Free Republic

Milton Everett Olin Jr., 65, died around 1 p.m. Sunday after he was involved in a crash in the 22000 block of Mulholland Highway. A report in the Los Angeles Times identified Olin as the former chief operating officer of file-sharing service Napster, according to court documents cited by the Times.

So, I was on this site a few weeks ago and a guy was complaining that they were “auto editing” bad words. The entire word would be replaced with asterisks. I posted and told him that you could always misspell the offending word and gave an example. I said you could spell the N word with three “g”s and their software would not touch it. But I didn’t say it that way. I actually posted the word to prove it. Keep in mind, I posted the word with no context. Just the word as an object, much as someone could...

Motorola’s Project Ara aims to build custom, open-source smartphones from replaceable, updatable, snappable components. Consumers could selectively replace and customize every device component, from camera to processor. Making modularity happen will be no small feat, but Project Ara recently signed up a powerful new co-conspirator—3D printing giant, 3D Systems. 3D Systems makes and sells 3D printing equipment for desktop, professional, and industrial use. The firm entered into a multi-year agreement with Motorola to design and implement a speedy, industrial scale 3D printing process for Project Ara.

Soliciting advice from experts, aka, freepers in general. Subject: Hunting property security. I am looking for advice from experts here concerning some type of wireless camera, both indoor and outdoor, to provide real time observation to a remote computer, cell phone, and ipad. My goal is to see what is going at a property located a hundred miles away. I have internet service to the property but I need a way to observe what is going on inside the living area and outside. Is there a reliable wireless system out there that a freeper can recommend?

High-temperature superconductors exhibit a frustratingly varied catalog of odd behavior, such as electrons that arrange themselves into stripes or refuse to arrange themselves symmetrically around atoms. Now two physicists propose that such behaviors – and superconductivity itself – can all be traced to a single starting point, and they explain why there are so many variations. This theory might be a step toward new, higher-temperature superconductors that would revolutionize electrical engineering with more efficient motors and generators and lossless power transmission. -snip- Most subatomic particles have a tiny magnetic field – a property physicists call "spin" – and electrical resistance...

Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...

In the late 1930s, as humans managed to launch yet another war that would fail to end all wars, H.G. Wells wrote a series of essays laying out a plan for a better world. Wells, a novelist, reformer and sometime historian, believed that technology could connect people in ways that had never before been possible, joining them in a network and uniting their wisdom into a kind of synaptic and singular mind. The structure Wells imagined would be, he declared, “a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified,...

It's likely you've seen a child that's too young to speak in complete sentences operating his mom's iPhone better than, well, his mom. But what about a product that's geared specifically toward babies -- like an infant seat -- that comes with a iPad holder? The Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity Seat by Fisher Price is just that. It features, in addition to the iPad holder, bat-at toys on the removable bar and a mirror that reflects the baby's image when the iPad is removed. But it's that iPad holder feature that's got moms up in arms.

I really like , so if you want to hear some just click on it.

In Brooklyn, New York, there is a bar called Sharlene's. At Sharlene's, a Jameson-and-soda costs $7, and I was on my second of the night when a friend, Derek, told me that if I listed Sleeping Beauty among my favorite movies on OkCupid, I would attract creeps and weirdos. He went on. For instance, to list Gilmore Girls among my favorite TV shows was fine, but I should balance it with something more aggressive, like The Sopranos. My favorite foods should include something savory, not just "pie" and "jam." And I should definitely not describe what I did on a...

A U.S. Army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team fires his M4 carbine at insurgents during a firefight, Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. The vehicle he is using for cover is a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. June 2012.U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod.

A Stanford University Ph.D. student named Rahinah Ibrahim was prevented from boarding a flight at San Francisco International Airport in 2005, and was handcuffed and detained by the police. Ultimately, she was allowed to fly to Malaysia, her home country, but she has been unable to return to the United States because the State Department revoked her student visa. Summation: The woman's eldest daughter, who was born in the U.S. and is a U.S. citizen, was called as a witness for the trial. Unfortunately, she mysteriously found herself on the no-fly list as well, and wasn't able to board a...

I have been using Bento as my CRM tool for years. Although made by Filemaker and considered to not be very robust, it did have one key feature lacking in its big brother program... it synced with Address Book. That meant I didn't have to maintain separate databases of people and it was very convenient. To my understanding, the newest version of Filemaker released this week still does not have this functionality. As of the latest iOS refresh, Bento will no longer sync across devices (so I lost the mobile notes I had made since last sync). Filemaker ceased support...

