Free Republic

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels? The Navy has a pair it doesn't need anymore. It has been trying to give them away since 2006, and they're headed for the scrap yard if somebody doesn't speak up soon.One is called Sea Shadow. It's big, black and looks like a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile. It was made to escape detection on the open sea. The other is known as the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76...

I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet's nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of "the world's largest e-book store." Unfortunately, despite starting the company...

Anyone have any experience with this nasty piece of spyware. I had not even heard about it, until this morning when I put it on my neighbor's computer. It would have been bad enough if I had done it to my own, it's horribe I did it to his...so...what's the best way of ridding myself of this evil interloper. And for once, I'm using that term about something other than Obama! Thanks!

<excerpt>In the middle of last week I tipped over from a state of mild fearfulness about the global economy to one of wild panic over what is to become of us. On Wednesday, I became host to all sorts of crazy worries – big, unmanageable ones as well as little, stupid ones. I worried about there being anarchy on the streets of London – while at the same time fretting over whether I should have painted the boxroom cream rather than white. This is the sort of mixed-up mental state I am familiar with from bouts of wakefulness at three...

An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning 'This site may harm your computer'. It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites - and some of its own pages - as containing malicious software or 'malware'. The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google's email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders. The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- While a number of technology giants have been making public disclosures about job cuts in recent weeks, IBM Corp. has been quietly eliminating positions in a number of divisions including its storied research unit, according to an organization seeking recognition as a union with the company. nearly 200 jobs have been cut from the research group, 1,200 from the systems technology group, over 300 from finance nearly 100 from human resources. an IBM spokesman, said the company is not commenting on the number of job cuts underway or on which business units are affected. Alliance@IBM believes...

President Barack Obama's aides, who ran the most tech-savvy US election campaign in history, were forced into a red-faced admission Monday -- the White House email system has crashed. "Our email system is not working so well," press spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters at the start of his daily briefing. "We'll endeavor to get you information from earlier in the day, hopefully in a little bit more of a timely manner, if we can get the email to work." At one stage, Obama aides were forced to turn back the clock and hand out copies of memoranda signed by the...

If you don't like going to Drudge and dealing with popups or getting tracked by third party cookies, I would suggest that you visit the following site: Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts FileThis site maintains an updated "HOSTS" file that has a pretty comprehensive list of known ad and spyware sites and will cause your browser to not go to those sites if the page you are loading wants to get a banner ad, popup ad, webbug, or third party tracking cookie. The list of blocked sites is updated about once a month. How does it work? When you...

The firmware update released by Seagate yesterday is apparently bricking 500GB hard drives. There are hundreds of people complaining in the Seagate forums that, after “successfully” updating their drives, they no longer work. If you own a Seagate drive, you might want to hold off on any firmware updates until this whole thing is ironed out. We’ll keep you posted.

Mobile broadband users in Stockholm will soon be able to surf the internet on a new high speed 4G network, following the signing of a deal between Ericsson and TeliaSonera. The order from Finnish-Swedish telecom provider TeliaSonera marks the first commercial deployment of Ericsson’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) network technology and will provide mobile internet users with data speeds up to ten times faster than those offered on current networks. "LTE brings the highest possible performance and network capacity, which is needed to meet the needs of the fast growing group of mobile broadband users around the world,” said Ericsson’s...

Current steam catapults use about 615 kg/ 1,350 pounds of steam for each aircraft launch, which is usually delivered by piping it from the nuclear reactor. Now add the required hydraulics and oils, the water required to brake the catapult, and associated pumps, motors, and control systems. The result is a large, heavy, maintenance-intensive system that operates without feedback control; and its sudden shocks affect airframe lifespans for carrier-based aircraft.

President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic. Here's the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline. Sounds good. But it won't be easy. In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation....

The Japanese electronics giant says that by 2011, 90% of all the products it makes will be able to connect online Just a few years ago most people were content watching their videos on a TV in the living room. But even though we now watch television over our computers, on high definition flatscreens or even on our iPods, we have still only seen the tip of the iceberg. That's according to Japanese electronics giant Sony, which today unveiled a pair of futuristic glasses that project 3D video onto the lens while still allowing you to see the world around...

