Free Republic

The owners of the website Ebola.Com have scored a big payday with the outbreak of the epidemic, selling the domain for more than USD 200,000 in cash and stock. The deal highlights the rewards and risk of industry trading and speculating in domain names that see high interest following news events. According to a securities filing, the buyer was a Russian-registered firm called Weed Growth Fund, previously known as Ovation Research. The October 20 filing said the price was USD 50,000 cash and 19,192 shares of Cannabis Sativa worth close to USD 170,000, which promotes medical uses for marijuana. The...

While all three GOP-backed members voted against restrictions, they were opposed by the three Democratic-backed members, including FEC Vice Chair Ann M. Ravel, who said she will lead a push next year to try to come up with new rules government political speech on the Internet.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the most amusing aspect of the whole #GamerGate phenomenon (background here and here and here) has been the angry progressive media types confusedly looking around trying to figure out how we got to a point where they would be targeted for boycotts and the like for casual comments they have made. As Varad Mehta noted, Crazy, right? They don’t quite understand the world they’ve created. They think it’s the worst thing in the whole world for Internet Tough Guys to make death and rape threats* and also that it’s cool to joke about Bristol Palin actually...

Amazon.com Inc. reports quarter three earnings today and analysts are expecting a loss of $0.75 per share according to FactSet. That’s a significant jump from their loss of $0.09 per share for the same period last year. Amazon follows a “profitless prosperity” model so losses aren’t unexpected, and typically Wall Street shrugs them off. This year, however, Amazon (AMZN) has seen more than a 20% drop in value on the NASDAQ. Wall Street is becoming restless-- is it time for Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to start focusing on the bottom line? Yahoo Finance’s Henry Blodget believes that investors are clearly...

Dealing with federal, state and local taxes and regulations is already an incredibly burdensome task on startups and small businesses. But beyond complying with onerous regulations from the jurisdiction where businesses operate, there is a little talked about potential tax change that could make it much more difficult for small businesses to expand into the online marketplace. This complication is known as the Marketplace Fairness Act or MFA. Right now, traditional “brick-and-mortar” stores are required by states and localities to collect sales taxes from customers and remit those back to the states. This is because they have a physical presence...

I live in a quiet subdivision in rural Ontario. I mean very quiet—all summer long, I rarely saw any kids outside biking or playing street hockey or running flimsy lemonade stands or just roughhousing around outside. Then, the day school started, I was shocked when I left my house in the morning and I saw kids everywhere, backpacks in tow, heading to bus stops and walking to the nearby school. This many kids live in my neighborhood? I thought to myself. Where were they all summer? There are a number of possible answers, of course. Some were probably on vacation....

Yik Yak, an anonymous, location-based app that acts as a sort of local bulletin board, wants to be a serious news source. Right now, Yik Yak is home to a lot of chatter and huge with college students. That demographic is reflected in the posts found on the app, which are mostly about midterms, Netflix, food and sex. But its founders, 23-year-olds Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, have big dreams for the app. They want it to be an on-the-ground, immediate feed of what’s happening, especially during breaking news situations. On Monday, they released a new feature, Peek, that lets...

People found guilty of Internet "trolling" in Britain could be jailed for up to two years under government proposals outlined on Sunday, following a number of high-profile cases of abusive and threatening behaviour on Twitter. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told the Mail on Sunday newspaper: "This is a law to combat cruelty -- and marks our determination to take a stand against a baying cyber-mob." There has been increasing concern in Britain about the growing scourge of Internet "trolls" who post hate-filled messages on social media, often threatening their targets. The parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann are among the...

We took a hacker to a café and, in 20 minutes, he knew where everyone else was born, what schools they attended, and the last five things they googled. In his backpack, Wouter Slotboom, 34, carries around a small black device, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with an antenna on it. I meet Wouter by chance at a random cafe in the center of Amsterdam. It is a sunny day and almost all the tables are occupied. Some people talk, others are working on their laptops or playing with their smartphones. Wouter removes his laptop from his backpack,...

