Free Republic

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - A Charlotte woman called On Your Side Investigates for help after she paid a local contractor thousands of dollars for work on her house that wasn't completed. Tanza Boller recently bought a house for her and her two children with the intention of fixing it up. She said she wanted to find someone she could trust, so she used Angie's List to help find a company to do the work.

The stunning leak of nude and intimate photos of scores of celebrities may reach far wider than was previously known, involving the breach of almost 600 online storage accounts, according to unsealed federal court documents. The "Celebgate" hack resulted in the posting on Aug. 31 of almost 500 purported photos of Hollywood stars, models and other celebrities — including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Kaley Cuoco and U.S. soccer star Hope Solo — to the Wild West-like Internet forum 4chan, from which they quickly spread. Apple Inc. confirmed the next day that the photos were obtained through a "targeted...

Can you be slapped with obstruction of justice for wiping clean your browser history? Yep, says the Feds. If you are in the habit of clearing your online tracks – as many do – a federal law on the books since 2002, meant to apply legal pressure on corporations under investigation, can be rolled out and used as leverage to charge individuals. Think Enron as the target, but Joe Internet user in the scope. Writes AOL.com: “Many Internet users delete their browser history and clear their cache and cookies without thinking twice about it… But the recent Boston Marathon bombing...

The Libertarians are up in arms this week after the Justice Department served subpoenas to Nick Gillespie’s Reason Magazine over comments left on their web site by anonymous readers. The commentariat buzz in question erupted over an article dealing with the life sentence imposed on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. This has prompted some outraged cries from observers such as Bloomberg contributor (and former Reason editor) Virginia Postrel, who described the move as stomping on free speech. Powerline’s Steven Hayward (coincidentally also a former contributor to Reason) wonders aloud whether the Justice Department attorneys are just stupid or possibly...

Next week, a 24-year-old man who knew Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev is scheduled to appear in U.S. Federal Court for sentencing on obstruction of justice charges related to the 2013 attacks. Khairullozhon Matanov, a former taxi driver, did not participate in or have any prior knowledge of the bombings, according to U.S. authorities. What could land him 20 more years in prison — where he has been since his arrest — are the charges that he deleted video files from his computer and cleared his browser history in the days following the attacks. A Grand Jury indictment...

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery. Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet? Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge. Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued...

A new report into U.S. consumers’ attitude to the collection of personal data has highlighted the disconnect between commercial claims that web users are happy to trade privacy in exchange for ‘benefits’ like discounts. On the contrary, it asserts that a large majority of web users are not at all happy, but rather feel powerless to stop their data being harvested and used by marketers. The report authors’ argue it’s this sense of resignation that is resulting in data tradeoffs taking place — rather than consumers performing careful cost-benefit analysis to weigh up the pros and cons of giving up...

Obama To Circumvent Congress With ‘Gag Order’ On Firearm Coverage by AWR Hawkins 7 Jun 2015 On June 1 Breitbart News reported on Obama’s Spring 2015 “Unified Agenda.” The gun control measures contained therein which were to be passed by executive fiat. Since that time Representatives like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4th) have placed riders on a DOJ appropriations bill to stop portions of the executive gun control push in its tracks. Now the NRA-ILA is revealing that the Obama administration is working behind the scenes to stifle reporting on firearms. From the NRA-ILA: Even as news reports have been highlighting...

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.” St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even...

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’...

Hours before his fatal encounter with anti-terrorism officers, Usaamah Rahim told an associate he was switching from plans to behead a conservative blogger to assaults on the "boys in blue." Rahim, who officials believe was radicalized by ISIS, referred to his planned act of jihad against police officers in coded language -- "going on vacation," he said, according to an FBI affidavit. The 26-year-old security guard's so-called vacation ended in a hail of bullets Tuesday. FBI and Boston police officers tailing him suspected he was about to launch an attack. An associate, David Wright, 25, was arrested and charged with...

Restaurant operator KFC said Monday it filed a lawsuit against three companies in China whose social media accounts spread false claims about its food, including that its chickens have eight legs. The case filed by China's biggest restaurant operator comes as the government intensifies a campaign to clean up rumors on social media. Internet marketers have been convicted of trying to manipulate online sentiment on behalf of clients by posting false information about competitors or deleting critical posts. In an announcement posted on its Chinese website, KFC said one of the best-known fake rumors was that chickens used by the...

'WOMEN bearing their breasts to the world have been duped after it was revealed the social media trend has nothing to do with charity.'

A former Internet "troll" who had been hired to promote political views online is suing her former employer in an attempt to draw attention to Russia's "information war" technologies, a news report said Friday. The grounds for the lawsuit filed by Lyudmila Savchuk, which is expected to be heard by a St. Petersburg city court next month, is the employer's failure to provide any labor contract or other paperwork supporting her hiring and eventual dismissal, Kommersant reported. Savchuk said she was fired after speaking to the media about her employer, Internet Research, which she described as part of Russia's "troll...

One of the primary contentions, yesterday evening, of Establishment Republicans and Democrats in defense of the NSA's massive data collection program, was that the program was not only free from abuse (something we know is not true), but that it's ultimately useful in targeting real threats to the American people; maybe not yesterday, maybe not today, but perhaps some day in the future it will ensnare an entire sleeper sell of Jihadists mid-phone call to Iran, giving an unsecured credit card number to their yellowcake suppliers. The data collection, you see, is done only on those whose backgrounds demand it....

An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

A new study from George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management found that, at least by social media standards, Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz are leading the 2016 presidential race. The report looked at how well candidates' campaigns fared by comparing the popularity of candidates' names and websites, as well as what words are shared in conjunction with candidates' names. Of all declared 2016 presidential hopefuls' websites, Hillary Clinton's campaign website received the most shares, with 4.8 million social media and news mentions. And it wasn't just the number of times her campaign was mentioned that was significant: Clinton's...

The FCC is readying a proposal to extend the controversial subsidy program to broadband.Conservatives have reserved their worst epithet for the Lifeline program, which provides discounted phone service to low-income families: "Obamaphone." Liberals call it a vital source of empowerment for the poor. Now the Federal Communications Commission is readying a proposal to extend the subsidies to the Internet, setting up a new battle with Republicans who already want to shut down the effort.

In a speech in South Korea US Secretary of State John Kerry called for government to play a bigger role in what goes on the Internet. Kerry advised that “we take a lesson from what’s going on in North Korea. Sure, there are a lot of things wrong with the way Kim is governing his country, but that doesn’t mean everything he’s doing is a mistake.” “A key positive in Kim’s policies is the government’s larger role in filtering what the citizens of North Korea can see and hear from the Internet,” the Secretary maintained. “Antisocial content that could undermine...

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.