Free Republic

A federal appeals court on Tuesday delivered a mixed ruling for net neutrality supporters and opponents alike, allowing the Federal Communications Commission's 2017 repeal to stand but striking down a provision blocking states from implementing their own open internet rules. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals also ordered the FCC to revise the repeal order to take into consideration other issues, like the effect that it will have on public safety. The FCC decided to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules in 2017 with the Republicans on the commission carrying the 3-2 vote along party lines. The rules classified internet...

President Donald Trump is using his powerful social media presence to push back against the impeachment inquiry, tweeting and retweeting more than 100 times over the weekend and his reelection campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads on the topic over the past week. More than 1,800 ads on Trump's Facebook page mentioning "impeachment" have run in the past seven days. The ads have been viewed between 16 and 18 million times on Facebook and the campaign has spent between $600,000 and $2,000,000 on the effort, according to data analyzed by Laura Edelson, a researcher at...

An aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday said the freshman congresswoman blocks people on Twitter if their input isn’t “constructive” - but a federal judge demanded that she come and explain that herself. Campaign manager Rebecca Rodriguez laid out Ocasio-Cortez’s online habits as part of a hearing in a lawsuit filed by former Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who claims the Democratic darling wrongfully blocked him online over his “criticism” of her. Hikind, a longtime Jewish leader, is among more than 20 people Ocasio-Cortez has muted online, a decision she makes “if she feels the posts start reaching a point...

I know many of you don't use facebook. I do to keep in touch with friends overseas. A message pop-up'd on my feed from Kamala asking if I wanted to take a survey and said sure.

After weighing options in Pittsburgh, Detroit and several cities in Florida, Egnyte, a cloud storage company from Silicon Valley, opened a Raleigh office on Thursday with plans to eventually hire 120 people. The office, on the 18th floor of the PNC Plaza building, will serve as the lead sales office for the company’s East Coast operations, a geographic area that includes everything east of the Rocky Mountains. However, despite the sales focus, the office is hiring across all positions, including engineering, product and customer success teams. “I don’t think there will be any position that we will shy away from”...

If a Wi-Fi connection is free and open to you, it’s also free and open to hackers. Firefox Private Network is a desktop extension that helps secure and protect your connection everywhere you use Firefox. Try it free during our beta trial. I also loaded the EFF Privacy Badger extension and found 112 beacons on the DailyMail Home page. I listed them below. acdn.adnxs.com ib.adnxs.com secure.adnxs.com insight.adsrvr.org match.adsrvr.org use-va1.adsrvr.org aax.amazon-adsystem.com aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com c.amazon-adsystem.com fls-na.amazon-adsystem.com ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com s.amazon-adsystem.com ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com z-na.amazon-adsystem.com swa.and.co.uk a4135.casalemedia.com as-sec.casalemedia.com cdn.digitru.st ad.doubleclick.net cm.g.doubleclick.net googleads.g.doubleclick.net googleads4.g.doubleclick.net pubads.g.doubleclick.net securepubads.g.doubleclick.net cdn.doubleverify.com cdn3.doubleverify.com tps11001.doubleverify.com tps11003.doubleverify.com tps11005.doubleverify.com tps11006.doubleverify.com tps11009.doubleverify.com tps11010.doubleverify.com tps11011.doubleverify.com tps11012.doubleverify.com tps11013.doubleverify.com tps11015.doubleverify.com...

Facebook has removed a fact check from a video posted by an anti-abortion group after Republican senators accused the platform of censorship. The moves comes after the group, Live Action, as well as Republican lawmakers, complained after Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers deemed that a video in which the group’s president, Lila Rose, claims that “abortion is never medically necessary” was inaccurate. They argued that the fact check was not impartial because two of the physicians involved in reviewing the claim had ties to abortion rights groups. The fact check was published by the group Health Feedback, part of the International Fact-Checking...

ThinkProgress, the influential news site that rose to prominence in the shadow of the Bush administration and helped define progressivism during the Obama years, is shutting down. The outlet, which served as an editorially independent project of the Democratic Party think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), will stop current operations on Friday and be converted into a site where CAP scholars can post. Top officials at CAP had been searching for a buyer to take over ThinkProgress, which has run deficits for years, and according to sources there were potentially three serious buyers in the mix recently. But in...

Hundreds of individuals were arrested over a four-month period around the world on as part of an operation to crack down on scams meant to hijack wire transfers from both businesses and individuals, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. In total, 281 individuals were arrested worldwide, with 74 of these arrests taking place in the United States, as part of Operation reWired. The operation also involved the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Homeland Security, State and Treasury departments. It was meant to disrupt business email compromise (BEC) schemes. This type of scheme typically targets employees of an...

