Free Republic

Our team has recently monitored and analysed a new stack of drive-by campaigns which aim to spread the Angler exploit kit by injecting malicious code into compromised web pages. Because of the mechanisms involved and the attackers’ objectives, the campaign is prone to achieve large distribution and affect a big number of PCs and their users. The campaign is carried out by installing a cocktail of malware on the compromised PC. The first payload consists of the notorious data thief Pony, which systematically harvests all usable usernames and passwords from the infected system and sends them to a series of...

Had to do it. Had to create the thread. The game is too damned good. This thread is reserved for hardcore gamers who play Fallout 4. Norm, KC, TADSLOS and I have hijacked so many threads discussing this game, I felt we needed our own thread.Fallout 4 is amazing. The content is excessively large. There is so much to explore, you could replay this game 10 times and not find every mission or quest. The characters are so much better fleshed out than any other game I have played. Even the radio announcer of Diamond City Radio will have you...

Should computers decide who gets a job? That’s a question recently asked by Government Executive Magazine which looked at a study of hiring practices and how much hiring recommendations generated by standardized testing differed from managers who “went with their gut” in terms of eventual employee performance and retention. The results were, at least as I read it, a bit muddled.First of all, the test subjects they looked at were all applicants for low skill service jobs. (Such as you’d find for new hires at call centers or data entry firms.) They were all given standardized tests and those results...

Today, I’m pleased to be able to announce the immediate availability of Raspberry Pi Zero, made in Wales and priced at just $5. Zero is a full-fledged member of the Raspberry Pi family

When HP splits in two on Sunday after a year of planning,... on one side with be HP Inc., which will largely consist of personal computers and printers. Ont he other, HP Enterprise HPE, which will sell the servers, data storage, networking, software and consulting services... each company is expected to have annual revenue of about $50 billion and will be among America's largest public companies. The story HPE is taking to corporate customers is HPE itself.Need to change your business? HPE can show you how, executives say. After all, few companies have gone to greater lengths to change.Since Oct....

The great mystery since the NSA and other intelligence agencies’ cyber-spying capabilities became watercooler fodder has not been the why of their actions, but the how? For example, how are they breaking crypto to decode secure Internet communication? A team of cryptographers and computer scientists from a handful of academic powerhouses is pretty confident they have the answer after having pieced together a number of clues from the Snowden documents that have been published so far, and giving the math around the Diffie-Hellman protocol a hard look. The answer is an implementation weakness in Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, specifically in the...

Global law enforcement agencies have arrested a gang member behind the theft of £20 million ($30.7 million) via a piece of malicious software that records banking details, and are on the hunt for the remaining members. The malware – known as Dridex – is believed to be developed by in eastern Europe and it's able to harvest bank details online in order to steal money from people. Global financial institutions and a variety of different payment systems have been targeted, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA), one of the authorities involved, said on Tuesday. "Thousands" of Brits have been infected...

Yet another bad new Zero-Day (already exploited) Adobe Flash vulnerability. Time to uninstall Flash from all your computers and keep it off for good! To remove Flash from Windows: Close your browser In Control Panel -> Programs and Features, remove/uninstall all Adobe Flash or Shockwave items. Restart your browser Go to Add-ons/Plugins and confirm there are no Shockwave or Flash plugins. To remove Flash from OS X (10.6 and later): Download and run this Flash uninstaller: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/support/uninstall_flash_player_osx.dmg To remove Flash from Linux: Close your browser Use "apt-get remove", "yum erase", or find the flashplayer .so (e.g. in /usr/lib[64]/mozilla/plugins or ~/.mozilla/plugins)...

If you are one of the many long-suffering people who have gone for a coffee break and come back to a computer screen full of gibberish or a crashed system, PawSense is for you! "PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard" is how BitBoost described the product. Chris Niswander, a graduate in computer science from Arizona State University, is the creator of this path-breaking product. "One day, my sister's cat, Amos, walked across her computer keyboard...

