Free Republic

Like the poster at the link, I am currently a Verizon Phone/DSL customer in Massachusetts and just received an email from Verizon stating that they will be raising my bill by $3/month, which already costs 76.00 with taxes, as we currently pay $59.99 for Verizon Freedom Essentials (unlimited nationwide + Canada and PR calling) and "High Speed Internet Enhanced" (approx. 6.50 Mbps speed at my location). No TV is included or needed. However, after i moved less than a 1/2 mile from where I was my Internet speed was approx. cut in half, from around 12 mbps to approx. 6,50....

Does anybody have Verizon Home Phone Connect, and if you do, how do you like it? and do you find it useful? We are concerned that if we get it, our Verizon DSL might be impacted. It would be great to cut our home landline contract, but we're worried about losing the DSL. Thanks. Loving my FReeper FRiends. Happy Fourth of July.

Though he is currently behind bars facing 11 felon charges for crimes ranging from gun possession to parole violations, viral Internet sensation Jeremy Meeks is seeking to reap the benefits of his well-received face. He was recently offered a modeling contract with Los Angeles-based Blaze Models. According to TMZ, the 30-year-old criminal has his ex-porn star agent, Gina Rodriguez, to thank. Rodriguez, who is quite the experienced entertainment manager, oversees clients including "Octomom" Nadya Suleman, Farrah Abraham and, most recently, Donald Sterling's much talked about ex-girlfriend, V. Stiviano. While this certainly may serve as some positive news once he...

James Varney of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, stayed at the Hyatt Place hotel in Riverhead, NY. He tried to look at the Drudge Report, but was blocked from doing so by his hotel’s internet connection. In fact, he tried looking at a number of conservative websites, including Powerline and Instapundit. They too were blocked. He then tried a number of liberal websites from Talking Points Memo to DailyKos. None of them had access problems. His hotel, Hyatt Place, uses Uniguest to connect its guests to the internet. Digging deeper, I contacted the good people of Uniguest. A cheery online...

In a stunning reversal, infamous Cannibal Cop Gilberto Valle will likely have his conviction for a bizarre kidnapping conspiracy scheme overturned on Tuesday after a judge decided to revoke the guilty verdict in the flesh-eating fetish plot, a source said. The disgraced NYPD veteran, who was convicted of hatching a “heinous” plan to cook, kill, and eat several women — including his own wife — was facing life in prison for the crime. But Valle will likely have the major charge of conspiracy overturned and the sentence vacated with only a misdemeanor charge of using police computers to track down...

American victims of Iranian terrorism were permitted by a U.S. court to assume control over Iran’s Internet licenses and domains in recompense for crimes perpetrated by the regime in Tehran, according to court documents. The decision means that Iran could effectively be kicked off the Internet once control of its “top level domains” are transferred to the American terror victims, who have sought more than a billion dollars in damages from Iran. Court documents detailing the decision and requesting control over Iran’s licenses have been served to the U.S. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees web...

A day after a surprise US supreme court decision to outlaw streaming TV service Aereo, US broadcaster Fox has moved to use the ruling to clamp down on another internet TV service. Fox has cited Wednesday’s ruling – which found Aereo to be operating illegally – to bolster its claim against a service offered by Dish, America’s third largest pay TV service, which streams live TV programming over the internet to its subscribers and allows them to copy programmes onto tablet computers for viewing outside the home. The move has fueled criticism of Wednesday’s ruling from groups that have argued...

<p>I don't seek out media appearances but last week was a busy one for me. I was interviewed by CBS News, BBC World Service, Jonathan Green of Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Sunday Extra, and by Piya Chattopadhyay of the CBC's The Current. I also had invitations from NPR and CTV that I, unfortunately, had to turn down due to time constraints. It was a busy week but thankfully all of the journalists, hosts and producers who reached out to me had a sincere interest in complex stories. They are my kind of people so talking to them was actually quite fun.</p>

Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate...

Baghdad: Supporters of a powerful jihadist group are waging an online propaganda war in concert with its battles on the ground in Iraq, where Sunni militants have overrun swathes of the country. For militant groups, the fight over public perception can be even more important than actual combat, turning military losses into propaganda victories and battlefield successes into powerful tools to build support for the cause. The offensive, led by jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) but involving other Sunni groups as well, swept down from northern Iraq, overrunning major areas of five provinces and...

