Free Republic

Nicole Gomes has no shame. The 24-year-old Sacramento woman has taken to the Internet to ask some benevolent stranger or another to buy her breast implants. “I didn’t get the boob gene from my mom,” she explains. “And it’s not something I would be able to afford by myself.” My first thought was that Gomes must work in the sex industry. And that the young woman figured larger breasts – in addition to her obvious computer skills – would make her a more marketable pole dancer or porn star or prostitute. But Gomes is a graphic designer, she says. And...

The Bushmaster M4 is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It's a serious weapon. But in the Internet's darkest black market, it's all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody. The Armory began as an offshoot of The Silk Road, notable as the Internet's foremost open drug bazaar, where anything from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased like a criminal Amazon.com. It's virtually impossible to trace, and entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The Silk Road's...

Republican governors, eager for new revenue to ease budget strains, are dropping their longtime opposition to imposing sales taxes on online purchases, a significant political shift that could soon bring an end to tax-free sales on the Internet. The newfound support among Republicans is a dramatic change from just a few months ago. [N.J. Gov. Chris]Christie called taxation of online sales "an important issue to all the nation's governors" and endorsed federal legislation giving all states taxing authority.

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education. Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionising education around the world". Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online interactive courses which can be...

Tonight the Right Online Welcome Event begins at 10PM EST (7PM PT) and will feature speakers such as Tracy Henke, Michelle Malkin, David Bossie, Stephen K. Bannon, and of course Governor Sarah Palin who is the keynote speaker. The chatroom is open and you can watch below:

The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S. The intriguing list includes obvious choices such as 'attack', 'Al Qaeda', 'terrorism' and 'dirty bomb' alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like 'pork', 'cloud', 'team' and 'Mexico'. Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150281/REVEALED-Hundreds-words-avoid-using-online-dont-want-government-spying-you.html#ixzz1wGTTvw4t

(CBS News) New York state lawmakers have proposed a ban on anonymous online comments. Called the Internet Protection Act (A.8688/S.6779), the legislation would require a web site administrator to pull down anonymous comments from sites, including "social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages."The bill states: A web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or...

S T A T E O F N E W Y O R K ________________________________________________________________________ 6779 I N S E N A T E March 21, 2012 ___________ Introduced by Sen. O'MARA -- read twice and ordered printed, and when printed to be committed to the Committee on Codes AN ACT to amend the civil rights law, in relation to protecting a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEM- BLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS: 1 Section 1. The civil rights law, is amended...

Aereo could kill TV business model, broadcasters sayBy Andrew Feinberg - 05/11/12 01:22 PM ET Barry Diller's upstart Aereo service, which lets paying customers record and watch over-the-air television stations online, could destroy the economic model behind television, an NBC-Universal exec said in a court filing. Aereo is being sued by all of the major television broadcasters in federal court in New York, where the service was launched. In a sworn declaration, NBC-Universal executive vice president for content distribution Matt Bond said Aereo could alter how cable and satellite companies handle traditional TV stations. He said Aereo could let the...

Fraud found in Obama’s online donationsBy Neil Munro - The Daily Caller – 5 hrs ago President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign has hundreds of thousands of eager, low-dollar donors — and a tiny trickle of unwilling, defrauded donors. The latest example comes from David Newman, who found a $15 charge, dated May 6, from the “Obama For America” campaign on one of his debit cards. Newman had supported Obama in 2008, but “I didn’t sign up to say ‘Do this every three months or every three years when you need money,’” he told The Daily Caller. “This is completely 100...

This is a social networking site for community organizers. We need to co-opt this. The left will be using this. Prepare, and conquer!

Liberal Democrat President Tim Farron today vowed the party would "kill" proposals for increased monitoring of emails and internet use if they were not watered down. Mr. Farron said he was "prepared" to look at draft legislation, dubbed a "snoopers charter", when it is published, but warned he was "in no mood" to back "authoritarian" laws. Many Lib Dems were "horrified" by the plans, which would allow Government listening post GCHQ to monitor internet traffic—times, dates, numbers and addresses—in real time. … The Government has faced an intense backlash over the plans, with senior Conservatives joining Lib Dems and civil...

To have been given so much—opportunity, life, and liberty—by a country I cherish, and to see it now potentially deteriorate economically, culturally, and politically into the very system that my parents risked their lives to escape, pains me. The torment of watching my mother ingest her own wedding band, though compelling, is no match for the agony I now feel as I watch and listen to the naïveté of a segment of ideologically imbued Americans paint the country I love as the world’s enemy. They relish in casting the U.S.A. as a force of evil and tyranny, while the truth...

Online graphic warns of al-Qaida return to NYCAssociated Press – 9 hrs ago NEW YORK (AP) — A mock movie poster warns al-Qaida wants to return to New York City, but authorities say there's no evidence of an actual threat. **SNIP** New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne says an overseas, Arab-language Internet site posted the graphic on its "artwork and design" page. He says the NYPD has been monitoring the site.

“Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution” is a 10-week online course presented by Hillsdale College. Featuring an expanded format from the “Introduction to the Constitution” lecture series with Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn, Constitution 101 follows closely the one-semester course required of all Hillsdale College undergraduate students. In this course, you can: • watch lectures from the same Hillsdale faculty who teach on campus; • study the same readings taught in the College course; • submit questions for weekly Q&A sessions with the faculty; • access a course study guide; • test your knowledge through weekly...

GRAND RAPIDS – A Comstock Park man has been charged with criminal copyright infringement for allegedly streaming live sporting events and pay-per-view events on the Internet.

So far ROU PAUL has 29% and leads.

Organizers with several Wisconsin Tea Party groups say they have thousands of volunteers ready to check the validity of signatures to recall Gov. Scott Walker and other GOP leaders. Organizers with We the People of the Republic and The Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty held a press conference Tuesday at the state Capitol to announce about 11,000 people have pledged online to check for fraudulent signatures through an online system. The groups are working with a Texas-based group to create the database program that will allow volunteers to check the signatures from home. They will receive webinar training to check for...

Satellite photos used to be for military eyes only, but Google Earth changed all that. Now something similar is happening to the ocean depths, with any web user able to listen in and "surf the sea floor" - and the US Navy is not happy."The cable is going underneath here," says Benoit Pirenne, standing at the water's edge on Canada's Vancouver Island. "It's going out 500 miles (800km) in a big loop in the ocean, coming back in the same place." The Vancouver cable connects a network of scientific instruments on the floor of the north Pacific, some as deep...

Reputation is a tricky business. And not just for politicians anymore. This year we're all worried about approval ratings—or should be. Reputation was once a qualitative measure of our behavior, vital but vague. Now it's getting quantitative. Soon there is likely to be an actual numerical reputation score for each of us, like a FICO credit score but for our whole lives.Ready? We've got the precursors now, whether or not we're aware of them. Companies such as PeerIndex, Twitalyzer, Talentag and PostRank (bought by Google) already apply online analytics to establish the heft of an individual's or business's "social capital."...