Free Republic

From California to London, the tech giants are employing top architects to build spectacular symbols of their immense global power. But they have their critics… We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification, of chirps and squeaks and bright, shiny things – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Graphics – rounded corners, lower case, Google’s primary colours, Twitter’s birdie, Facebook’s shades of blue – enhance the innocence and infantilism. It is a world, as Jonathan Franzen once said, “so...

What does looking into the hearts and minds of online trolls tell us? That's the question Australian researchers tried to answer in a new study that investigates the psychological profile of trolls — that is, computer users who engage in the disturbing 21st century practice of deliberating provoking, demeaning, and threatening others online. Researchers at Australia's Federation University used an online questionnaire to look closer at a handful of traits — psychopathy, sadism, and empathy — among those who engage in online trolling. The survey included 415 participants, approximately one-third male and two-thirds female, with a median age of 23...

Denver, Colo., Jul 18, 2017 / 05:09 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In the last 24 hours more than twenty Catholic pages, some with millions of followers, have been blocked by Facebook for unknown reasons. Of the known affected pages, 21 are based in Brazil, and four are English-language pages, with administrators in the U.S. and Africa. Most of the blocked pages had significant followings - between hundreds of thousands and up to 6 million followers each. One of the blocked English-language fanpages was “Jesus and Mary”, which had 1.7 million followers. The page’s main cover photo was of the sacred hearts...

Pakistan Causes Youtube Outage for Two-Thirds of World, Other Glitches"Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries."..."On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google."

A couple weeks ago I came across an old article about Journolist which I found striking. In particular, I was struck by the ways in which some of the debates taking place among left-leaning journalists back in 2008 still seem to encompass the ways the left-wing media operates today. For those who don’t remember it, Journolist was just a listserv created by Ezra Klein. The list was invitation only and was mostly made up of progressive journalists. In theory, the list was a kind of digital water cooler where like-minded people could talk to others in the field. That may...

The thugs were egged on by government indifference. That’s all they needed to have a holiday of riot. They smashed windows. They burned. They attacked opponents and sent bystanders scurrying in fear. And the police stood by. And the authorities that had the power to discipline them quailed in their offices. The ideas the goons rioted to suppress had to slink away unheard. A victory for the bad guys, if we can play loose with the term. That happened in Berlin, Germany in 1937, right? Similar things, yes, but this particular travesty happened at UC Berkeley in 2017. It did...

The president of the United States of America is a “sh*tposter.” It’s not an elegant turn of phrase. But it is, I think, the correct terminology to capture a political moment so monstrously stupid that even Jerry Springer finds it embarrassing. To sh*tpost, according to the scholarly journal Urban Dictionary, is to “make utterly worthless and inane posts on an internet message board,” particularly those involving memes or low-quality visuals. And the president’s latest act of sh*tposting—tweeting out a video edited to show Trump wrestling, and beating up, the CNN logo—has flung the 24-hour news network into a week-long controversy...

The potential energy of ecommerce has yet to be fully unlocked. Retail jobs are hemorrhaging throughout the United States. Credit Suisse predicts that 8,000 retail stores will close in 2017. Radioshack is closing 1,430 stores, Payless Shoes is closing 800 stores and Sears is closing 265 stores. According to the U.S. Census reported by The New York Times, department stores have lost 448,000 jobs in the last 15 years, offset by a net gain of 645,000 net jobs in the retail sector in that time, due to natural economic growth. Warehouse clubs (which presumably includes Wal-Mart as well its Sam’s...

Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/07/07/cnn-holesolo-blackmail-journalism-kirsten-powers-column/459898001/

It has become crystal clear that CNN still has no clue why Hillary and the establishment lost. On the Fourth of July, CNN managed to out-petty the president, further corrode its credibility, and kick-start the Trump 2020 ground game in one fell swoop. After President Trump tweeted a modified GIF of himself at an old pro-wrestling match, in which he is seen clobbering a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head, CNN chose the low road. Rather than denounce the president’s tweet as unpresidential and move on with actual journalism, the network instead had a public, 72-hour meltdown,...

Earlier this year, a sloppily doodled MS Paint comic appeared on Reddit—the online news aggregator and so-called “front page of the internet”—juxtaposing images of 20th-century fascism with more modern symbols of far-right political thought. Under the column “fascism then” loomed the usual suspects: soldiers goose-stepping in formation, concentration-camp prisoners in striped pyjamas, a barking-mad Adolf Hitler. Under “fascism now” lurked a weirder assemblage of ideological signifiers of the so-called “alt-right”: a snickering cartoon frog in Nazi regalia, the crooning French candelabra from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, an anime character, a badly drawn swastika. The comic carried a caption courtesy...

