Free Republic

The United Kingdom has slapped 4Chan with a £20,000 (around $26,000) fine in a bid to clamp down on platforms that are hindering Online Safety Act (OSA) investigations. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom says the fine was issued after the controversial social media site ignored “legally-binding information requests” related to global revenue and its illegal harms risk assessment. Starting from tomorrow, 4Chan additionally faces a daily penalty of £100 (around $133) for either 60 days or until 4Chan complies with the information requests, up to a maximum of £6,000 (around $8,000). “Today sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly...

Indeed, even vocal supporters of America’s effort are now expressing doubts that Nasa will be able to beat the Chinese space agency in the race to send humans back to the lunar surface. China has been making great strides in its lunar effort and is targeting a Moon landing by 2030. America’s programme, on the other hand, is beset with problems, including the lack of a working lunar landing system and lunar surface spacesuits that are behind schedule.

Today we’re introducing Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot. Figure 03 is designed for Helix, the home, and the world at scale. Our goal is to deliver a truly general-purpose robot - one that can perform human-like tasks and learn directly from people. To realize this vision, our engineering and design teams completed a ground-up hardware and software redesign to ship Figure 03 for: Helix: Figure 03 features a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system which is purpose-built to enable Helix - Figure's proprietary vision-language-action AI. The home: Figure 03 has several new features, including soft goods, wireless...

Very suddenly last week, FR on my Android device became so tiny I can barely read it. Additionally, text no longer "wraps" when I zoom in. I've seen other Freepers report this happening. Search turned up nothing. Can anyone provide a fix? Thanks in advance.🙂

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a futuristic buzzword — it’s an everyday business tool. From generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to machine learning models powering real-time analytics, customer service, and cybersecurity, AI has gone mainstream. But while most of the conversation has focused on data privacy, automation, and ethics, there’s another massive shift underway: AI is transforming the way we use the internet. As organizations across every industry embrace AI on a scale, they’re also encountering a new challenge: exponential growth in data transfer, processing requirements, and bandwidth demand. This is not a theoretical problem — it’s...

Interest in artificial intelligence continues to surge, as Google searches over the past 12 months are at 92% of their all-time peak, but recent research suggests AI’s success could be its downfall. Amid the growth of AI content online, a group of researchers at Cambridge and Oxford universities set out to see what happens when generative AI tools query content produced by AI. What they found was alarming. University of Oxford’s Dr. Ilia Shumailov and the team of researchers discovered that when generative AI software relies solely on content produced by genAI, the responses begin to degrade, according to the...

The sudden closure of one of the country's very first Whole Foods stores has rocked the upscale Bay Area town of Mill Valley. Residents say Amazon has abandoned the beloved neighborhood staple that defined their community for more than three decades and are furious despite there being another store a mile away. The California store first opened in 1992 and became a local institution where the town's 14,000 residents caught up in the aisles and kids grabbed snacks after school. But after a rodent infestation and roof repairs forced a temporary shutdown over the summer, locals expected the market to...

Deutsche Bank analyst George Saravelos said AI spending is offsetting other economic headwinds. He recently said that without the huge capex from Big Tech, a recession would be more likely. However, he also said there are key questions about what happens when the spending spree ends.AI spending has grown to be so enormous that it might be a driving force for the entire economy, not just an engine for stock-market gains. In a note on Tuesday, George Saravelos, Deutsche's global head of FX research, argued that if US tech companies hadn't dramatically ramped AI capex this year, the economy would...

This is The serus of the funniest Monkey and car video you will ever see. "Don't what the poster meant by "serus", oh well it's fun as hell...

THE GERMANS are an inventive bunch. They came up with the printing press, the car and the X-ray machine, not to mention MP3s and gummy bears. The country remains a big contributor to technological progress, filing more than 16,700 international patent applications in 2024. But, according to a new global ranking of 139 economies published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), Germany is no longer among the ten most innovative countries in the world. China has displaced it. WIPO uses 78 indicators to assemble its Global Innovation Index. They cover inputs (such as spending on research and development) and...