OK, this is weird. Starting yesterday, my Firefox browser (was version 32.0) would not make bookmarks to pages on conservative sites. Free Republic, Hot Air, Lucianne... It worked on non-political sites just fine. This morning I updated to Version 33.0, and the problem still persists. I checked at Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, and they bookmark normally, but Again/still Free Republic, Hot Air and Lucianne.com will not do bookmarks.

As best-selling novelist John Grisham prepares to publish his new legal thriller, he argues America's prison system has run out of control. America is wrongly jailing far too many people for viewing child pornography, the best-selling legal novelist John Grisham has told The Telegraph in a wide-ranging attack on the US judicial system and the country's sky-high prison rates. Mr Grisham, 59, argued America's judges had "gone crazy" over the past 30 years, locking up far too many people, from white collar criminals like the businesswoman Martha Stewart, to black teenagers on minor drugs charges and - he added -...

Been pitched while in the backseat of a car service? That may be because 60 percent of Lyft drivers also had jobs (or aspirations for one) in the entertainment industry.Before passengers exit from the back of Jerry terHorst's Honda Civic, he makes sure to hand them his card. "Future Famous Actor," it says in block letters. Then, if he gets the chance before they make it to the curb, he tells them about the web series he's working on with his roommate. "I don't want to be that L.A. guy who's like, 'Oh, my web series ...' " he says....

Two students have been arrested after threats on social media were made against Coral Glades High School and Sawgrass Springs Middle School. The students arrested were identified as a 16-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl.... ..... post similar threats with one stating, "I'm a white boy. I've been bullied a lot, and I'm posting on Instagram that people don't go to school tomorrow because I'm going to shoot up the school with an AK-47."

The integrity of the Internet could be at risk if Congress does not act to rein in the National Security Agency, Google head Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday. Speaking alongside other tech executives and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at a Silicon Valley event, Schmidt said the revelations about U.S. surveillance could prompt countries to wall off their networks. “The simplest outcome: We’re going to end up breaking the Internet,” Schmidt said, “because what’s going to happen is governments will do bad laws of one kind or another, and eventually what’s going to happen is: ‘We’re going to have our own...

Pornography is everywhere. It’s an evil with far-reaching affects that damage many layers of society. But no one is hurt more by the overwhelming presence of pornography in our society than children.According to a study by the London School of Economics, nine out of ten children who go online (by the way, many of them just doing their homework) will view pornography. Even when kids are acting responsibly and innocently, adults in the pornography business are so fixated on creating new porn addicts that they have made it virtually impossible for children to escape their grasp. Think about it—90 percent...

There has been mounting evidence in the last two weeks that the Internet, one of the last unregulated venues for communication, might well be headed for federal regulation. What makes the specter of Internet regulation (or "net neutrality," as its proponents prefer to call it) all the more ominous is that it might become law through rulings by the Federal Communications Commission rather than a vote of elected representatives in Congress. On Sept. 24, the Washington Post reported that the FCC was working with activists seeking to generate comments in favor of tough, 1930s-style regulation of telephone. In what the...

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

Federal Court Says the Government Can Impersonate You on Social Media — and There’s Not Much You Can Do About It Imagine finding out you have a Facebook page that you didn’t actually create. It has your name, your private photos and all of your personal information — none of which you posted. That’s the discovery New York resident Sondra Prince made. Prince, formerly Sondra Arquiett, alleges that after she was arrested on drug charges in 2010, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used the photos on her confiscated cellphone to create Facebook profile in her name and without her consent....

FULL TITLE: Man, 23, who coached at local high school met two 13-year-old girls online before taking them back to his PARENTS house where he hid them in the basement and raped one A 23-year-old old man from Minnesota who had coached young girls at a local high school is accused of sexual assault and kidnapping after bringing two 13-year-old girls he met online to the basement of his parents' home. Authorities say Casey Lee Chinn from Burnsville met the girls through Omegle, a free online chat site, and picked them around 7:30pm on Monday. Police were then able to...

Facebook has apologized to drag queens and the larger LGBT community in the wake of controversy over the site's names policy, clarifying that users don't have to use their legal name.