Free Republic

Be careful what you wish for. That is the message for companies such as Google and Facebook as US regulators move ahead with a plan to enshrine the idea of an open internet in regulation. On the face of it, the big internet companies will have scored a significant victory if the Federal Communication Commission votes, as expected, for its new “net neutrality” rules this month. The regime is intended to make sure broadband and other network providers cannot block or otherwise hold internet services to ransom. Who could take issue with such a noble purpose? Telecoms regulation is not...

It’s a day of wild stories in the tech sector, with Amazon (AMZN) reportedly looking to open a huge chain of stores and Google (GOOGL) said to want to compete with Uber in the ride sharing market. Neither blockbuster story has been confirmed. Amazon isn’t commenting on the report that it might want to take over stores from near-bankrupt RadioShack. And Google is indirectly denying the report it would take on Uber, a company it has backed via its venture capital unit. But would either move make sense? Both are certainly debatable and full details obviously are not available. There’s...

The “Smithsonian” magazine compiled a list of the “100 most significant Americans,” and to the dismay of his fan base President Obama failed to make the cut. Adding insult to injury, former President George W. Bush made the list. But it gets even better, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was also included. The liberal website Raw Story bemoaned the very idea that the Smithsonian Institution “decided that George W. Bush is a more ‘significant’ figure in U.S. history” than the exalted one. Curiously, the only redeeming qualification Raw Story named when mentioning Obama is that he was the country’s first...

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Google has recently revealed that it is dropping the paid subscription from Google Earth Pro, a more robust version of its Google Earth software. The Pro service will now be available for free, previously costing $399 per year. While the standard version of Google Earth has often been more than enough for casual map and globe users, the Pro version has seen use among professionals from scientists to businesses, who have been able to take advantage of advanced features previously not available for free. Among the main differences between Google Earth and its Pro sibling are high-resolution imagery and automated...

Adobe Systems' Flash software had a good long run as the technology of choice for bringing interactive splash to the Web, but Google is helping to give it the heave-ho by moving YouTube to Web-standard video instead. "We're now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the Web," said YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider in a blog post Tuesday. It took four years for Google to make the HTML5 change, which is a major victory for Web standards fans who've strived to eject proprietary plug-ins from the Web. If you watched a video online 10 years or so, ago, it was...

A controversial Spanish former magistrate slammed Google in Geneva for handing over emails from Wikileaks staff to the FBI without informing the whistleblowing website. At a press conference in the Swiss city on Monday, Baltasar Garzón, who heads the legal team working for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, accused the American internet search engine of an “attack on journalism” by providing the emails of three Wikileaks journalists to the U.S law enforcement agency. He told the Geneva Press Club that the staff members had only been informed in December that the contents of the accounts had been handed over to federal...

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google’s chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be “misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community.” The Los Angeles Police Department said Monday it had not heard back from Google about whether it had addressed Beck’s concerns. Google purchased Waze for $966 million in 2013. There are no known connections between any attack on police and Waze, although Beck said Waze was used in the killing of two New York Police Department officers on Dec. 20. The Instagram account of the gunman...

#Google hands data to US Government in #WikiLeaks espionage case https://t.co/ocBQGvL4yl pic.twitter.com/MIxGiOu9si — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 26, 2015 Google hands over WikiLeaks emails, but is the first to exploit Charlie Hebdo and Sony's "the Interview". Why? https://t.co/D2Ir2Yi3Kq — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 25, 2015 'Attack on journalism': WikiLeaks responds to Google's cooperation with US govt Google’s willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says. Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that...

The United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA,Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate...

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday predicted the end of the Internet as we know it. At the end of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where his comments were webcast, he was asked for his prediction on the future of the Web. “I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear,” Schmidt said.

