Free Republic

n February, Iranian hackers took down the computer system of gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson’s casino empire, wiping hard drives clean and shutting down email. Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest gaming company, was devastated by the attack. But until a Bloomberg Businessweek report Thursday night, the company had never revealed the extent of the hack. Coming months before the recent hack on Sony Pictures, the hit on Sands is now believed to be the first major destructive cyberattack on a U.S. business, although there are likely others that have gone unreported. From the instant the offensive started, Las Vegas Sands...

“Notorious piracy website The Pirate Bay was taken offline yesterday, as part of a raid by Swedish authorities,” Electronista reports. “The server raid in Stockholm, which took place yesterday morning, is said to be performed as part of a large operation to protect intellectual property, with several servers and other computers seized for further examination by the police.” “Yesterday’s event joins copious others in the history of The Pirate Bay where authorities have attempted to reduce piracy,” Electronista reports. “It also occurs just over a month after co-founder Fredrik Neij was arrested in Thailand, after fleeing Sweden following his 2009...

The computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web has called for affordable access to the Internet to be recognized as a human right, as a report showed that billions of people still cannot go online and government surveillance and censorship are on the rise. Tim Berners-Lee said Thursday the Internet can help tackle inequality—but only if it comes with the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The Briton, who launched the Web in 1990, made the remarks as he released his World Wide Web Foundation’s latest report tracking the Internet’s global impact. …

AbstractThe FCC has proposed new regulations for Internet service providers, so-called net neutrality rules; the specific practices such rules would ban are unclear. While much will depend on the how the final rules are written, regulation advocates have given some indication of the types of practices they would target. Most of the practices identified by regulation supporters as activities that should be prohibited are in fact beneficial to consumers, or are conducted by challengers to the dominant firms in the marketplace. These cases—identified as examples of neutrality violations by regulation supporters themselves—show that efforts to further regulate the open...

Sen. Ted Cruz is winning on social media. Between Sept. 1 to Dec. 1, the Texas Republican garnered the most mentions on Twitter out of 10 potential 2016 candidates, with 4.55 million mentions to his two handles, @SenTedCruz and @TedCruz, according to data provided to Politico. Cruz also had similar success on Facebook, with 1.8 million people talking about him, adding up to a whopping 5.6 million interactions (posts, comments and likes) between Aug. 22 and Nov. 22. The only other candidate with as much clout as Cruz on social media was former Secretary of State and likely 2016 Democratic...

Free Republic is the only site I can get onto right now. How is that even possible if "the DNS server isn't responding" as the message tells me?

You might only just have got your head round the idea of 4G, but a new network is just around the corner, and it could be 100s of times faster – and the new technology could lead to a world where everything from your car to your lightbulbs ‘talk to you’ via apps. When David Cameron first mentioned research into 5G, he suggested 5G-equipped devices could download HD films in a second – but the new network might be so fast it can download 800 films per second, according to University of Surrey researchers. ‘Latency’ – that annoying ‘lag’ when...

....the hacker group Anonymous made good on a threat to crash the city's website because of recent laws the city has passed regulating homeless behavior. Besides the city's website, fortlauderdale.gov, the police department website, flpd.org, also was affected, as was the city's email system.

....Roseanne Barr tweeted a photo of her face looking battered and bruised, joking that she got into a "tussle" with Bill Cosby. In reality, the actress had gotten a chemical peel. The media immediately pounced on the comedian's post, and she deleted it. Barr since regrets doing it -- not joking about Cosby but deleting her post.

Exhibit 12 in the government’s case against Anthony Elonis is a screenshot of a Facebook post he wrote in October 2010, five months after his wife, Tara, left him. His name appears in the site’s familiar blue, followed by words that made Tara fear for her life: ‘'If I only knew then what I know now . . . I would have smothered your ass with a pillow. Dumped your body in the back seat. Dropped you off in Toad Creek and made it look like a rape and murder.'’Exhibit 13, also pulled from Facebook, is a thread that started...

For those who don't know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful -- but not always G-rated, or spell-checked -- Urban Dictionary explains, "Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn't involve decieving [sic] someone isn't trolling at all; it's just stupid." (Pro tip: When spelling "deceiving," remember it's "i before e except after c.") The definition continues: "As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll. I don't like the president's executive action...