OverviewThe first beta release of IE8, which was demonstrated at the MIX08 conference, contained many new features, including WebSlices and Activities. In the second beta release, Activities were renamed to Accelerators. Added featuresSome of the features and changes for the Beta 2 compared to Beta 1InPrivateDelete Browsing HistorySearch SuggestionsUser Preference ProtectionCaret BrowsingAccelerators (previously known as Activities)Web Slices (previously known as WebSlices)Suggested SitesTab Color GroupingAutomatic Crash RecoverySmartScreen Filter (Known as Safety Filter in Beta 1)Tab isolation (tabs spread over separate operating system processes) Removed featuresInline AutoCompleteThe option to delete files and settings stored by addons or ActiveX controls.CSS Expressions are no...

SEATTLE (AP) -- Amazon.com Inc. said Friday that the 2008 holiday season was the online retailer's "best ever," with more than 6.3 million items ordered and 5.6 million units shipped during its peak day on Dec. 15. Amazon's upbeat take on the holiday season bucked the drumbeat of generally dismal news from retailers. Holiday sales typically account for 30 percent to 50 percent of a retailer's annual total, but rising unemployment, home foreclosures, the stock market decline and other economic worries led many shoppers to slash their shopping budgets this year.

China makes first 2,210-kw coal mining machine www.chinaview.cn 2008-12-14 00:06:27 Print The first China-made 2,210 kilowatt coal mining machine passed check and appraisal on Saturday in the northwestern Shaanxi Province, reducing the reliance on exports. (Xinhua Photo) Photo Gallery>>> XI'AN, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- The first China-made 2,210 kilowatt coal mining machine passed check and appraisal on Saturday in the northwestern Shaanxi Province, reducing the reliance on exports. Trial operation showed the remote control machine, produced by Xi'an Coal Mining Machine Co. Ltd, can mine eight million tons of coal annually, according to the Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Department....

December 12, 2008, 0:30 p.m. Game ChangerTotally video. By Robert VerBruggen Video games are undeniably popular: Over Thanksgiving week alone, Nintendo sold more than 800,000 Wii consoles. This trend could have serious ramifications for society; experts have speculated about consequences ranging from an uptick in childhood obesity to better-developed visuospatial skills. But video games’ effects on our way of life could exceed even these expectations. In Changing the Game, David Edery and Ethan Mollick focus on the world of business, explaining how companies are increasingly turning to games to solve various problems. The book both advises companies on how...

ARLINGTON, Va. - Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when a MyFoxDC investigative reporter bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last. It recites what the August 10, 2007 and July 16, 2008 orders said, but it also resolves the recent dispute over SCO's desire to voluntarily waive some claims and then bring them back to the table after an appeal, should it prove successful. Here's SCO's motion to voluntarily dismiss, and Novell's response, so you can verify that this judgment indeed represents another loss for SCO. You'll see that it was Novell that suggested the wording regarding SCO's voluntarily dismissed claims that we see in the judgment, that they be dismissed...

A British couple have divorced after the husband was caught having a "virtual affair" with a female character in an online role-playing game. David Pollard and Amy Taylor met in an online chat room in 2003 and married after discovering a shared love of the Internet game "Second Life." In the game, players create characters known as avatars, which then interact with others in a virtual world. To his wife's horror, Pollard's interaction included virtual infidelity with a female character playing the role of a prostitute.

SAN FRANCISCO: Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world's largest networks, according to a new report on online security. [ ... ] The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be...

A federal grand jury has indicted a former Intel employee whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has accused of stealing trade secrets from the company. Biswamohan Pani, 33, allegedly was found with more than 100 pages of Intel documents, with 13 "top secret" file also discovered inside his residence. Intel put more than $1 billion of research and development money into the documents Pani stole, which includes future CPU designs. "The indictment was not a surprise," said Bradford Bailey, Pani's attorney. "We knew it was coming. We will enter a plea of not guilty when an arraignment date is...

"Federal agents seeking to generate MD5 hashes from files on a suspect’s hard drive must now obtain a warrant before doing so, says a Pennsylvania U.S. District Court, as such an act constitutes a government search protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case in question, United States v.Robert Crist, involves accusations of child pornography"

Finally the iPhone unleashed! Break away from the stranglehold Jobs & Co. have on you and your iPhone. Download and install the software you've really been wanting to use. Never again suffer from "windows" envy or be ridiculed for having a small software repository. Upgrade NOW to the NEW, Dual Boot Windows iPhone Mobile...Coming in Jan. 09.

The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill. As a result, some constituents may get a 'try back at a later time' response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote. “We were trying to figure out a way that the House.gov website wouldn’t completely crash,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the Chief Administrative Office (CAO), which oversees the upkeep of the House website...

