Free Republic

Full Title: 'Mascara from Amsterdam, or if to be precise from the field': Outrage as female 'separatist' posts Instagram selfie wearing 'looted mascara - and boasting about it' Outrage has been expressed in Russia and Ukraine over a young woman who allegedly boasted on her social media site about using looted mascara from the Malaysian air crash site. Identified as Ekaterina Parkhomenko from Torez, close to where the Boeing 777 hit the ground after being shot out of the sky, she posted a picture of a blue mascara bottle, say reports. Her Instagram account then carried two selfies taken with...

Apple, Inc's double digit U.S. Mac growth contradicts IDC & Gartner reports of a Mac sales slump By Daniel Eran Dilger Apple reported "strong double digit growth" in its Mac sales in the U.S., directly contradicting the earlier estimates published by IDC and Gartner that stated Apple's U.S. Mac sales fell year-over-year in the June quarter and calling into question the legitimacy of market estimates that the tech media uncritically presents as factual. Earlier this month, IDC (above) reported that Apple's U.S. Mac unit sales in Q2 (Apple's fiscal Q3, the quarter ending in June) fell by 1.7 percent, while...

Here are 11 sure signs you've been hacked and what to do in the event of compromise. Note that in all cases, the No. 1 recommendation is to completely restore your system to a known good state before proceeding. In the early days, this meant formatting the computer and restoring all programs and data. Today, depending on your operating system, it might simply mean clicking on a Restore button. Either way, a compromised computer can never be fully trusted again. The recovery steps listed in each category below are the recommendations to follow if you don't want to do a...

The mystery of how a woman could have been filmed while using a modern cell phone back in 1938 seems to have finally been solved. Black and white footage of a young female chatting into a wireless handset - said to have been filmed at a factory in the United States in the 30s - has attracted over 300,000 plays on YouTube. Conspiracy theorists hailed the clip as proof of time travel, citing it alongside other instances of old films that appear to show imagery of modern technology existing years before it was invented.

A wanted man assisted in his own arrest after using Facebook to mock police by commenting on his mugshot. Maryland police uploaded the mugshot of Roger Ireland, 28, in their #WantedWednesday posts following his violation of his parole terms. Ireland then bragged ‘Y’all will never catch me,’ in the comments on the post. Other users began to tag Ireland’s family members in the comments section, prompting him to post further nonsensical comments, such as: ‘Stay tha **** out my **** get yall **** 2gether b4 u find room 2 peak bout mine im out on 3 bails.’ Within 24 hours...

A bull elk is back in the wild after a wild night in Garden City. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game says someone called police to report seeing an elk in a vacant lot at 42nd and Adams Street. The responding officer called Fish and Game. A conservation officer found the elk, which appeared to be stressed. Fish and Game says people were getting too close and trying to take "selfies" with the animal. Because of the stress, the elk ran off through the neighborhood including Veteran's Parkway. "When people get this close to a wild animal, the stress...

Russia's interior ministry has offered up to 3.9m roubles (£65,000) for research on identifying the users of the anonymous browsing network Tor, raising questions of online freedom amid a broader crackdown on the Russian internet.

LORAIN, Ohio — An elementary school teacher has been charged with possession of child pornography according to Steven M.Dettelbach, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. Edward A. Dembiec, 53, of Lorain, Ohio, was charged Friday after a lengthy investigation that found Dembiec possessed the “criminal information on or about October 1, 2008, through May 5, 2013.”

Women were also jailed 10 days in the first sentence of its kind in Saudi ArabiaA Saudi court sentenced two local women to 10 days in prison and ordered them lashed 10 times each after they were found guilty of swearing at each other on WhatsApp. The judge at the court in the western Red Sea port of Jeddah tried to reconcile the two but they refused and insisted on charging each other. “The judge had no choice but to sentence the two and make them write a statement not to abuse each other again,” Arar daily said, adding that...

This recount, found on The Meta Picture, tells the story of one restaurant’s quest to find out why they kept getting bad reviews despite serving the same number of customers on a daily basis. It took a look into their past to discover exactly what has changed in the last ten years – and their findings tell more about how we as a country have changed – possibly, for the worse. Now, although this particular instance may or may not be true, it tells a story that is all too common today in America. We are so engrossed in ourselves...