A new worm is targeting personal computers running the Linux operating system, and may also pose a threat to embedded devices such as home routers and set-top boxes, a security vendor reported this week.   Symantec said its researchers warned the malware, named Linux.Darlloz, spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi that had been patched as early as May 2012.   "The worm is capable of attacking a range of small, Internet-enabled devices in addition to traditional computers. Variants exist for chip architectures usually found in devices such as home routers, set-top boxes and security cameras," researcher Kaoru Hayashi said...

Windows 8.1 is now the fifth most popular desktop OS, at least as recorded by Web tracker Net Applications. For November, Microsoft's latest version of Windows snagged 2.64 percent of all desktop OS traffic recorded by Net Applications. That number was a healthy gain from the 1.72 percent seen in October and the 0.87 percent in September. The rise also pushed Windows 8.1 just ahead of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks with a 2.42 percent share and just behind Windows Vista with a 3.57 percent share. Windows 8.1 popped up in June as a preview edition before officially launching in...

Researchers recently took data from the Facebook app Are You Interested and found that not only is race a factor in our online dating interests, but particular races get disproportionately high — and low — amounts of interest. Of the 2.4 million heterosexual interactions researchers reviewed, the findings show: Women get three times the interactions men do.All men seemed to be more interested in people outside their race.Black men and women get the lowest response rates to their messages.All women except black women are most drawn to white men, and men of all races (with one notable exception) prefer Asian...

It says the SmartWig can be worn "in addition to natural hair", and will be able to process data and communicate wirelessly with other external devices. ... Google and Samsung are among the firms that have launched products in wearable technology - seen as a key growth area. "Wearable gadgets are definitely going to be one of the big areas of growth over the next two years," Andrew Milroy, an analyst with consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, told the BBC.

After two months of massive glitches and bugs on the healthcare.gov website, the Obama administration says they met their self-imposed deadline of getting the site running smoothly. The administration said Sunday the site is now working for just about everyone but warned it still needs more fixes. Valley Health's health insurance enrollment campaign in Barboursville, WV proved that while the site has improved many problems, there are still kinks that need to be fixed. During Thanksgiving weekend, Valley Health helped those in need of health insurance sign up at the Huntington Mall in Barboursville, WV. In three days, certified assisters...

Anyone got cure for his virus?

Bitcoin miners are being allegedly bundled with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications, a new report indicates. According to a report by security company Malwarebytes third party applications that come bundled with legitimate applications and commonly known as potentially unwanted programs/applications (PUPs/PUAs) now come integrated with Bitcoin miners. These miners surreptitiously carry out Bitcoin mining operations on the user’s system consuming valuable CPU time without explicitly asking for user’s consent. Because of the extensive mathematical calculations involved, the mining operation consumes a lot of CPU resource and renders the user’s system almost useless for...

https://www.healthcare.gov/

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

It was only a matter of time before PlayStation users exploited and defiled the live-streaming feature. At the moment the feature is open for any gamer to publicly display all manner of X-rated shenanigans before they are banned. What this means for its future and the implications of censorship will surely be a big issue for Sony.

Just after Microsoft released Windows 8.1, rumors have surfaced that they might be releasing fix 8.2 as early as January of 2014. The big changes coming, in 8.2, are said to quell the critics of Windows 8 and their last release of their 8.1 fix. These changes in 8.2, are Microsoft’s attempt at making the OS a lot more intuitive for the user and acknowledges the changes that users have asked for. The recent release of version 8.1, brought back the familiar Start button that was absent in their first release, but it wasn’t quite enough for most users. The...

Today, Google is running a 50th anniversary tribute to Doctor Who on its start page. Take a look!

$750 – that is the amount of money it cost a police department in Massachusetts to get access to their computer files back. The culprit of this kidnap and ransom was the now-infamous CryptoLocker, which locked both images and Microsoft Word documents on the department's computer system. While precise statistics are hard to come by, researchers at Symantec say they are seeing hundreds of thousands of spam emails a day distributing the threat, with hundreds of infections per day. Ransomware scams are still in vogue, but where CryptoLocker makes its mark is its use of asymmetric encryption– and don't be...