Things are a-brewin’ in Sweden. Sweden is not just home of the infamous bikini team, it is also the home of Outpost 24, an equally sexy software-as-a-service network scanning service, and the employer of my friend Robert E. Lee and his colleague Jack C. Louis. These guys are the inventors of UnicornScan, a user-land TCP stack turned into a port scanner. Never heard of it? Use Nmap exclusively? Well if you run Linux, I suggest checking it out, especially if missed ports in your portscan is inexcusable. But I digress. Robert and Jack are smart dudes. I've known them for...

BLINK and you would have missed it. The expression of disgust on former US president Bill Clinton's face during his speech to the Democratic National Convention as he says "Obama" lasts for just a fraction of a second. But to Paul Ekman it was glaringly obvious. "Given that he probably feels jilted that his wife Hillary didn't get the nomination, I would have to say that the entire speech was actually given very gracefully," says Ekman, who has studied people's facial expressions and how they relate to what they are thinking for over 40 years. It seems that Clinton's micro-expression...

WESTFORD -- Gary Levaseur looks cool driving his electric blue snowmobile down the street in the summer. Well, it's not really a snowmobile anymore. The drywaller has built a prototype and patented his invention that converts snowmobiles to three-wheeled motortrikes. The conversion can be done in just two hours, meaning the sleds that usually gather dust for eight or nine months a year can be used year-round. His converted Arctic Cat is a slick-looking machine that can go up to 75 mph and get and estimated 30-plus mpg, Levaseur said. "It turns a lot of heads," he said. "I like...

Mainly to help FReerepublic folders, but anyone can take advantage of this deal. Item number 7387-A11 (Refurbished) Lenovo 3000 J115 - Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 2 GHz - RAM 1 GB - HD 250 GB - DVD±RW (+R DL) - Memory card reader - LAN- Fast Gig - Modem - Vista Home Premium. 1 year manuf. warr. incl. Subtotal: 210.00 Sales Tax: 0.00 Shipping: 30.32 Order Total: 240.32 Actually they are $230.00, but if you call the guy below, and ask him for a "folding@home" discount, he'll give you an additional $20.00 off. Tech For Less Cory -719-886-8000 ext....

The sound on my computer is not working properly. When I play mp3, mov, wav, wmv, wma, rm, and avi files, there is a beeping/crackling noise. Most of the time the jibberish noise is complete. Sometimes, a bit of the intended audio can be heard through the beeping/crackling. The only audio that plays well is from YouTube videos and .flv files. I have a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy sound card. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers for the sound card with no success. I have removed the sound card and reseated it with no success. My speakers are 6.1 Cambridge...

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP. That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after...

Last week we discovered that some Fedora servers were illegally accessed. The intrusion into the servers was quickly discovered, and the servers were taken offline. Security specialists and administrators have been working since then to analyze the intrusion and the extent of the compromise as well as reinstall Fedora systems. We are using the requisite outages as an opportunity to do other upgrades for the sake of functionality as well as security. Work is ongoing, so please be patient. Anyone with pertinent information relating to this event is asked to contact fedora-legal redhat com One of the compromised Fedora servers...

I have been hijacked by an adserver/virus. I am running AdAware, but does not fix problem. I consider myself tech-savvy, but this is ridiculous. Problem started this morninng, and occurs on FR, and any other website I visit. Any suggestions, or ideas? Thanks.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has confirmed that the iPhone 3G has a kill switch that can remotely remove software from the devices. {snip} But the real controversy started when Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the books iPhone Open Application Development and iPhone Forensics Manual, discovered a URL buried in Apple's firmware. That URL links to a file dubbed "unauthorizedApps" where malicious or simply bad apps might go once they disappear from the App Store. According to Zdziarski, I Am Rich isn't the only app to disappear. BoxOffice (renamed to Now Playing) and NullRiver's NetShare were also removed. But removing the applications...

Marisel Garcia is one of eight or nine women in the Gainesville, Florida who is a victim of a Webcam Spy Hacker voyeurism scandal, orchestrated by Craig Feigin. Craig Feigin, a computer programmer, worked on Marisel Garcia's computer to fix her laptop. When she got her machine back from Feigin, it had a slew of other problems so she brought it to another area repair man. One of the new problems was that the computer's built-in camera light came on every time she was near the machine. When Marisel Garcia got her computer back, she learned that Craig Feigin had...

