Free Republic

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy. A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are...

A fire Sunday morning in Northwest Washington, D.C., damaged studios for Fox News, C-SPAN and MSNBC, and forced "Fox News Sunday" to relocate its broadcast to a local affiliate's studio. D.C. Fire and EMS tweeted that an electrical fire broke out in the 8th floor television studio but nobody was injured. Steve Scully, the political editor for C-SPAN, tweeted shortly after 7 a.m. that the Fox News and C-SPAN studios sustained "extensive damage," and MSNBC's studio took on "extensive smoke and water damage."

LAS VEGAS — CES 2019 kicks off this week, which of course means that close to 200,000 tech heads are swarming into Sin City to ogle the latest crop of gadgets — and we’re not necessarily talking about stripper robots. Talking appliances... from basic items like speakers and alarm clocks, to quirkier fare like fridges and toilets.

In May 2018, the Russian military revealed it had combat-tested its Uran-9 robot tank in Syria. The diminutive remote-control tank is noted for its formidable gun and missile armament. However, just a month later Defense Blog reported that Senior Research Officer Andrei Anisimov told a conference at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg that the Uran-9’s performance in Syria revealed that “modern Russian combat Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are not able to perform the assigned tasks in the classical types of combat operations.” He concluded it would be ten to fifteen more years before UGVs were ready for such...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A user of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company. The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported. “This unfortunate case was the result of a human error and an isolated single case,” an Amazon spokesman said on Thursday. The first customer had initially got no reply...

(This is 96 pages long so I am just posting the Executive Summary here) On September 7, 2017, Equifax announced a cybersecurity incident affecting 143 million consumers. This number eventually grew to 148 million—nearly half the U.S. population and 56 percent of American adults. This staff report explains the circumstances of the cyberattack against Equifax, one of the largest consumer reporting agencies (CRA) in the world. Equifax is one of several large CRAs in the United States. CRAs gather consumer data, analyze it to create credit scores and detailed reports, and then sell the reports to third parties. Consumers do...

Elon Musk unveiled the workings of the prototype tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday night, by giving rides to VIPs and a few reporters. The mile-long tube runs 30 feet below the surface from Space X headquarters into a residential neighborhood and has car elevators on either end. A vehicle is lowered into the single-lane tunnel, where it pulls onto raised, rail-like platforms. Horizontal guide wheels mounted near the front tires hold the car between the walls, similar to some roller coaster designs, as, ideally, an autonomous driving system propels it up to 150 mph. Musk envisions a network of...

Google works with establishment conservative think tanks that argue against regulating the tech giant, one of which had its pro-Google opinions published in National Review, according to a new report. Audio recordings obtained by Wired reveal that Google cooperates with and funds a range of establishment conservatives in D.C. that help it fend off scrutiny and oversight from politicians. The organizations named in Wired’s report are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Cato Institute. ... In case anyone still takes bought-and-paid-for establishment arguments about free markets and competition seriously, that’s a special privilege Silicon...

... Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her. An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was...

On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, marking the beginning of the United States’ war against Japan. @USSArizona marked the occasion with a series of “as it happened” tweets... However, earlier in the day during the live “as it happened” tweets, there was a problem that’s being looked into.

CIMON isn’t much to look at. It’s just a floating ball with a cartoonish face on its touch screen. It’s built to be a personal assistant for astronauts working on the International Space Station (ISS). CIMON stands for Crew Interactive MObile compinioN. It’s not supposed to be just a tool. It’s also supposed to be a friend. Yes, it’s a personality prototype. You can tell, can’t you? But, as numerous books and movies have clearly warned us — shortly after being switched on for the first time, CIMON has developed a mind of its own. And it appears CIMON wants...

Utah Sen.-elect Mitt Romney signaled he may focus on climate change when he's sworn in in January. In a brief interview with E&E News yesterday, the former Republican presidential nominee said he sees climate change as a "critical area." ....snip Last year, Romney told college students in St. Louis that he was "concerned about the anti-scientific attitude" expressed by some of his Republican colleagues and that he was convinced humanity has played a part in global warming (Climatewire, Oct. 3). "I happen to believe that there is climate change, and I think humans contribute to it in a substantial way,...

Breaking: @joyent, Gab’s new hosting provider, has just pulled our hosting service. They have given us until 9am on Monday to find a solution. Gab will likely be down for weeks because of this. Working on solutions. We will never give up on defending free speech for all people.

Boston, Mass. – The rate of infectious disease (ID) markers, such as those for HIV and hepatitis B and C viruses (HBV and HCV), in donated blood is higher for men who have sex with men (MSM) relative to blood donors overall, according to an analysis of data from more than 8.4 million blood donations collected from January 2017 through September 2018 by the American Red Cross. However, the ID marker rates for reinstated (1.44%) and newly eligible (2.0%) MSM donors were similar to those of first-time male donors (1.52%). The findings were presented at the 2018 AABB Annual Meeting,...

Last week, a trolling campaign organized by right-wing internet users spilled over onto Twitter. The campaign, which was born in the fever swamps of 4chan and Reddit message boards, involved creating hundreds of fictional personas with gray cartoon avatars, known as NPCs. These accounts posed as liberal activists and were used to spread — among other things — false information about November’s midterm elections.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for...

Free speech social media platform Gab.ai has rebranded as Gab.com and aims to become a tech hub for “liberty-minded tech startups” that wish to avoid connections to leftist Silicon Valley groups. Gab.ai, the free-speech themed social media platform founded by CEO Andrew Torba, has long aimed to act as an alternative to sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Now Gab is rebranding as Gab.com and aims to provide an infrastructure for tech developers that wish to grow their own platforms and products without being forced to go through leftist companies based in Silicon Valley. Andrew Torba spoke to Breitbart News...

IPAWS National Test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) The national WEA test has been postponed to the backup date of October 3, 2018 at 2:18 p.m. EDT.

The link goes to a Twitter thread by investigative citizen journalist Nick Monroe, who is following the hearing and providing much detail.

According to the ImportGenius website that tracks the import/export activity at shipping docks, the U.S. Army Contracting Command received the 3D mobile air-defense radar system from Ukraine. The notice by the ImportGenius said that the U.S. Army Contracting Command center in Orlando has received 3D mobile air-defense radar system, called the 36D6M1-1, from Ukraine through SFTC “Progress”. The 36D6M1-1is a mobile 3D airspace surveillance radar system that was developed by the SE “Scientific and Production Complex “Iskra” and is designed to be used as a part of modern automated Air Defense systems, Anti-Aircraft Missile Complexes and to detect low flying...