960s, he was one of the founders of Byte magazine, which eventually became the nation’s largest computer publication. After leaving Byte, he went on to found a number of other computing magazines, including Kilobaud (later called Microcomputing), 80-Micro, inCider, Hot CoCo and RUN before selling his company to IDG in the early 1980s and moving on to create magazines about music and cold fusion technology.

Take Back the Internet Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us. By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical Internet stewards. This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I...

When a New York Times report appeared Thursday saying the National Security Agency had “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption” protecting online transactions, computer security professionals braced for news of breakthroughs undermining the fundamentals of their field. However, cryptography experts tell MIT Technology Review that a close reading of last week’s report suggests the NSA has not broken the underlying mathematical operations that are used to cloak online banking or e-mail. Instead, the agency appears to rely on a variety of attacks on the software used to deploy those cryptographic algorithms

An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn’t trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. “Meeting in person is out of the question,” he says. “I don’t meet in person even with my closest advisors.” When I ask for his name and nationality, he’s so spooked that he refuses to answer any other questions and we lose contact for a month. All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that despite the portrayal by the media of a deal for advanced missiles to be purchased from Russia as a future event, the fact is that Syria has already begun acquiring the S-300 missile system from Moscow.

If the Internet is to reach everywhere—from the pills you swallow to the shoes on your feet—then computers will need to get a whole lot smaller Freescale will start offering the KL02 along with some slightly larger microcontrollers, all with Wi-Fi integrated, later this year. redistributive chip packaging --- has been used for some years in defense systems

Einstein railed against the possibility of spooky action at a distance because it violates relativity. Now Chinese physicists have clocked it traveling more than four orders of magnitude faster than light