Everyone knows that we can buy guns online, but not many are aware that the big search engines like Google and Bing sort of push search results for "guns for sale" farther down the search listing. Not saying that its completely gone in the search. But seems like the search engines are trying to discourage the searches for anything related to gun for sales query. Oh yes, by the way if you're trying to sell through Amazon, same thing not a chance. Twitter too has been on the same wagon, trying to create ads to run on Twitter and...

President Obama thrilled liberals and Internet activists last week by calling for the "strongest possible" net-neutrality regulations to ensure that all Internet traffic is treated equally. **SNIP** "The net result is that every single American broadband customer will have to pay a new tax or taxes to access the Internet," Ajit Pai, a Republican FCC commissioner, warned in a speech last week. "That translates into less broadband adoption, especially among the millions of families that still struggle to make ends meet in this lackluster economy." Technically, the FCC does not have the authority to "tax." But the agency already collects...

Sen. Ted Cruz is lobbying hard to prevent government regulation of the Internet, but one measure the Texas Republican supports is expected to create a sizeable budget hole for his state. Cruz, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, spent ample time last week promoting a permanent extension to an expiring ban on federal, state, and local taxation of Internet access that is currently being considered in Congress. The measure, which passed the House earlier this year, is popular in both parties and considered a lame-duck "must pass," as the ban is set to lift on Dec. 11. But a lesser-known...

The head of the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a plan Monday aimed at delivering high-speed Internet to classrooms and libraries around the country. To pay for the $1.5 billion proposal, the agency is planning a substantial increase in government fees on all monthly phone bills.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) are squaring off over whether new net neutrality rules would hinder or help the growth of the Internet.After Cruz last week called net neutrality “ObamaCare for the Internet,” Franken over the weekend said that the Texas Republican had the issue “completely wrong.” ADVERTISEMENT The Texas senator “just doesn't understand what this issue is,” Franken said.On Monday, Cruz’s office fired back with YouTube videos and Vine clips that it said explains how tough Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules would “calcify” the Internet and prevent people from using it as a platform for innovation.Cruz...

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is continuing his fight to limit government interference into (and taxation of) the Internet, today releasing a compilation of comments he has received since his Washington Post op-ed and short video were released last week (you can watch the video here). Here's a few of many (emphases were added by me): "Sen. Ted Cruz got it right last week when he tweeted that Title II would be ObamaCare for the Internet." -- L. Gordon Crovitz, former Wall Street Journal publisher and author of the Wall Street Journal's Information Age column "Private Internet providers already compete with...

(CNN) -- Vincent Harris, Ted Cruz's top digital operative, is leaving the Texas senator's team to work for Sen. Rand Paul's political operation, as the jostling for staff ramps up ahead of the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest. Harris will join Rand Paul's political action committee and his 2016 team as a chief digital strategist, according to Doug Stafford, executive director of RAND PAC. Stafford said Harris will sit at the "top of the leadership team," as Paul and his inner circle carry out what's expected to be a dizzying political schedule. Paul will likely announce his Senate re-election bid...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joined the video social media service Vine on Monday, publishing two short videos that shared his views on issues related to Internet freedom in less than ten seconds. The posts are clips from a speech Cruz delivered on Friday at the Capital Factory offices in downtown Austin where he advocated against imposing a sales tax on Internet transactions or imposing other burdensome regulations, as Breitbart Texas reported. The first video is a short and simple message, based on the well-known "Don't Mess With Texas" slogan....

Internet old-timers - those of us over age 25 - remember a time when the web was called the Information Superhighway. The debate over net neutrality has us thinking about another sort of highway: the Trans-Texas Corridor. The TTC, a proposed 4,000-mile toll road, rail and utility project, died a death of a thousand cuts in 2010. First proposed as a much-needed infrastructure investment, the well-intentioned project grew into a monstrosity of politically connected contractors, private property concerns and conspiracy theories. The biggest blow to TTC was statewide opposition to granting Spanish-owned developer Cintra a 50-year, multibillion-dollar deal to control...