Free Republic

I was a big fan in the early 80's. I had a week long correspondence with him in the mid 90's. I loved reading his Chaos Manner column in Byte magazine along with Garcia s circuit cellar. It was a great mag. I've been rereading some of his works lately and just reminiscing. Jerry Pournelle s Iron law: ...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach...

Microsoft's first Patch Wednesday update for the year has taken care of multiple vulnerabilities rated as critical. No known exploits are available for the vulnerabilities, but Microsoft recommends that users apply the patches through Windows Update as soon as possible. Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 see two common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs) fixed - CVE-2016-0002 and CVE-2016-0005 - as part of a cumulative update. Supported version of the Windows client and server operating systems are all affected by the vulnerabilities, which Microsoft rates as critical and exploitable. Microsoft's new Edge browser in Windows 10 is also being...

The Novena Heirloom is a limited edition custom enclosure system I built for use with the open-source Novena computer designed by Bunnie Huang and Sean Cross. It was crowd funded in cooperation with Portland, Oregon-based Crowd Supply. Several prototype concepts were developed for the campaign. After consulting with Huang, we decided to forgo an easel design in favor of a more traditional clam shell laptop. The requirement for user access to the internal components argued for a removable keypad and drove the final result. The thrust of the design concept is informed by, and hopefully serves as homage to, the...

I have an idea for a brilliant, sarcastic Conservative phone app called "Happy Safe Space Filter" that would be a wonderfully hot ticket with Conservatives, and/or Sarcastic Teenagers. It could either be a freebie for the Cause, or in true Capitalist fashion, would probably sell well at 99 cents. (The joke works I a lot of ways, but would include a little body copy crediting Conservatives.) I claim the idea and would be willing to give it up for 10% of gross. It is a pretty simple thing. If you have App writing experience, please message me here on Free...

Revolutions in warfare, though they may be predicted by theorists, are often unnoticed by governments and their military establishments -- until it is too late. On November 11, 1940, during the Battle of Taranto, torpedo planes from the British aircraft carrier Illustrious sank the Italian battleship Conte di Cavour. It was the first time in history that an aircraft carrier sank a battleship....

The era of the $5 computer has arrived.The latest version of the Raspberry Pi is even being given away free with a magazine. Not a subscription. Just buy the single issue of Magpi and you get a free computer.The devices have hobbyists and entrepreneurs excited about the possibilities of Pi. Raspberry Pi Zero $5 computer unveiledThe Next Thing unveils $9 computer, CHIP Ben Z. Cooper is using one as the brains behind a spectacular light show at Vancouver's VanDusen Gardens."You wave your hand in the air and control a whole grove of maple trees lighting up," Cooper told CBC News...

Astra Taylor's iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade. Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She's also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She's not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer - because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds. Taylor...

State AG sues major tech support provider alleging deceptive scam By Connie Thompson Wednesday, December 16th 2015 State investigators just sued one of the rising stars in the tech-support industry claiming part of the operation is based on a scam. The company, called iYogi, is accused of tricking people into paying for tech support services they don't need. According to investigators iYogi engaged in a different twist on the notorious tech support scams where someone call you claiming your computer has problems. What's significant in this case is workers don't call you, you call them. And iYogi is one of...

The consumer electronics industry has always fascinated me. I spent my first ten years as an analyst covering the telecom industry, which historically has had very good margins. But, when I started covering the consumer electronics industry, I was struck by the fact the vast majority of players in that market make razor-thin margins, if they’re profitable at all. Even more striking is Apple, which might be described accurately, if incompletely, as a player in the consumer electronics market, makes telecom-like margins while competing with those barely profitable vendors. And just as interesting is the fact that, as players that...

What do Common Core and Obamacare have in common, other than the enthusiasm they engender in the White House and widespread disappointment they generate outside of it? Both programs have fatal computer glitches. "New Hampshire-based company Measured Progress, which developed online Common Core tests used in Montana, Nevada, and North Dakota, has acknowledged a major glitch in the tests' rollout," Chris Neal reported in School Reform News. "Technical malfunctions, such as servers crashing during testing, resulted in only 37 percent of Nevada students being able to take their exams." "Meanwhile, Montana and North Dakota only managed to test 76 percent...

Fellow Freepers, I am looking into getting my son (13, soon to be 14) a build-it-yourself computer kit. He has ripped apart a couple of old laptops, but they don't have compatible parts. I am looking for a kit that he can use to learn to put together a working cpu that is usable and can be loaded with an operating system. I see a couple available on Amazon, but one looks too simplistic and the other is too complicated. When it comes to hardware and operating systems, I am very much a novice. I welcome your insights. Thanks so...

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...