It is either the funniest thing on the internet, or the creepiest, but one thing is for certain: a guy called Owen Mundy knows where your cat lives.No matter where you are in the world, if you have posted a photo of your feline friend on social media, chances are Professor Mundy’s supercomputer has captured it, collated it, and pinpointed your location.Professor Mundy combines art, design and computer programming in his addictive site – simply titled iknowwhereyourcatlives.com - highlighting our obsession with cats and the trends of the internet.On his website, Mundy reveals that there are 15 million photos tagged with the...

Just throwing it out there. Nothing is impossible. I do foresee something like this in the short to mid term future. What's to stop them? Would our own government do anything if the populace of the southwest was over 55 percent "amnesty given" Latinos and Latino illegals?

The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for...

When I load FR certain words are appearing as hyperlinks. I scanned the hard drive using super anti spyware and got rid of one program called "immenent". Also getting pop-ups. Ad block is on and I'm using firefox browser. I also use windows defender. Any help appreciated, thanks.

MacDailyNews presents live notes from Apple’s Q314 Conference Call with analysts starting at 5pm EDT/2pm PDT today. For its fiscal 2014 third quarter ended June 28, 2014, Apple today announced Q314 financial results with quarterly revenue of $37.4 billion (vs. $35.3 billion YOY) and quarterly net profit of $7.7 billion (vs. $6.9 billion YOY), or $1.07 per diluted share.“Our record June quarter revenue was fueled by strong sales of iPhone and Mac and the continued growth of revenue from the Apple ecosystem, driving our highest EPS growth rate in seven quarters,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “We...

YUBA CITY (CBS13) — A Facebook page created to criticize people about their weight is generating controversy in the Yuba-Sutter region. 530 Fatties appears to be created by someone who lives within the local 530 area code, and featured photos of overweight or obese people in public without their permission. With those photos are words mocking the subjects’ weight. The page was taken down at some point on Monday after CBS13 began looking into it after several people reached out to us. Jessi Lynn Howell, 18, is still mortified after discovering a picture of herself posted on 530 Fatties.

Apple Inc. is preparing for its largest initial production run of iPhones, betting that larger-screen models will lure consumers now attracted to similar phones from Samsung Electronics Co. and others. The Cupertino, Calif., company is asking suppliers to manufacture between 70 million and 80 million units combined of two large-screen iPhones with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays by Dec. 30, according to people familiar with the matter. Its forecast for what is commonly called the iPhone 6 is significantly larger than the initial order last year of between 50 million and 60 million versions of the iPhone 5S and 5C--which had...

A new kind of tracking tool, canvas fingerprinting, is being used to follow visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn. First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it. Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites...

I never thought it would happen to me. I’m technologically savvy, hyper-vigilant about parental controls, and frequently check the search and browser histories of my kids’ electronic devices. As a writer for LSN, I’m more aware than most people of the filth that’s out there and the harmful effects it can have on a developing brain (not to mention a developing soul). So that’s why I was surprised and heartbroken the day I discovered my ten-year-old son had been watching hardcore pornography on his iPhone. It was the first day of final exams. At the bus stop that morning, my...

Is iOS spying on you for Apple? According to forensic scientist Jonathan Zdziarski, quite possibly: Several undocumented services run regularly in the background on over 600 million iOS devices, which could be sending data to Apple. At a recent talk at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York, Zdziarski identified “a number of undocumented high-value forensic services running on every iOS designs” and “suspicious design omissions in iOS that make collection easier.” What does that mean? In short, Zdziarski showed that these services could be used to take forensic artifacts off an iPhone or iPad that should never...

KATY PERRY @katyperry So INCREDIBLY sad to hear that there were 100 volunters for UNICEF on flight #MN17 Sending our prayers to all of the families affected :( UNCIEF have assured the public that no employees or volunteers for the world organisation were onboard the MH17, Malaysian Airlines flight that was shot down over Ukraine last week after Katy Perry, an ambassador for the company, tweeted that 100 volunteers had died in the accident. ** snip ** With 54 million followers, more than any other Twitter user, Perry's tweet obviously caused confusion and for many, probably panic. It's unclear where...

