Free Republic

A new UN report on the state of broadband says 1.5 billion more people use the internet today than in 2010, but 52% of the world's population still lacks access. Of people without internet, 62% live in Asia and the Pacific Islands, and 18% in Africa. "Men outnumber women in terms of Internet usage in all regions of the world." China has the biggest internet market, with 700 million users. The global average internet speed is 7.2 megabits per second. South Korea has the fastest internet at 28.6 Mbps. To compare, Nigeria has one of the slowest speeds with 1.5...

Hackers broke into British company Piriform’s free software for optimizing computer performance last month potentially allowing them to control the devices of more than two million users, the company and independent researchers said on Monday. The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which is downloaded for personal computers and Android phones as often as five million times a week. It cleans up junk programs and advertising cookies to speed up devices. CCleaner is the main product made by London’s Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the world’s largest computer security vendors. At...

Twitter rival GAB was served notice by its domain registrar that it has 5 days to transfer its domain or they will seize it. BREAKING: Gab’s domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it. The free and open web is in danger. pic.twitter.com/Irl6KO5Xmr— Gab (@getongab) September 18, 2017 At the same time GAB is suing Google for anti trust violations.According to David Z. Morris at Fortune magazine, GAB supports Milo Yiannopoulous whom Morris slanders by calling him a white supremacist who was banned from Google for his racially offensive harassment of a...

Oracle Corp. is hiring another 5,000 employees for its cloud software business as it fights Salesforce.com Inc. for market share in the fast-growing industry. The hiring surge aims to beef up what’s already Oracle’s fastest-growing business, increasing revenue by 58 percent in the quarter it reported June 21 compared with a year earlier. The move is the latest in a back-and-forth between Oracle and its main rival that last week saw Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff bragging he was on track to generate $10 billion in cloud revenue this year, a goal Oracle was trying to hit first. It...

Content marketing is one of the best ways that you can bring new customers to your eCommerce store. Eighty-two percent of consumers report developing a positive opinion on a company after reading content produced by them. Also, 70 percent of consumers prefer to learn about a company and its products through content like blogs and articles, as opposed to advertisements. As if that wasn’t enough, content marketing tends to cost about 60 percent less than other types of conventional marketing and generates about three times more leads. Tips on Content Marketing for eCommerce However, content marketing can be difficult to...

China’s campaign to stamp out use technology that allows web surfers to evade its internet filters is disrupting work and study for entrepreneurs, scientists and students. […] After Beijing began clamping down on use of VPNs in January, dozens of activists and lawyers have been detained and a cybersecurity law tightened control on online data. How many people might be affected is unclear, but consumer research firm GlobalWebIndex says a survey of Chinese web surfers this year found 14 percent use a VPN daily. …

At the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said there are voices on the internet, specifically on Breitbart and YouTube, that want to kill her. "I think we should focus a lot on domestic terrorism also. So I would like to ask again, given all that you have said about how difficult it is and the privacy concerns, do you have any thoughts about what we can do to begin to deal with the KKK, the white nationalists, the - the extremists, the Alt-Right?" Waters asked. "They're on the internet,...

n a recent ruling, U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York found that the website for Blick Art Materials, where customers can purchase products, is a place of public accommodation and thus subject to the ADA.... Of the hundreds of suits filed, so far one has gone to trial, and it didn't bode well for the defense bar. In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Scola of the Southern District of Florida found that supermarket chain Winn-Dixie violated the rights of a blind customer by not making its website usable through screen reader software.

Contrary to the furious spin from Hillary Clinton’s adversaries in the media and Republican Party, FBI Director James Comey did not undercut Hillary’s truthfulness on her State Department emails. In fact, his statement and testimony affirm that Hillary has been honest about the email issue from day one. Here are the facts, not the spin. “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” — James Comey On various occasions over the past fifteen months, Hillary has said that she did not send or receive emails containing classified information or any material marked as classified. This, to the...