Move over, microchip. A random assembly of gold nanoparticles can perform calculations normally reserved for neatly arranged patterns of silicon. Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that follow preprogrammed rules, but this strategy limits how efficient they can be. “The best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011 operations per second and use a few hundred watts,” says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. “The human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts. That’s a huge gap.” To close that gap, researchers have...

Stressing on the importance of research and development for creating sustainable practices, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar today said that India is not an 'IT-superpower' but an 'IT-labour contractor' as it lacks innovation. "We say that we are IT-superpower but we are not. We are IT-labour contractors. We have not come up with Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, any new operating system or real new products." "Indian industries must start investing more in research and development. Unless we research and come out with solutions, we do not get the benefit. Industrial progress should be based on it," the Minister said while speaking at...

Linux is a great operating system. Nobody in the Linux camp will argue about that. There are many articles on the Internet convincing you to try and to switch to Linux. There are also many articles that attempt to show you why you should not switch. Let's look at this question from a slightly different viewpoint today. Say, you are now convinced that you want to switch to Linux. What you should NOT expect from this switch? 1. Linux works much faster than Windows This isn't too far from the truth. Generally speaking, Linux OS is less resource-hungry than Windows....

Question: Does anyone here know of an online map source who provides maps that are better suited for printing on modest price (or even B&W) printers, than the usual Google, Bing, etc., maps? Anyone who's ever printed out a map from the above sources knows what I mean. The printed maps are just too "washed out" or faded looking. I can capture maps from the above and copy them into an image or photo viewer like IrfanView to improve them somewhat, but even then, results are poor, and often one ends up using lots of toner for bodies of water,...

C# is making its way past Java as the most popular programming language in the workplace, according to SD Times readers.While Java sits on top of the TIOBE Programming Community index for August 2015, with C# coming in at No. 4, our latest poll shows C# is the No. 1 language used in the workplace, with Java and C/C++ following.Out of 1,166 votes, 37% of developers voted for C#, 20% voted for Java, and 17% voted for C/C++. The least-popular programming languages used at work, according to the poll, included Python/Ruby/Perl and Objective-C/Swift.A more detailed breakdown of the poll...

Every morning, I fire up my home computer (downloaded Windows 10 last week) and when I go to my Google Chrome icon, it takes me exactly 10 minutes for the Google main page to pop up on my screen. I like Google Chrome because I have GooglePlus and GMail, but it seems that Windows 10 is not supporting it because they want users to jump to Microsoft Edge (their browser) instead. What can I do to correct this? Should I uninstall and then install Google Chrome again? This delay is very frustrating.

“Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”The girl points down to a small box with a few wires coming out. “I can bring up a web browser, and take photos inside grandpa’s house. Has he moved his coffee cup today? Is the telly on? At least...

Just a quick question to all computer gurus- I have an old Pentium 4 2200, and have to replace the cpu cooler/fan, so I ordered one that is supposed to work with socket 478, but the contact pad that came with it is much smaller than the one that came with the computer's cpu cooler which needs replacing- Can I simply grease the new pad and install it? or will I need to purchase new larger pad?

At the Aspen Security Forum two weeks ago, James Comey (and others) explicitly talked about the "going dark" problem, describing the specific scenario they are concerned about. Maybe others have heard the scenario before, but it was a first for me. It centers around ISIL operatives abroad and ISIL-inspired terrorists here in the US. The FBI knows who the Americans are, can get a court order to carry out surveillance on their communications, but cannot eavesdrop on the conversations, because they are encrypted. They can get the metadata, so they know who is talking to who, but they can't find...

Hillary Clinton is going to prison–or would be, if she were an ordinary person. The FBI has reportedly taken possession of the emails on her home computer server, according to U.S. officials cited by the Associated Press.

The new EcoTank printers cost more up front but can churn for years without running dry Epson's new printers change the ink-onomics of your home office. WSJ's Wilson Rothman explains why paying more will make your ink-cartridge hassles disappear. It was after midnight, and I was facing a ticking-clock real estate transaction. All I had to do was print 15 pages of black-and-white contract, sign it and fax it back. Only halfway through, my printer ran out of ink—magenta ink! Thus began a chain reaction culminating in my nearly throwing the printer out the window. I ended up at Kinko’s....