Malware dubbed Mayhem is spreading through Linux and FreeBSD web servers, researchers say. The software nasty uses a grab bag of plugins to cause mischief, and infects systems that are not up to date with security patches. Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov, who work at Russian internet portal Yandex, discovered the malware targeting *nix servers. They traced transmissions from compromised computers to two command and control (C&C) servers. So far they have found 1,400 machines that have fallen to the code, with potentially thousands more to come. […] Mayhem spreads by finding servers hosting websites with a remote...

On Thursday, Microsoft announced it would cut 18,000 jobs (14% of the company workforce) in the next year, the largest reduction in company history. Since its acquisition of Nokia, experts predicted there would be some layoffs, but the number is double the amount predicted. Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft’s device unit (the hardest hit by the layoffs) and former CEO of Nokia, proceeded to bury the news about 12,500 layoffs in the eleventh paragraph of a corporate memo. Elop begins the memo with a cheery “Hello there,” stating Microsoft’s strategy is “focused on productivity and our desire to help people...

Does anyone have any expertise on downloading XBMC to a Allwinner AS13 CPU? It's a Allwinner AS13 4 X A7 1G CPU SG*544 GPU*4

‘phablet’ phone will go on sale this year 4.7-inch iPhone production to start third week of July 5.5-inch version scheduled for second week of August Recent video shows the 4.7inch handset's sapphire glass screen being bent, twisted, scratched with keys and even stabbed with a knife t is a tale of two phone firms. As Microsoft confirms it is laying off 18,000 workers, mainly in the mobile phone business it bought from Nokia... The Economic Daily said Foxconn had finally confirmed the rumours it would hire a huge number of staff. The latest report appears to contradict earlier claims the...

An employee at an insurance agency in central Sweden will lose 15 days of pay as punishment for surfing the web on the job, spending over 40 hours this summer mainly using social media. Multiple employees at a branch of Försäkringskassan (Swedish Social Insurance Agency) in Gävle face serious repercussions for browsing the web instead of helping customers. In one case, the employee spent about 50 hours of work time during one month visiting 350 websites - including plenty of shopping, weight-loss sites, and blogs. Over a period of seven months the woman had worked 51 hours overtime, but over...

The communist, America haters at Google are at it again. They have a Google Doodle for Nelson Mandela's 96th birthday, but not just a clickthrough to the Wikipedia. They have an entire sequence of Kumbaya images that basically tells white to go you-know-what themselves. Another reason to use DuckDuckGo.com as your search engine. (Side note: I wonder if Google keeps an eye on who clicks the image, and more frighteningly, who DOESN'T click the image?) LINK TO COMMIE GOOGLE SITE

Infections found in Australia and New Zealand. A new malware that runs on UNIX-like servers even with restricted privileges has already infected machines in Australia and is actively hunting for more targets, a new research paper has shown. Three researchers from Russian web provider Yandex - Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov - said in the technical analysis of the malware, published on security and anti-virus specialist publication Virus Bulletin, that Mayhem functions like a traditional Windows bot. -snip- According to the researchers, Mayhem appears to be the continuation of the Fort Disco brute-force password cracking attack campaign that...

Apple today announced that Susan L. Wagner, founding partner and director of BlackRock, has been elected to Apple’s board of directors. Bill Campbell, the board’s longest-serving member, is retiring after 17 years of service. Wagner co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and helped it become one of the world’s most successful asset-management companies, holding a range of leadership positions including vice chairman until mid-2012. She continues to serve on the boards of BlackRock and DSP BlackRock (India), as well as Swiss Re, Wellesley College and Hackley School. “Sue is a pioneer in the financial industry and we are excited to welcome her...

Not content to blow both feet off with a shotgun, Microsoft is going for the kneecaps now by blackmailing it’s customers. If you are still dumb enough to use Windows, you are about have your wallet shaken down by Microsoft in a familiar yet still unwelcome way.We don’t feel the need to sugarcoat this much because the company’s behavior is so blatant and uncaring it is almost staggering. Worse yet the victims, that would be almost all Windows users, have only themselves to blame because the pattern has been well laid out for years now. Microsoft has been unapologetically blackmailing...