CNN unmasked the Reddit user from a trail of biographical cues he left as he published hate-filled posts. UPDATE: A video shared by President Donald Trump with his Twitter followers and a video singled out by CNN appear to have "substantial differences," WikiLeaks has reported. Implying that that alone may prove the news network got the wrong internet user when claiming the creator of the video was HanA******Solo, WikiLeaks tweeted: (TWEET-AT-LINK) But the hub for whistleblower-sourced material isn't the only member of the media that is making this claim. Some conservative-leaning news organizations have also made similar assumptions. According to...

The same news outlet which often claims President Trump is a "thin-skinned" narcissist is now threatening to ruin the life of a private person who dared mock it with a Trump meme. In an appalling display of what's been labeled "thug journalism" and may even be blackmail, CNN sought retribution against the anonymous Internet user who created a video portraying Trump wrestling a figure whose head has been replaced by CNN's logo. The video went viral this week after Trump retweeted it and irked CNN, which stated that it "encourages violence against reporters." The video's alleged creator has since been...

Lindsay Lohan wants to make America great again. The actress spent the 4th of July defending President Trump against ‘bullies’, asking followers on Twitter to support the ‘kind’ Trump family. Huh? Who knew that President Donald Trump‘s biggest supporter would be…Lindsay Lohan? Lindsay, 31, took some time out of her 4th of July holiday to respond to positive stories about the president on Twitter. It’s clear that Lindsay’s a major Trump supporter, and would like her followers to switch to Team #MAGA and jump on the “fake news” train, too. In the first tweet, she responded to an angry Trump...

Journalists were gobsmacked to discover that Trump tweeted an animated GIF of him from his wrestling days knocking out someone with the CNN logo superimposed over his head. Among the scandalized were the “targets” of the tweet – CNN itself. And so, CNN did what any reasonable, sensible, and journalistic operation would do: they sought out the person who originally made the GIF on Reddit. (TWEET-AT-LINK) Reddit user”HanA**holeSolo” first shared the GIF last Wednesday of Trump pummeling a wrestler with CNN’s logo imposed on his face. CNN could find no earlier instance of the GIF. The GIF was later edited...

Jack Ma, the man who turned Alibaba into ChinaÂ’s dominant e-commerce platform, now has his sights set on global domination. Over the past year, Ma has spent more than 800 hours flying to dozens of countries, meeting business leaders and head of states to introduce his grand vision: small businesses from all corners of the world trading freely and securely on AlibabaÂ’s platform. His goals are equally ambitious: Ma wants Alibaba to hit $1 trillion in gross merchandise value by 2020. By 2036, the company sees itself serving two billion customers, effectively becoming the worldÂ’s fifth largest economy, with sales...

Some Thoughts on Privacy - God Is Watching (And so Are Many Others) Msgr. Charles Pope • May 5, 2016 • 0 Comments At the bottom of this post is a 2010 CBS news story reporting hat anything you’ve copied on a digital copier going back years is stored on a hard drive inside the copier. These drives are evidently so large that they can store more than 20,000 documents and hundreds of thousands of pages.Hence if you have ever photocopied personal materials (e.g., social security numbers, checking info, personal data) it is likely on that hard drive. The...

FULL TITLE: ‘I had to do what was right as a father’ Del City father describes moments when family took down man wanting to have sex with teen DEL CITY — A Del City father ambushed a man after learning that he had been involved in a sexual online relationship with his teenage daughter. The father, who did not want to be identified, used the Family Time app to discover that his 15-year-old daughter was having an inappropriate relationship with a 33-year-old man. When he found out the two were meeting for the first time, his family took action. “He...

OneWeb plans to launch a constellation of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites using non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology in order to provide global, high-speed broadband. The company’s goal has far-reaching implications, and would provide internet to rural and hard-to-reach areas that currently have little access to internet connectivity. Additionally, OneWeb has a targets of “connecting every unconnected school” by 2022, and “bridging the digital divide” by 2027.

How rude. " Double standard: @PPact is allowed to advertise on @Twitter, but our ads have been blocked until we delete tweets. https://t.co/QlPSItKYFx " — Live Action (@LiveAction) June 27, 2017 Via Live Action News: "While Planned Parenthood is allowed to advertise on Twitter, the social media company has suppressed Live Action’s ads, calling our pro-life messages offensive and inflammatory. What exactly is Twitter calling so offensive and inflammatory? Tweeting a picture of a child developing in the womb and saying that we believe in the right to life. Or tweeting ultrasound images, like the ones that most expectant moms...