Free Republic

This is an update to article written a few years ago. Everybody knows that retail and institutional investors are usually late to a trade. When they decide to buy, the wise guys are distributing or selling their shares to them and locking in their gains. When they sell, the wise guys are accumulating or buying their shares from them, again locking in their gains. How do the wise guys pull it off? The answer lies in the combination of reflexive human behavior and the use of high frequency, algorithmic (HFA) trading. With the advance of computer trading on a massive...

Computers have as much consciousness as cars or concrete. This will not change. They’re machines. They can be programmed to follow directions and calculate certain kinds of solutions within those directed parameters. That’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the story. Why do some technocrats believe computers will gain actual consciousness? They think a) the brain is a machine that expresses consciousness via information processing, and b) information processing is all the consciousness there is. To sum up, technocrats are high-IQ idiots. You can assemble all the information in the world and cross-reference it 100 billion different ways; you...

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- A Taiwanese man who was on a three-day computer gaming binge died in an Internet cafe and went unnoticed for hours, the second such death in the area in less than a month. The man, identified as Hsieh, went into the Internet cafe on Jan. 6 and was found motionless on a table on Jan. 8. Investigators said the man had a heart attack. His death went unnoticed for several hours as gamers continued around him. "The CCTV footage from the Internet cafe showed that he had a small struggle before he collapsed motionless,"...

wanted for a dying laptop.

One of my New Years resolutions is to not stay signed into Google mail or Google anything// Does this help with the tracking google does? I use track me not on Firefox and Chrome. I am using Bing and Google for searches Thanks

Researchers at Check Point have discovered a serious security vulnerability affecting at least 12 million leading-brand home and SME routers that appears to have gone unnoticed for over a decade. Dubbed the ’Misfortune Cookie’ flaw, the firm plans to give a detailed account of the issue at a forthcoming security conference but in the meantime it’s important to stress that no real-world attacks using it have yet been detected. That said, an attacker exploiting the flaw would be able to monitor all data travelling through a gateway such as files, emails and logins and have the power to infect connected...

After about 10 years with gmail.com, I've decides to migrate to a new email address. I figure it will take few months, and will insert a forward rule in my current gmail account. I'd like to find another free provider if possible. I don't mind using a service that wraps advertising around received message, but I don't want to use a provide that wraps around sent messages. I know about reagan.com but they charge. I know they advertise explicitly that they do not browse messages for social engineering, advertising ... etc. That attracts me and if I do choose a...

A relatively long-standing vulnerability in OS X has been uncovered by a Swedish hacker, Emil Kvarnhammar, who has dubbed it “rootpipe” by the so-far undisclosed method in which it can be used to take control of your Mac. In this vulnerability, a flaw allows a hacker to gain administrative access of a system without supplying a password, and then be able to interact with your Mac as an administrator. In an interview with MacWorld, Kvarnhammar describes this bug as having been present in OS X 10.8.5, but he was not able to replicate it in 10.9; however, Apple has shuffled...

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...