His campaign plans to launch its own app soon, professionalizing its operation to track ‘the army of Trump’ and keep supporters donating, volunteering and recruiting. Sometimes Twitter isn’t enough. After spending years alleging anti-conservative bias on social media, President Donald Trump will soon have another way to get his message out how he wants. Trump’s reelection campaign plans to launch a smartphone app this fall to encourage supporters to donate, volunteer and reel in like-minded voters — all while providing the president more unfiltered access to his followers. Supporters who download the all-in-one app are expected to be able to...

The news site ThinkProgress is shutting down and will no longer publish original reporting from a progressive perspective. The Center for American Progress Action Fund was attempting to sell the hyperpartisan website but failed to find a buyer, according to The Daily Beast. (Shame, that)

Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren offered proposals during Wednesday’s climate change town hall on CNN that mirrored what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as her biggest mistake during her 2016 campaign. Biden and Warren both attacked coal mining and fossil fuels during the 7-hour long forum, suggesting that eliminating one of the largest sources of energy in the United States would substantially help the environment. “We’ve got to shut down” all coal-fueled power plants, Biden asserted during his portion of the town hall.

Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has renewed the debate surrounding the outsized influence of tech companies in American politics with her lawsuit against Google. Ms. Gabbard, a U.S. representative from Hawaii, has alleged that Google’s decision to temporarily suspend her advertising account after the June Democratic primary debates was tantamount to suppressing her candidacy. Her lawsuit accuses Google of violating her First Amendment rights, for which she is seeking $50 million and assurances that Google will not censor or restrict her account further. Google has countered that Ms. Gabbard’s account was flagged for “unusual activity” and suspended “to prevent fraud...

Facebook is censoring pro-life group Live Action, claiming that its content is "false news" and using two doctors that perform abortions as fact-checkers.The social media giant marked Live Action as “false” for promoting in a video the perspective that abortion is "never medically necessary," a view, the group stressed, that is held by thousands of OB-GYNs across the globe.Live Action said last week it was notified that their page's reach will be reduced for the "repeated sharing of false news."The third-party mechanism that Facebook used last week to determine the group's content was "inaccurate" relied upon the viewpoints of Robyn...

Ok- Not sure how to post vanity threads- hopefully i did it right by posting into general chit chat? Anyways, Looking for suggestions on how to run windows 7 securely on the internet since updates are gonna come to a close- I dual boot, and use Linux mint cinnamon as my main online OS- and use Windows 7 as my gaming OS, my photoshop OS- I do online Racing game which i have to connect to their site (Iracing) and occasionally have to look something up in firefox, but mostly i don't go online with windows except for those- I...

This is my use case--maintaining the Wifi connection as I move around the yard (1.2 acres). I work in the yard a lot, and the fact that I'm moving (around the yard) also means that the Wifi signal can be in and out. I have an Asus RT-AC5300 as my base and it provides fine coverage over most of the house. And covers most of my yard, although there are some weak spots on the farthest extremes. The router itself is on one end of the house in a spare bedroom. The wife doesn't want it in the middle "where...

A Texas district judge temporarily blocked the implementation of Facebook’s new “Off-Facebook Activity” tool over concerns of erasing criminal evidence. The “Off-Facebook Activity” tool prevents search history from being linked to individual users. The feature was announced more than a year after Facebook said it was working on a “Clear History” tool that would allow users to completely clear their browsing data after it was revealed that the tech giant used that information to target advertisements.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor ($98.90 @ OutletPC) [with built-in Radeon Vega 8 graphics, pre-thermal-pasted, and includes heatsink & fan] Motherboard : MSI B450-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard ($84.89 @ OutletPC) [ATXform Factor] Memory : Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($59.99 @ Amazon) Storage : Team GX2 256 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($29.99 @ Newegg) Power Supply EVGA 400 W ATX Power Supply ($32.89 @ OutletPC) Case Thermaltake Versa H21 ATX Mid Tower Case $44.99 Walmart Wireless Network Adapter : TP-Link TL-WN881ND PCIe x1 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter...

Results of a Facebook (audit) released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.[snip] Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.” Hawley proposed (legislation) in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

On Tuesday Facebook released the results of a study on bias within and by the platform against conservative perspectives and activity on the platform. It was led by former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and his team at corporate law firm Covington & Burling LLP.The report confirmed what many had already been experiencing firsthand in the years since social media has become central to global communications, business, governance, and interactivity – that many voices on the right felt subject to arbitrary purposefully targeted restrictions on their ability to operate freely within the terms of services of the platform.Senator Kyl and...