Obama lackey John Podesta who founded the far left Center for American Progress is about as transparent as Obama. The Center of American Progress has been hiding it’s donor lists for month. Finally, today they were shamed into releasing a partial list of donors. Problem is Podesta’s Center for American Progress isn’t accounting for over $5 million in donations from ‘anonymous sources.’ Podesta will likely be a big part of Hillary Clinton’s run next year, if the old granny does in fact run. Wonder if she’ll get questions about her buddy Podesta’s missing $5 million. Funny too that you don’t...

Does anyone remember if Google has previously been so obvious demonstrating their support of Obola and demoncrats, by promoting the White House State of the Union link on their search page? See: Google.com 1. BTW: I know they are in bed with Obola and NSA 2. I use start page.com instead of Google. My d@mned "smart" phone defaults to its master from time to time.

Just the other night I was watching a rerun of the Big Bang Theory episode, The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification, in which Sheldon bemoans the fact that he won’t live long enough to have his intellect fully uploaded into a robot and creates a Mobile Virtual Presence Device. It now looks like Sheldon will have to rely on his robotic doppelganger a bit longer because the days of useful android options have been pushed back even further. Ladies and gentlemen… Google Glass is dead. The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product,...

Today, 23andMe announced what Forbes reports is only the first of ten deals with big biotech companies: Genentech will pay up to $60 million for access to 23andMe's data to study Parkinson's. You think 23andMe was about selling fun DNA spit tests for $99 a pop? Nope, it's been about selling your data all along. Since 23andMe started in 2006, it's convinced 800,000 customers to hand over their DNA, one vial of spit at a time. Personal DNA reports are the consumer-facing side of the business, and that's the one we're most familiar with. It all seems friendly and fun...

Surviving staff members of Charlie Hebdo have vowed to publish the satirical weekly next Wednesday, despite the murder of most of its senior journalists – with a hoped-for print run of 1m copies. Google said it would donate €250,000 (£195,000) to help support the publication from its press innovation fund; a further €250,000 was pledged by French newspaper publishers, to be taken by a donation tax, according to a report in Les Echos. The two groups involved in the distribution of the papers will take no fee for next week’s issue. Richard Malka, the magazine’s lawyer, told Les Echos that...

For people who dislike and misunderstand capitalism (or free markets, or laissez-faire, or economic liberalism, or whatever you want to call it), the governing principle of market competition is the “Walmart effect.” According to this model of how the economy works — a model with very little basis in reality, but never mind that — big companies such as Walmart muscle into a market or a territory, use advantages of scale and predatory pricing (“predatory” here meaning “saving consumers money at the expense of relatively well-off business owners”) to drive out so-called mom-and-pop operations, lower workers’ wages, and then...

Gmail blocked in China By Paul Carsten BEIJING Mon Dec 29, 2014 2:52am EST (Reuters) - Google Inc's Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world's biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame. Large numbers of Gmail web addresses were cut off in China on Friday, said GreatFire.org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group. Users said the service was still down on Monday. "I think the government is just trying to further eliminate Google's presence in China and even weaken its market overseas," said a member of GreatFire.org,...

Very quietly and under the radar, authorities in China have cracked down on Christmas celebrations in China, deeming them "Western spiritual pollution." As CNMNews reports, for several years, a virtual rush to convert to Christianity has been underway in China, both in its Protestant and Catholic versions. The Department of Education this year issued a directive to limit Christianity’s appeal to young people, banning Christmas events and celebrations in schools and kindergartens, deemed “kitsch” and “un-Chinese”. The crackdown has also been spreading to universities and colleges nationwide. The result is nowhere more evident than in Google's traffic in China...  As...

If you have it installed on your computer, fire up Google Earth and click on the icon along the top edge of your screen that looks like Saturn. A menu will drop down. Click on Mars. After Google Mars loads, enter these coordinates into the search bar: -84.2952811,-56.5576401 . Here's what you'll see: At first, I thought someone had photoshopped it. But you can see that isn't true. So what do you think it is? I don't know if the picture is presented in true color, but if it is it sure looks like moss to me!... Moss that can...