Free Republic

An incredibly detailed image of the Moon was composed by an Indian teen, who captured 55,000 images—racking up over 186 gigabytes on his laptop in the process—for a pastiche of celestial proportions. Sixteen-year-old Prathamesh Jaju from Pune, Maharashtra, shared his HDR (high-dynamic range) image of a waning crescent moon on Instagram. He admitted that amassing so many photos for his most detailed and clearest picture to date put his technology to the test. “[It] almost killed my laptop with the processing,” he said. The amateur astrophotographer began the project by capturing multiple videos of different small sections of the Moon...

Took an 8 mile roundtrip hike up Mount Montara a couple days ago, 16 miles south of San Francisco. This is a fairly strenuous hike going from sea level up to 1,894 feet elevation in four miles. Mount Montara is straight west from SFO and you see it when you take off north from the airport. I was fortunate to hit a beautiful early fall day with clear blue skies (that'll be changing real soon now). Hiking on a weekday, I passed no more than 20 people over several hours. Mount Montara is frequently socked in with really stiff winds,...

I was hiking in the Diablo Range near San Jose, CA yesterday and had the good fortune to be there when a storm front was moving in. This is the Joseph D. Grant County Park on the Dutch Flat trail (2,457 feet) looking into the Hall Valley. That's Mount Hamilton (4,360 feet) on the other side. The Lick Observatory is located on top of the biggest peaks and is the world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory. It was constructed between 1876 and 1887. The Mt. Hamilton Road was cut and everything was hauled up on mule-drawn wagons. The late summer...

Hillary Clinton appears to have established multiple email addresses for her private use, and possibly the use of her aides, under the domain of “clintonemail.com,” according to a prominent member of the hacking community who supplied independent research data, conducted with high-tech tools, to Fox News. The hacker used an open-source tool, publicly available, called “The Harvester” to search a variety of data sources – including well-known platforms such as Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter and others – for any stored references to email addresses seen using a particular domain, in this case clintonemail.com. Hackers working under contract for private firms,...

I’ve raised in prior posts (here and here) the issue of physical security of the clintonemail.com e-mal server, which is why were it was located and how it was set up matters. Last night, Mitch LaKind — who has experience setting up secure military e-mail servers — wrote me about the detailed issues surrounding Clinton’s approach. I’ll let him speak for himself (emphasis mine, though): As a former contractor to the Air Force, I personally managed the Microsoft Exchange servers that were installed at Thule Air Base. My experience with Microsoft Exchange goes back to 1997, when the earliest versions...