Employees at Dell Services offices in Plano will be affected by global layoffs that parent company Dell Inc. is undergoing, but the number of pink slips the Round Rock-based tech giant will pass out in North Texas is not yet clear. Dell workers were to be notified Wednesday of layoffs across the globe, including at Dell Services offices in Plano. A statement put out by Dell confirmed the layoffs but declined to give the number of workers that the computer firm will cut. Dell has about 2,500 employees in North Texas and about 16,500 statewide.

SEATTLE — Microsoft said Thursday that it planned to eliminate up to 18,000 jobs over the next year in a shake-up intended to help the company move more quickly in the market. The cuts are the largest in the company’s 39-year history, representing about 14 percent of its work force. Microsoft will make the deepest cuts from the businesses it acquired from the Finnish phone maker Nokia. About 12,500 of the jobs being eliminated will come from the Nokia groups, resulting from the closing of a factory in Hungary and other changes. That is about half the number of employees...

Tech behemoths Apple and IBM announced a partnership Tuesday that could make Apple—traditionally a consumer brand—a major player in the business market. IBM said it would create a class of more than 100 business applications exclusively for iPhones and iPads to run on Apple's iOS platform. In return, IBM will sell Apple's products with 100 industry-specific apps to its clients worldwide. Some of the services IBM will provide via iOS include device management, security, analytics and mobile integration, they said in a release. In return, Apple's vaunted AppleCare service would provide support for these applications. The partnership is about "transforming...

The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to permanently extend a ban on Internet access taxes that Congress has temporarily extended three times over the past 16 years. The House, in a voice vote Tuesday, passed the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act, over the objections of some Democrats. In addition to permanently banning states and local governments from taxing Internet access, the bill would ban any other form of Internet-only taxes, although its aimed primarily at taxes on Internet access service. The bill does not address Internet sales taxes, a separate issue that Congress has debated for several years. The...

The Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla., where the Dave Matthews Band is playing Tuesday night, can hold up to 15,000 people. But as Yahoo and Live Nation see it, the potential audience is limitless. Tuesday’s show is the first in an ambitious partnership to supply free live video streams of a different concert each day for an entire year; more shows are planned by Kiss, Justin Timberlake, Usher and the Neighbourhood. If successful, the program will help establish Screen, Yahoo’s video site and competitor to YouTube. And for Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter, and the rest...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Google has set up a special team to take on hackers and other threats on the Web. Google’s new initiative, dubbed “Project Zero,” aims to hunt cyber-threats and identify potential vulnerabilities on the Web that could be exploited by “criminal or state-sponsored” actors. “You should be able to use the web without fear that a criminal or state-sponsored actor is exploiting software bugs to infect your computer, steal secrets or monitor your communications,” Chris Evans, a member of Google’s security research team said in a company blog post. “Yet in sophisticated attacks, we see the use...

A fresh set of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the UK intelligence agency can manipulate online polls and debates, spread messages, snoop on YouTube and track Facebook users.

Microsoft's plan is tout Windows value, the ability to run native and Web apps, Office, desktop apps and work with existing peripherals in battle with Google's Chromebook. Microsoft operating chief Kevin Turner said the company and its partners won't cede the low-end PC market and will sacrifice Windows licensing margins to do it. Turner, speaking at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner conference, put meat around the company's plan to focus on platforms and productivity. As Mary Jo Foley noted Microsoft is going for a suite of experiences across multiple devices. Here's the problem: Microsoft has the share in the PC market, but...

IBM has provided an outline of its plans to invest $3 billion over the next five years. It hopes the cash injected into its R&D activities will help it find ways to make chips even smaller and more efficient and research into practical alternative materials which will prove superior to silicon.Big Blue has observed the diminishing returns in the process reduction of silicon chips over recent years and has now decided it needs to bet big on the task of finding a suitable successor. Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President of IBM Systems & Technology Group said "We really do see...

In the past week, I’ve been called “Inspector Gadget” twice, had a near-calamitous accident involving spray-on sunblock, and felt my arm vibrate so often I started treating it as a phantom limb. All because I’m part of the latest tech trend, a bona fide phenomenon in Silicon Valley that is inspiring the kind of pants-wetting excitement usually reserved for new iPhones and Grand Theft Auto games. I’m talking about smartwatches—the tech world’s quixotic attempt to mount minicomputers on your wrist. I’ve been wearing two smartwatches for several days apiece, and so far, it’s been an enlightening experience. Though not necessarily...

