Free Republic

The new hybrid device might not need humans at all. In college, it wasn’t rare to hear a verbal battle regarding artificial intelligence erupt between my friends studying neuroscience and my friends studying computer science. One rather outrageous fellow would mention the possibility of a computer takeover, and off they went. The neuroscience-savvy would awe at the potential of such hybrid technology as the CS majors argued we have nothing to fear, as computers will always need a programmer to tell them what to do. Today’s news brings us to the Neural Turing Machine, a computer that will combine the...

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. “This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying. She speculates that the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A company that performs background checks for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday it was the victim of a cyber attack, adding in a statement that "it has all the markings of a state-sponsored attack." The computer breach at Falls Church, Virginia-based US Investigations Services (USIS) probably involved the theft of personal information about DHS employees, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the story. DHS has suspended all work with the company amid an investigation by the FBI, the Post reported. A U.S. government official confirmed to Reuters that the FBI is...

A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated -- and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!

Apparently, the feebs have been using malware and the TOR network to snoop on quite a bit more information than one might have suspected. Use the following link here for more info: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation_torpedo/

This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil” Per FR posting rules, ars technica can not be posted, so a link to the article referring to USB thumbdrives hacking computers is listed instead. Ignore the "source url", it just points back to the FR website. Article here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/this-thumbdrive-hacks-computers-badusb-exploit-makes-devices-turn-evil/

I was given the gift of a new laptop- HP Pavilion Smartouch 17. not my first choice, but it was a nice gift and the giver knew my old Toshiba Satellite L505-a6946 is dying and that I'm too cheap to buy a new one. The Satellite uses Vista and the new HP is Windows 8.1 . I need to know what's the best(easiest) way to move all my data from one to the other including AVG,Hitman Pro, Malwarebytes,emails(Outlook)and other vital programs. While I'm at it, I assume it came with all sorts of unwanted 'bloatware' so I will need to...

A relic from long before the age of supercomputers, the 169-year-old math strategy called the Jacobi iterative method is widely dismissed today as too slow to be useful. But thanks to a curious, numbers-savvy Johns Hopkins engineering student and his professor, it may soon get a new lease on life. With just a few modern-day tweaks, the researchers say they've made the rarely used Jacobi method work up to 200 times faster. The result, they say, could speed up the performance of computer simulations used in aerospace design, shipbuilding, weather and climate modeling, biomechanics and other engineering tasks. Their paper...

I'm trying to determine if it's worth messing with to find a different (and free) operating system for my very old Dell Latitude laptop. It currently has Windows XP SP3, which of course Microsoft no longer supports.

I run a data center. Disk drives that are left running continuously last between two and three years. Three years is about 36 months. The odds of a disk failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300. The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656. The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month is 37 to the 7th power = 1 in 78,664,164,096.

We know that Lois Lerner' s computer crashed at some time and per this morning it was just before "she learned of the rogue agents in Cincinnati." Since she was a fairly high level employee whose job required travel did she have a laptop? The way they describe their email system (not the way most systems work) not only would the desktop which crashed have a complete copy of all e-mails both incoming and outgoing so would the laptop. If she did have a laptop did it crash as well; did the agency give it to another employee at some...

If you think that the world's greatest inventions came from the fevered minds of solitary geniuses, think again. As you scan this list of the 10 inventions that changed the world, note how many of them perfected workable designs. 10. Plow Compared to some of the gleaming, electronic inventions that fill our lives today, the plow doesn't seem very exciting. It's a simple cutting tool used to carve a furrow into the soil, churning it up to expose nutrients and prepare it for planting. Yet the plow is probably the one invention that made all others possible. No one knows...

I'll try to make this as short as possible, because I never know when a page is going to load. As you may recall, I started having connection issues about three and a half months ago. After eliminating every other issue I wound up getting another (rebuilt) computer. Late last month the same issue began showing up so I returned the computer to the repair shop at which I bought it. They hooked it up to their connection and announced that there was nothing wrong with it. As recently as last Sunday this thing was working like a top. Now...

So, this weekend's news in the tech world was flooded with a "story" about how a "chatbot" passed the Turing Test for "the first time," with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that's what they do. First, here's the press release from the University of Reading, which should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for any reporter. Here are some quotes, almost all of which are misleading...

Let’s talk about the coolest substance ever: graphene. It’s one atom thick, (about one-millionth the thickness of a single strand of hair), it’s 100 times stronger than steel, and it conducts electricity like nothing else. It’s a supermaterial that is quietly changing the course of technology. Here’s why you should get excited about it: It will turn computers into transformers It is now being suggested that graphene can be changed into different configurations on the fly by simply manipulating it with lasers. That means that it could take on the form of different computers in just seconds, freeing us from...

Fugitive Edward Snowden on Friday challenged the NSA’s insistence that it has no evidence he tried to raise concerns about the agency’s surveillance activity before he began leaking government documents to reporters, calling the response a “clearly tailored and incomplete leak ... for a political advantage.” “The NSA's new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers -- after more than a year of denying any such contact existed - raises serious concerns,” Snowden said in an email Friday to NBC News. “It reveals as false the NSA's claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of...

Sure there are technical forums that discuss btrfs, the shiny new filesystem for Linux but my experience has shown that FReepers meet or exceed the technical expertise anywhere on the net. The two cutting-edge filesystems that are (supposedly) impervious to bitrot are btrfs and zfs (which has a Linux implementation, older than what Oracle has now closed off).

The United States on Monday charged five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets, ratcheting up tensions between the two world powers over cyber espionage. China immediately denied the charges, saying in a strongly worded Foreign Ministry statement the U.S. grand jury indictment was "made up" and would damage trust between the two nations. Officials in Washington have argued for years that cyber espionage is a top national security concern.

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “By expanding federal law enforcement’s power to secretly exploit ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us,” Nathan...

A man has filed a lawsuit in Florida for the right to marry his MacBook computer, according to the UK Telegraph newspaper. Chris Sevier argues that if same-sex marriages are allowed, on the grounds that one can marry anyone they love, then Sever should be allowed to marry his computer. Apparently it is not just any computer that turns Sevier’s head, but the massive inventory of pornography stored on it: “Over time, I began preferring sex with my computer over sex with real women. Naturally, I ‘fell in love’ with my computer and preferred having sex with it over all...