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.... ...Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.... "...We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale...

The wife of a Northern California man whose mug shot for an arrest on felony weapons charges went viral on social media due to his widely admired looks is upset that people are taking her husband's arrest as a joke, a woman who says she is a friend of the couple told CBS Sacramento. "She's furious. Her man is in there and people are taking it as a joke, thinking it's funny talking about his looks, saying all kinds of crazy things," friend Simone Johnson told the station. Jeremy Meeks, 30, an ex-con, was arrested last Wednesday, June 18 on...

South Korea’s current fetish with ‘watching people eat’, or ‘dinner porn’ as the crazy is now known has uncovered a new star. The dinner porn craze involves no sex of course, but simply watching other people eat – online, on TV, wherever. According to a report on asiaone.com, quoting Elite Daily, Tae Ryun Huh is the new and emerging Korean sensation. No just because she eats, but because of how much she eats. And then this amazing fact – the school worker weighs 48kg. Tae Ryun Huh invited TV cameras to watch her eat and the South Korean show discovered...

Tea Parties happened organically BECAUSE we have each other. Hence, terrorists, tyrants and those who intend harm to our freedom and constitution know they MUST isolate us by CONTROLLING the INTERNET and phone communication when it hits the fan. (Articles on that subject are featured in at cbPatriot.) The CB Patriot Project is the place to join patriots from around America who have already joined the project to assure we can still communicate and congregate - just as we did in 2008 when the tea parties began to rise up. Social media was not nearly as relevant when we started...

WOODBURY, Conn. – A high school student claims that a firewall is blocking conservative websites at his school. Andrew Lampart, a senior at Nonnewaug High School, discovered that he couldn’t get on the National Rifle Association’s website while on campus as he was doing research for a classroom debate on gun control in May. “So, I went over to the other side,” Lampart told WTIC. “And I went over on sites such as Moms Demand Action or Newtown Action Alliance and I could get on these websites but not the others.” The 18-year-old decided to investigate further by broadening his...

Comcast is testing data caps for its broadband internet customers that would limit them to 300 GB of data per month, according to The Times Leader. Comcast has started open trials of its home broadband data caps in several large markets around the country. Here are all the regions affected: Mobile, Alabama Huntsville, Alabama Tuscon, Arizona Atlanta, Georgia Augusta, Georgia Savannah, Georgia Jackson, Mississippi Charleston, South Carolina Knoxville, Tennessee Memphis, Tennessee All of central Kentucky The entire state of Maine

A high school student in Connecticut is accusing administrators of political censorship after the school restricted access to conservative news outlets and websites while allowing students to visit liberal sites. Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut, was assigned an in-class debate on gun-control during his "Law & You" course. While preparing for the debate during study hall Lampart logged onto the school provided Internet and found out that students were forbidden from visiting The National Association for Gun Rights website or the news outlet TheBlaze.com. "I used my study hall to research gun control facts...

If you think that the world's greatest inventions came from the fevered minds of solitary geniuses, think again. As you scan this list of the 10 inventions that changed the world, note how many of them perfected workable designs. 10. Plow Compared to some of the gleaming, electronic inventions that fill our lives today, the plow doesn't seem very exciting. It's a simple cutting tool used to carve a furrow into the soil, churning it up to expose nutrients and prepare it for planting. Yet the plow is probably the one invention that made all others possible. No one knows...

Only 4 percent of consistently conservative Americans want to live in cities, but urban environments are where the tech action is. It's one of those stats that just smacks you across the face: In a recent Pew poll, only four percent—4%!—of consistent conservatives want to live in America's cities. Meanwhile, about a quarter of people with mixed political views want to live in cities more than they want to live in small towns, suburbs, or rural areas. And nearly 46 percent of consistently liberal people want to live in cities. For someone who writes about technology, this is particularly significant....

A veteran IT professional tells TheBlaze that the IRS’ claim that the agency lost two years’ worth of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails is “simply not feasible.” On Friday, members of Congress revealed that the IRS would not be able to hand over Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees from January 2009 to April 2011, possibly due to a “glitch” or “crash.” Lawmakers were seeking the emails as part of their investigation into the IRS targeting scandal. Norman Cillo, an Army veteran who worked in intelligence and a former program manager at Microsoft, argued it is very...