SAN JOSE — A jury on Thursday said that Samsung Electronics would have to pay Apple $290 million more in damages for violating patents, putting an end to one chapter in the long-running patent struggle between the two tech companies. The six-woman, two-man jury calculated the damages based on 13 products that infringed Apple’s patents. They determined that two smartphones incurred the heftiest damages: Samsung’s Infuse 4G, at about $100 million, and the Droid Charge, at $60 million. While the price tag will not significantly affect either company’s pocketbooks — they are two of the most profitable companies in the...

merica’s traditional phone system is not as dependable as it used to be. Just last month, the Federal Communications Commission told phone companies to start . According to one estimate, as many as 1 in 5 incoming long-distance calls simply doesn’t connect. The problem may be in the way those calls are being routed — often via the Internet, which is cheaper. It may also have something to do with the gradual decay of traditional landline infrastructure. Dan Newhouse, a farmer in eastern Washington state, hears that decay on his home phone every day. “We live out in the country,...

Installing smart-home automation systems can be pricey, which is why designer Roger Yiu is giving consumers a back door to controlling your home on your mobile — the Smart Power Strip app. The Smart Power Strip lets you power on and off any device you can plug into a conventional wall outlet. You can also set timers and read your electricity usage in real-time, all from your smartphone.

Massachusetts cops have admitted paying a ransom to get their data back on an official police computer infected with the devilish Cryptolocker ransomware.Cryptolocker is a rather unpleasant strain of malware, first spotted in August, that encrypts documents on the infiltrated Windows PC and will throw away the decryption key unless a ransom is paid before a time limit. The sophisticated software, which uses virtually unbreakable 256-bit AES and 2048-bit RSA encryption, even offers a payment plan for victims who have trouble forking out the two Bitcoins (right now $1,200) required to recover the obfuscated data. On November 6, a police...

Just in time for the holidays, the price of a stolen identity has dropped as much as 37 percent in the cybercrime underground: to $25 for a U.S. identity, and $40 for an overseas identity. Researcher Joe Stewart of Dell SecureWorks teamed with independent researcher David Shear to get an insider's look at what a plethora of hacking services and stolen data cost these days in the underground. Among their findings: For $300 or less, you can acquire credentials for a bank account with a balance of $70,000 to $150,000, and $400 is all it takes to get a rival...

I have been experiencing a most perplexing problem with Mozilla Firefox lately and I'm hoping that maybe someone here will have the answer I'm looking for. I have an addon/extension called "Download Youtube Videos as MP4s." Basically, it allows me to download Youtube videos in either an FLV or MP4 format. This comes in quite handy for saving data/information regarding political matters. Lately, however, something, somewhere, somehow, has been messing that up. If I click on the download button, instead of getting a "Save As" context menu, the webpage goes blank, a very long URL is displayed in the address...

New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran...

I have an old, old version of MS Money and love i; it does everything I want it to for keeping track of my investments. But Microsoft stopped making Money a few years back, so that leaves one other big player in the space, Quickens software. However, when I read all of the review on Amazon it appears to be a nightmare for many people, especially those using Windows 8/8.1, which is what I am now using. My version of MS Money barely worked on Vista; several times in fact it would not, making it fitful at best. I am...

This article in in PDF form so be aware of that. Here's a snippet that's indicative of the overall style and the points that Mickens makes: When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things,...

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is holding the first congressional hearing on the future of Bitcoin. The first panel features senior figures from the Obama administration. And their comments about Bitcoin have been remarkably positive.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” I think it would be safe to say that in 1792, if an agent of the government would have stopped Thomas Jefferson on the street in Charlottesville, and demanded his personal diary or papers without a warrant, Mr. Jefferson would have likely have used that little...

Just before the weekend Microsoft released its new 3D Builder app for Windows 8.1. We heard before the launch of Windows 8.1 that 3D printing capability would be native to the operating system; with plug-and-play support for a wide range of 3D printers and native support for many associated 3D file formats. Now the new Microsoft 3D Builder app puts a front end on this functionality and presents you with a “clean, simple user interface,� to easily get you from object browsing to finished output.Microsoft calls the 3D Builder app “the best place to view, prepare, and print your 3D...

Hello to all you techies, geeks and lurkers. I've got an older Lenovo laptop (3000 N100) that crashed for the second time in a month. It was definitely software related. Had W-XP preloaded by Lenovo. It's been running slow lately so I thought this would be a good time to Linux on it. My sons use it for home schooling. I don't need it to do much other than surf the web and play some flash videos. Lenovo has this thing called Lenovo Care that is installed on the LT. Does anyone know where this resides? I can't find anything...