Every month, over 60,000 people search for terms like “best AI chatbot,” “top AI chatbots,” or “what is the best AI chatbot?” — and the number keeps rising. In many ways, we’re living through AI’s version of the Big Bang. What started as a handful of tools has rapidly expanded into a vast, ever-evolving universe of thousands of AI platforms — each claiming to be the next breakthrough. With so many tools available and countless generic lists floating online, it’s no surprise users feel overwhelmed trying to choose the right AI chatbot. Professionals, students, educators, marketers — people from all...

I don't do anything hinky or illegal on my PC. But is CCleaner good for cleaning up cache? At the moment, I use the "delete history" feature on my browser and the "delete history" feature on "Internet Options." Does CCleaner do anything else?

A woman has been accused of using dating apps to meet men and then burglarize their homes, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Adva Lavie is wanted for a string of burglaries in which she allegedly targeted older men, posing as a romantic companion on virtual dating platforms and social media, according to officials. She is also known to use the aliases Mia Ventura, Shoshana or Shana, according to officials.

Poisoning AI models might be way easier than previously thought if an Anthropic study is anything to go on. Researchers at the US AI firm, working with the UK AI Security Institute, Alan Turing Institute, and other academic institutions, said today that it takes only 250 specially crafted documents to force a generative AI model to spit out gibberish when presented with a certain trigger phrase. For those unfamiliar with AI poisoning, it's an attack that relies on introducing malicious information into AI training datasets that convinces them to return, say, faulty code snippets or exfiltrate sensitive data. The common...

Piper Sandler Companies released the results of its 50th semi-annual Taking Stock With Teens survey on Thursday. "This fall, teens self-reported annual spending dropped to $2,213, which is a 6% decline year-over year and a 1% decline on average in the past 10 years. On a positive note, looking at wallet share for the upper-income teen, clothing grew 1% year-over-year, driven by females, while footwear share held steady after a decline last spring," highlighted Piper Sandler analyst Anna Andreeva. Nike (NYSE:NKE) once again was the top clothing brand for teens, with Hollister (ANF) ranking number two and Brandy Melville a...

The Tyranny of Digital ID Digital ID is a trojan horse for an invasive surveillance state. The UK government recently announced plans to impose digital ID on every resident, raising alarms among citizens across the Western world. Promoted as a crackdown on “illegal working” and a convenient tool to access “vital government services,” the ID will be “mandatory as a means of proving your Right to Work,” officials said, concentrating power in a way that would make the Party in 1984 blush.Unlike a physical ID, a digital version records every use and provides the government with a record of...

Winboat is a tool that now easily let's you run your Windows programs underneath Linux in a way that makes it almost seamless. How do you do this? Let's find out!

Microsoft is closing a popular loophole that allowed users to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. The change has appeared in recent Insider builds of Windows 11, indicating it is likely to be included in the production version soon. Microsoft refers to these loopholes as "known mechanisms" and is talking about local commands in this instance. You can learn all about these in our piece for getting Windows 11 installed with a local account, but suffice to say start ms-cxh:localonly is no more. "While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical...

Observations by 30+ hiring managers and tech recruiters about what’s happening: a flood of inbound applications means more selective hiring, there’s increased demand for product engineers, and moreLast month, we published a deepdive on the tech jobs market based on data that revealed a slow, steady rise in recruitment across Big Tech and startups. There’s also predictably massive AI engineering demand, fewer remote roles, and the growing significance of location, among other things. The job market feels pretty weird right now: hiring managers say it’s hard to fill positions, but software engineers also get fewer responses to their applications. Also...

Recent images purportedly depicting the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS during its closest approach to Mars last week have erupted in controversy online, as many took to social media with theories about what the object’s unusual shape could mean about its nature and origins. The new images obtained last week by NASA’s Perseverance rover appear to show 3I/ATLAS streaking through the Martian night sky as it passed through the field of view of the robotic explorer’s Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) from its position in Jezero Crater. The recent imagery was originally uploaded to NASA’s multimedia page in raw format. Since that time,...