Free Republic

Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard bureaucratic operating procedure. Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending....

So I get a private call, dead air for a few seconds, then the phone rings back to the caller. Indian accented man answers claiming my computer is infected with a virus, no company name nothing. So I ask which computer. a few meaningless back and forth. Ask me to google teamviewer.com, instead of just going to teamviewer.com. wanted access to my system, wouldn't tell me the virus. did an off line scan anyway. So note to selfs, do not let anyone your not 100% sure is legit connect to your system with teamviewer

We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now. This story is something that I think about in those times to remember to stay calm. No last minute fix could ever be this dramatic or important. My grandfather passed away about a week ago. At the service, I was asked to say a few words and read from his memoirs. This was my choice. RED TEAM...

If you happen to do anything other than sleep in a cave today, chances are you have Ada Lovelace to thank for it. She is responsible for the first ever computer program. And she came up with it long before the computer even existed. Today is the fifth annual Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating the achievement of a Victorian mother-of-three who would change the world. Let’s travel back through time for a moment. Before the ZX Spectrum and before the Atari 2600, there was a thing that historians like to call the 19th century. The computer may have existed as a...

Back in the early 1980s I was a first-adopter and bought an AT&T 6300 PC. Believe it or not, it still fires up and runs (though the monitor fizzes now and won't display anything). It runs MS-DOS and had Wordstar on it. I backed up the work I had on that machine with both hard copies and floppy disks, (you young whipper-snappers might have heard of those), but they were all destroyed in a fire. Always intended to ask someone if there was a way to get the information off the old hard drive, but I kept thinking, "mañana," and...

The Metropolitan Police have foiled an extraordinary plot to steal millions of pounds from a London branch of Santander Bank using a remote control device planted on one of its computers by a bogus maintenance man. On Thursday evening, the Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) arrested 12 men between the ages of 23 and 50 years old accused of being involved in the alleged attempted heist at addresses in London, a statement said. A bank source confirmed to press that a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) was fitted by someone posing as a maintenance worker, something that would have allowed the...

<p>What are human workers going to do when super-intelligent robots and computers are better than us at doing everything? That is one of the questions that a new study by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne of Oxford University sought to address, and what they concluded was that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be automated within the next 20 years. Considering the fact that the percentage of the U.S. population that is employed is already far lower than it was a decade ago, it is frightening to think that tens of millions more jobs could disappear due to technological advances over the next couple of decades. I have written extensively about how we are already losing millions of jobs to super cheap labor on the other side of the globe. What are middle class families going to do as technology also takes away huge numbers of our jobs at an ever increasing pace? We live during a period of history when knowledge is increasing an an exponential rate. In the past, when human workers were displaced by technology it also created new kinds of jobs that the world had never seen before. But what happens when the day arrives when computers and robots can do almost everything more cheaply and more efficiently than humans can?</p>

If you pressed Control-Alt-Delete to log on before reading this, Bill Gates says he's sorry. The Microsoft founder says the triple-key login should have been made easier, à la Apple's Macs, but that a designer insisted on the more complicated step. "We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button," Gates said Saturday during a question-and-answer session to launch a Harvard University fund-raising campaign. His comments have gained attention since a video of his Harvard Q&A was posted on YouTube on Tuesday....

We'll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes we will be able to upload our entire brains to computers within the next 32 years - an event known as singularity Our 'fragile' human body parts will be replaced by machines by the turn of the century And if these predictions comes true, it could make humans immortal In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally...

The hype around 3D Printing bothers Terry Wohlers, president of Wohlers Associates, a research consultancy focused on additive manufacturing and 3D printing. “It’s unsettling to read this oversimplification (of 3D printing technology) where you push a button and out pops a shiny new thing,” he says. The reality, of course, is different. 3D printed objects “pop out” only after a long design and (depending on object size) printing process. This disconnect bothered Wohlers so much that he wrote a post about it. Wohlers knows what he is talking about. The fifty-five-year-old former Colorado State University faculty member has been working...

I have seen several laptop models I like but they have Windows 8 installed. I need to stay with a Windows OS, but having read poor reviews, it appears Win 8 may become the next Vista. Is it that bad? I like Win 7 but it limits my selection. As always, any suggestions/input appreciated.

McConlogue approached Leo, a 36-year man who lives on the streets of lower Manhattan, on Thursday and gave him two options. The first was $100 in cash. The second option on the table was a laptop, three JavaScript books and two months of coding instruction from McConlogue. Soon, McConlogue will deliver him a Samsung Chromebook with 3G connectivity, three JavaScript books, a solar charger for the laptop and something to conceal the laptop in. He will spend an hour before work every morning teaching him the basics of software coding.

In case you haven’t noticed, 3D printers are all the rage these days. People are using 3D printers to print Aston Martin replicas, there’s a number of household items you “manufacture,” and even NASA’s bringing a 3D printer onto the International Space Station. But with all these 3D printables, you either need to download the code from a site like Thingiverse, or create the 3D code yourself with your printer’s included software. What if you want to print a replica of something that already exists without building the code yourself? MakerBot, one of the leading innovators in 3D printing, has...

The following image is a composite created by scanning the WH LFBC using Xerox WorkCentre 7655 upside down using the automatic feeder. The resulting file was opened in Preview, the image rotated 180 degrees and printed to PDF. The resulting PDF was opened in preview, the layers unlocked and moved to the side. In addition, a close up of the signature was ‘blown up’ to show how the background layer, not surprisingly, has filled in some of the white that resulted from the separation of the background and foreground layers. Note how for example the signature block is fully separated.

It doesn't matter if you're a saint or a frequent sinner, a sailor with a potty mouth or a monk who took a vow of silence. If you own a computer, then at some point you've belted out a line of obscenities that would make Andrew Dice Clay wince in astonishment. PCs have a way of bringing out the worst in us when things go wrong, and according to a recent nationwide survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Crucial in June 2013, some even tend to get physical. Out of over 2,000 U.S. adults ages 18 and older...

I have literally lost hundreds of pages, threads and posts this way.

Depressing news for those of us who appreciate great prices on computer gear and component parts. The Geeks website now displays a simple page explaining that all ordering has now ceased. Competition appears to be the overriding reason, and a general unwillingness to have been forced to this point is quite apparent. I, for one, will miss all the great deals they offer, and have offered for many years.

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed. If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused. "I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who...

Forget hacking accounts, computers or mobile devices - security engineers from Indiana have managed to hack the software inside the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape. Using a laptop wirelessly connected to the car's electronics, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek were able to remotely control the brakes, the accelerate, change the speedometer, switch the headlights on and off, tighten the seatbelts and even blast the horn. The project was funded by a grant from the U.S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to highlight the security risks affecting modern-day cars. Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, Director of Security Intelligence...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Google Inc. /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG -0.05% said a new Nexus 7 tablet will be priced at $229 for a 16 GB version; $269 for 32 GB and $349 for an LTE version. The 16 GB and 32 GB versions will be available next week