“I was in private industry beforehand. But I've kind of always liked computers,” Mularski said during a recent interview. All 56 FBI field offices have cyber squads. Mularski chose Pittsburgh largely because of family considerations — he grew up in suburban White Oak, the son of a steelworker. “It kind of looked like cyber was the wave of the future,” Mularski said. “The majority of all my computer training was just on-the-job training at the bureau.” It has proved remarkably effective. Even before the Chinese and Russian cases made worldwide headlines, Mularski was making cyber waves. He infiltrated Dark Market...

LG Display showed off some of its latest products Thursday, including a display that can be rolled up like a piece of paper and a transparent display that looks just like a window until it’s turned on. Small flexible displays and transparent ones were developed based on LCD materials in the past, but this is the first time a company release an organic light-emitting diode flexible display and an OLED transparent display simultaneously. LG Display’s flexible model is the world’s largest OLED-based flexible display. It is 18-inches and features high-definition resolution of 1,200 by 810 pixels. As Chinese IT companies...

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...

IBM boffins have been given a tidy $3bn cash pile to solve a problem that lurks not too far in our future. That problem is the imminent breakdown in conventional chip operation and chip materials as we shrink transistor gates from today's 14nm process size to 10nm and 7nm. At around 7nm, which most industry observers expect we will hit in the early 2020s, things start to get really unpleasant. More and more jostling electrons jump in and out of gates against processor designers' wishes, leading to a frustrating problem known as gate current leakage. ... These investment areas include:...

IRONSIDES is an authoritative/recursive DNS server pair that is provably invulnerable to many of the problems that plague other servers. It achieves this property through the use of formal methods in its design, in particular the language Ada and the SPARK formal methods tool set. Code validated in this way is provably exception-free, contains no data flow errors, and terminates only in the ways that its programmers explicitly say that it can. These are very desirable properties from a computer security perspective. IRONSIDES is not a complete implementation of DNS. In particular, it does not support zone transfers or all...

I live in New York which makes the detestable Chuck Schumer one of my Senators, He sent me the email below - unsolicited - regarding his efforts on my behalf on Net Neutrality. Beneath that is my response to him.

Winners of the 2014 Dronestagram Photo Contest have finally been selected! Picking winners was a very difficult task especially because of the great quality of the photos that have been submitted. We tried to reward the photos that show the best the fantastic potential offered by drones in terms of image. It’s been an amazing first edition with many photos entered from everywhere in the world. Thank you all for joining in.We would like to extend a special thanks to our contest sponsors National Geograpic, Go Pro, Picanova, Droneshop and Parrot for generously offering amazing gifts !Are you one of...

AMD has just published a massive patch-set for the Linux kernel that finally implements a HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) in open-source. The set of 83 patches implement a Linux HSA driver for Radeon family GPUs and serves too as a sample driver for other HSA-compatible devices. This big driver in part is what well known Phoronix contributor John Bridgman has been working on at AMD.********************** Heterogeneous System Architecture has been talked up for a while now by AMD as well as ARM vendors and now finally for open-source enthusiasts we can finally start seeing the advantages of the CPU and...

Rhode Island has become the second state in the nation to have a police dog trained to sniff out hard drives, thumb drives and other technological gadgets. Why? Police are looking for storage devices that could contain child pornography. The dog, Thoreau, already appears to be up for the task as he assisted in his first search warrant search in June 2014 and found a USB thumb drive containing child pornography hidden four layers deep in a tin box inside a metal cabinet. Police will be able to use the storage drive finding dog on tough child porn cases where...

The Khronos Group this morning released an updated version of the OpenVX 1.0 provisional specification. OpenVX is the industry-developed hardware acceleration API for computer vision applications and libraries. As explained on the OpenVX page, "OpenVX enables performance and power optimized computer vision algorithms for use cases such as face, body and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. OpenVX enables significant implementation innovation while maintaining a consistent API for developers. An OpenVX application expresses vision processing holistically as a graph of function nodes. An OpenVX implementer can...