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found. The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators. Several security experts say that although attacks against network administrators are not new, the systematic use of administrative software to spread malicious software...

George Ledin teaches students how to write viruses, and it makes computer-security software firms sick.In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers—they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus...

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology. Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64, ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process. According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of...

What do you think of this router, printer server, and firewall? I need a wireless router for a laptop with DSL service, 2 old printers, and a portable printer (USB)? Frequently Asked QuestionsZoneAlarm Secure Wireless Router Z100G Discussion ForumZoneAlarm Secure Wireless Router Z110G - Is It Worth The Price? (post March 19, 2007) Other thoughts are a Belkin F5D8230-4 and a Belkin F5D7230-3.

Serial rabbit killer uses Google maps to find victims German police are concerned that the person killing rabbits may go on to kill human beings Roger Boyes in Berlin The roll call of victims is growing longer by the day. They have names like Rocco, Fussel, Marianne and Fluffy — and a five-man police unit has a file on each and every one. The so-called “bunny murders” — 40 domestic rabbits killed at night in their hutches, heads and sometimes paws sliced off, their bodies drained of blood — is stunning communities across western Germany. “Nobody knows where the killer...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - One in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal emails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey. U.S. information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 percent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role. "All you need is access to the right passwords or privileged accounts and you're privy to everything that's going on within your company," Mark Fullbrook, Cyber-Ark's UK director, said in a statement released along with the survey...

Jim Louderback, CEO of internet TV network Revision3, is considering legal action against anti-piracy firm MediaDefender after an internal investigation revealed it to be the source of a Memorial Day weekend Denial of Service attack against Revision3’s computer network.

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts. One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the...

YouTube law fight 'threatens net' YouTube is owned by search giant Google A one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube threatens internet freedom, according to its owner Google. Google's claim follows Viacom's move to sue the video sharing service for its inability to keep copyrighted material off its site. Viacom says it has identified 150,000 unauthorised clips on YouTube. In court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web. The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital...

MediaDefender attacks and cripples Revision3 for locking out its spy-bots Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 29, 2008 10:14 AM | permalink MediaDefender, the thugs paid by the entertainment industry to spy on file-sharers and attempt to cripple file-sharing networks, attacked a legitimate Internet TV company called Revision3 over the weekend, launch as massive denial-of-service attack in retaliation for having their spy-bots locked out of R3's BitTorrent trackers: Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. ItÂ’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how...

    To be exceptionally honest with you, Ultrasonic Batgoggles don't exactly need any pimping from us. What you see above is a homegrown device that enables humans to discover how bats must feel when using echolocation in order to judge how far away certain objects are. The main components are an Arduino microcontroller clone, Devantech ultrasonic sensor and a set of welding goggles -- oh, and a sick poker face to really round things out. Check out the links below to get a gist of the background as well as a step-by-step guide to concocting your own. EXCERPTED....

Indispensable in hot kitchens: the nanotube Oxford chemists have found a way of using carbon nanotubes to judge the heat of chilli sauces. The technology might soon be available commercially as a cheap, disposable sensor for use in the food industry. Professor Richard Compton and his team at Oxford University have developed a sensitive technique to measure the levels of capsaicinoids, the substances that make chillies hot, in samples of chilli sauce. They report their findings in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal The Analyst. The current industry procedure is to use a panel of taste-testers, and is highly...

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years. Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system....

Four or five years ago, ZigBee had a burst of publicity. Why has it gone quiet since then? ZigBee promised to integrate wireless sensors - light switches, burglar alarms and just about everything else - into mesh networks, using economical low-power, low-speed connections. Using links defined by IEEE 802.15.4, it promised networked devices with a battery life of five or ten years, that could be installed and left to run. But what's happened? We've yet to see any ZigBee installations, and we keep hearing of competitors, including proprietary technology like Z-Wave's Zensys, new systems that use IP over 802.15.4, and...

A BusinessWeek probe of rising attacks on America's most sensitive computer networks uncovers startling security gaps The e-mail message addressed to a Booz Allen Hamilton executive was mundane—a shopping list sent over by the Pentagon of weaponry India wanted to buy. But the missive turned out to be a brilliant fake. Lurking beneath the description of aircraft, engines, and radar equipment was an insidious piece of computer code known as "Poison Ivy" designed to suck sensitive data out of the $4 billion consulting firm's computer network. The Pentagon hadn't sent the e-mail at all. Its origin is unknown, but the...