“We have bridges that are falling down,” then-candidate Donald Trump told Fox last August, pledging to double the amount Hillary Clinton wanted to spend on infrastructure as president of the United States. “We’ll get a fund, we’ll make a phenomenal deal with the low interest rates and rebuild our infrastructure.” One year later and eight months into his presidency, Trump has continued to double down on his lofty promises — during “Infrastructure Week” in June, he told his supporters in Cincinnati that the U.S. “deserves the best infrastructure in the world.” But the administration has been slow to move its...

On June 2, 2011, Judicial Watch released documents that show the Obama FCC’s collusion with a radical leftist organization to seize control over the Internet. This investigation caught the eye of congressional leaders, and now it appears a congressional probe of the matter is in the offing. ... The documents we uncovered show that the Obama FCC was deeply involved in discussions with the radical leftist organization Free Press in the run up to the December 2010 FCC vote. How deep? Free Press reached out to the FCC to invite FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to write an op-ed for the...

I'm starting to believe that with all of this online censorship, the graffiti of the future will be IP addresses written on walls in chalk.

“Shoot Selfies, Not Animals” is a phrase so moronic only PETA could have conjured it up. It’s the name of their latest anti-hunting campaign, which has been making the rounds online. The activist group launched the photo frame a few days ago. It’s now the number one filter currently on Facebook. It didn’t take long for the filter to go viral, but not for the reasons PETA hoped. Hunters quickly jumped onboard and hijacked the campaign in a hilarious trolling. Naturally, PETA responded rather butt-hurtedly. Courtesy of their blog: It’s not every day that thousands of hunters throw their support...

After Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer, hitherto Nazi-friendly internet companies have found their boots and their banhammers. The angry right has for some time anticipated this eventuality, and colonized or established replicas of key services and platforms. 8chan, Voat and Gab are the most well-known examples, respectively resembling 4chan, Reddit and Twitter. Adi Robertson writes that the internet's plumbing, the world of domain name registrars and load mitigation, will be harder to replicate. Why the alt-right can’t build an alt-internet. Even if such a registrar could ignore bad PR, activists could still lodge complaints with the registries, which...

My computer is on (I think?) Wait, let me check and see if FreeRepublic is up. /sarc Not having problems anywhere else.

Despite that most web traffic today comes from smartphones and tablets, the mobile web remains inconveniently slow. Even on fast 4G networks, a page takes 14 seconds to load on average—an eternity in today's connected world. A team of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and MIT has found a way to dramatically speed up the mobile web. Their new Vroom software prototype works by optimizing the end-to-end interaction between mobile devices and web servers. They tested the software on 100 popular news and sports websites, and they found that Vroom cut in half the median load time...

Something important happened in the field of education this month. For the first time ever, any student anywhere can take top-quality courses online in every major freshman college subject, taught by professors from the most prestigious universities, that lead to full academic credit at 2,900 traditional colleges, such as Purdue, Penn State, Colorado State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all absolutely free. There is no tuition cost. No text book cost. No administrative or connection fees. No taxpayer subsidy or federal Title IV funding required. And this is not a plan for the future, but a working reality available to...

For years luxury brands have mesmerized us with highly desirable products and services. They inspire us to dream bigger and leave us desiring more. You can learn so much about attracting ideal clients from these dream building brands. I had a client (let’s call the brand was called “Arnanda”) this client had on their list On the outside, it seemed that this client was a success but this client was struggling financially to reach more high-end clients and make a profit. On the other hand, another one of my clients from Italy, who had worked as a consultant for Salvatore...

(Tips, for those wishing to dump Google, on alternatives to their services - Browser, Search Engines, youtube, gmail, etc) (A commentator suggested you do a google image search on "white couple" - he said the results would make your blood boil. He was right.)

The names and faces of individuals who were part of last weekend's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., are being plastered all over the Internet by civil rights advocates. It's part of an effort to shame the people who participated. But it's a tactic that can also snare some innocent people in its net. "Yes, You're Racist" is the name of a Twitter account that has been very active in posting pictures of white supremacists at the Charlottesville march and rally. Logan Smith, who runs the account, thinks other people should see the faces of white supremacists. "They're not wearing...