I just launched a beta version of RadioSearchEngine.com - the world's first radio search engine. There are other directories of A-Z lists of radio stations, but this is the first search engine where any song or artist can be located on stations playing from anywhere in the world. A universal web player for the first time connects to and plays nearly every station offering immediate audio satisfaction and unprecedented user control. Uses: radiosearchengine.com - Play local stations, locate trending songs and popular showsradiosearchengine.com/search/metallica - Get a list every Metallica song playing on radioradiosearchengine.com/search/katy-perry-roar - List all stations playing Katy Perry's...

Despite billions in revenue each quarter and owning the dominant desktop platform in the world, people still find it easy to criticize Microsoft. A lot of that has to do with its distant third place in the smartphone race — in the post-PC era, people care more about how you're doing on phones and tablets than in the traditional computing space.That, along with Microsoft's struggles in boosting demand for its Surface tablets, has led to many people saying very negative things about the company's products and future.Because of all of that negativity, many overlook the areas where Microsoft shines. While...

It's hard to believe, but it's been 30 years since Microsoft first showed off Windows to the world.It's changed an awful lot in that time.Thanks to better hardware, the rise of the Internet, and competition from long-time rival (and occasional ally) Apple, Microsoft has managed to stay relevant by releasing updates that meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people all around the world. Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985, two years after Bill Gates first showed it off to the public. Essentially a graphical user interface layered on top of MS-DOS, it was immediately adopted by the...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have "contributed $25,000 apiece" to Washington's Initiative 594, which would effectively ban private gun sales in the state. The Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility (WAGR) is pushing the initiative, claiming it "makes sure anyone buying a gun in Washington State passes the same background check, no matter where where they buy the gun and no matter whom they buy it from."

One of the givens of working in IT is that the pace of technology changes rapidly, and so too, do the skills that are needed to stay current. Here are 10 that John Hales, a VMware instructor at Global Knowledge says are going away:1. Windows XP/2003 and earlier. Why? Mainly because the operating systems are reaching their end of life and won’t be supported/updated by Microsoft any longer. Also, new applications no longer support them.2. Silverlight. This was Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash and it can’t be used with the new Windows Store (metro) apps or on a Windows phone.3....

The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be "an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the law's tradeoffs — the one that should have happened a while ago." Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law's passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their...

American soldiers patrolling dangerous streets will soon be accompanied by autonomous robots programmed to scan the area with thermal imaging and send live images back to the command center. Likewise, squads of infantrymen hiking through mountains will be helped by a wagon train of robots carrying extra water, ammo and protective gear. Such scenarios are but a few years down the road, according to robotic researchers and U.S. military officials. "Robots allow [soldiers] to be more lethal and engaged in their surroundings," said Lt. Col. Willie Smith, chief of Unmanned Ground Vehicles at Fort Benning, Ga. "I think there's more...

ALBUQUERQUE, NM, November 14, 2013 (Operation Rescue) - The campaign website for a pro-life group supporting the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance in Albuquerque, New Mexico has been hacked and e-mail meant to go to the pro-life PAC ABQ Voters For Late Term Abortion Ban has instead been redirected to the abortion-supporting group Respect ABQ Women, which is opposing the Ordinance. The Pain Capable ordinance, which goes to a vote on November 19, is the first of its kind to be proposed at the municipal level and would ban abortions after 20 weeks within the Albuquerque city limits, where...

Corporations try to use social media to their advantage. Sometimes it works. Most times it fails. Some of those failures are spectacular. Case in point: Today's JP Morgan Chase "Twitter Takeover" of #AskJPM hosted by one of JPM's Vice Chairman. Apparently, the social network still dislikes JP Morgan Chase and let them have it with a level of snarky disdain that caused JPM to "cancel the event", as if that were possible.

I've always known this, and I'm sure most of you do too, but we never really talk about it. Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. Since this functionality is highly timing-dependent, a real-time operating system is required. This operating system is stored in firmware, and runs on the baseband processor. As far as I know, this baseband RTOS is...

While employees may get the brunt of the blame for security breaches, company leaders are doing their fair share of damage as well, a new study finds. Research from ThreatTrack Security revealed that 40% of security professionals found that a device used by a member of their company's senior leadership team had been infected by malware because of a visit to a pornographic website, and nearly 60% of the security professionals surveyed have cleaned malware from a device after an executive clicked on a malicious link or was duped by a phishing email. In addition, 45% of respondents said they...