Free Republic

Fudan University in Shanghai is to study China's historical figures such as Confucius and the early emperors through modern DNA technology, Beijing Times reports. The studies follow the latest findings published on Monday on Cao Cao, a warlord who lived nearly 2,000 years ago in final years of the Eastern Han Dynasty. It debunked rumors that Cao's father Cao Song was fostered by comparing the DNA of Cao's living descendents and that found in the teeth of Cao's grandfather. Han Sheng from Fudan University, who led the Cao Cao research, says it is a breakthrough in the fields of both...

Edward Snowden's stolen secrets and the dismal failure of the rollout of Obamacare is giving electronic technology a bad name. But blaming high-tech tools is more like blaming the messenger. We have to work harder to master the secrets of the Internet, but the human element remains our biggest weakness. It's hardly news that the screening process for giving Snowden access to sensitive data was deeply flawed. So, too, were the instructions to the National Security Agency that enabled the abuse of the rest of us. For whatever good intentions the NSA might have had, the snoops cost America the...

Dish Network said on Wednesday it will close all 300 or so retail locations of the Blockbuster video rental chain by January, closing a chapter on a brand that failed to compete in the digital world. Dish plans to lay off as many as 2,800 employees. Dish, the second-largest U.S. satellite TV company, bought the failed Blockbuster LLC video rental chain in a bankruptcy auction in 2011 for $320 million, a dramatic fall for a brand that at its peak in 2002 had a market value of $5 billion.

Weighing only 0.56 ounces (16 grams), the Black Hornet looks like a tiny toy helicopter. But it's really a nano-size piece of military hardware unlike anything on the battlefield today... The Black Hornet nano drone, which can be carried in a soldier's pocket, has an onboard camera that gives troops video and still images of hard-to-access places.

Excerpt: Yes, you can get a ticket for driving while wearing the new eyewear-like Google Glass wearable computer, which is now being tested nationwide for possible entry into the consumer market. Cecilia Abadie, 44, who lives in Temecula and works at a golf store in San Diego, got just such a ticket Tuesday night after being stopped for speeding by a California Highway Patrol officer. Quickly, Abadie posted a note on the Internet: "A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving! ... Is Google Glass illegal while driving or is this cop...

We no longer have to play at goblins and ghosts on Halloween. We've got real snoops and authentic spooks, and they're plenty scary, reading our mail and tracing us through social media. Safety and security are the crucial domestic interests in the high-tech world where we all live. We feel helpless in trying to keep control over our most minute musings; we're sure that Big Brother is watching us, and not necessarily to watch over us. It's the season when doubts and fears, some real and some not, assail. We're frustrated with the breakout of Obamacare, which betrayed its...

In today's knowledge economy, high-tech firms and high-paying, high-tech jobs are key factors in economic growth and prosperity. Some economists have estimated that every high-tech job creates an additional five or so spinoff jobs, a significant ripple effect through the economy.A new analysis by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute identifies 25 leading locations for high-tech information jobs. While much research on high-tech meccas looks at the metro level, Mandel's study identifies the concentration of high-tech jobs by county, which offers a closer look at clustering and agglomeration.The map below, by the Martin Prosperity Institute's Zara Matheson, shows the 25...

Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard bureaucratic operating procedure. Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending....

Don't take it from conservatives. The co-founder of a "very, very major social-media site" has said the criticism of the Obamacare website is fair because the "technology sucks." So reported Willie Geist on today's Morning Joe, telling panelists that the person he interviewed was co-founder of a site so major that they would all know it and might have it open on their computers as he spoke. View the video here.

What is the appeal of auto-autos? Is it just the latest techno-gadget, like the iPhone? Hardly. Auto-autos offer a huge array of benefits. Start with a quantum-leap increase in consumer satisfaction. People spend an enormous amount of time and energy driving. I, for one, am weary after my hour-long commute to work. If I could relax with my coffee and read my newspaper, I would be much happier and more rested at work. Second, there would be an explosive growth of productivity. We already see that cell phones have allowed people to conduct business in the car to a limited...

The Metropolitan Police have foiled an extraordinary plot to steal millions of pounds from a London branch of Santander Bank using a remote control device planted on one of its computers by a bogus maintenance man. On Thursday evening, the Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) arrested 12 men between the ages of 23 and 50 years old accused of being involved in the alleged attempted heist at addresses in London, a statement said. A bank source confirmed to press that a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) was fitted by someone posing as a maintenance worker, something that would have allowed the...

Two technology stories have filled the airwaves in recent days: the impending Twitter IPO, which is predicted to raise more than $1 billion; and the Obamacare online roll-out, which has crashed in a welter of locked-out applicants and frozen exchanges. The connections between the two events are deeper than you might think – and they represent the latest milestones along the diverging responses by industry and government to the birth of the technology revolution more than a century ago.

The words of Pope Francis and Archbishop Charles Chaput should give us pause this weekend and make us think about the growing trend in our society to devalue human beings and treat them like playthings. We must not only think about the innocent souls we are discarding like trash, but about our own as well. Much has been written about Pope Francis' interviews and insights in last few days. Some of the rhetoric has been respectful, while some not at all. But much of what I have read is insightful. For example, the following excerpt from an editorial by Archbishop...

Welcome to ObamaWreck! Americans nationwide spent Tuesday struggling with the much-hyped "Affordable Care Act" health insurance exchanges. Server meltdowns, error messages and security glitches plagued the federal and state government websites as open enrollment began. But when taxpayers discover exactly who will be navigating them through the bureaucratic maze, they may be glad they didn't get through. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius controls a $54 million slush fund to hire thousands of "navigators," "in-person assisters" and counselors, who are now propagandizing and recruiting Obamacare recipients into the government-run exchanges. As I warned in May, the Nanny State...

LONDON -- A chemical mist which turns perpetrators florescent green is being used to target thieves in Britain. Officers have started fitting SmartWater technology to security systems in cars and houses in the U.K.'s capital. When someone tries to break in, they are sprayed with the odorless substance which is only visible under ultraviolet light and cannot be washed off. Crooks have no idea they have been tagged -- until it is too late. The dramatic effect can be seen in these photos of Yafet Askale, a 28-year-old who stole a laptop from a "trap car" in the Brent area...

At first blush, the Massachusetts “tech tax” appears similar to tax regimes in other states. However, the Massachusetts tax on computer software services has a unique set of implications—and would likely have an unprecedented impact on the state’s tech economy. The software services tax or “tech tax” passed in July would tax all computer software services, including cloud computing and data storage operations. The legislature intended for the tax to raise $160 million for transportation improvements, but many believe the wide range of services eligible for taxation coupled with the law’s ambiguous language would yield upwards of $500 million. Massachusetts...

It's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices. The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the...

If the notion of an anonymous identifier strikes you as a contradiction in terms, you aren't alone."It's a persistent identifier, a super cookie," says Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Google will gain more information about users wherever they are, across platforms and with one number. This will be the new way they identify you 24/7."

Invent something and the first thing that goes through some people's minds -- especially politicians' minds -- is what might go wrong. 3D printers now allow you to mold objects right in your living room, using patterns you find online. It's a revolutionary invention that will save time, reduce shipping costs and be kind to the earth. But what critics see is: guns! People will print guns at home! Well, sure. On TV, Rachel Maddow sneered about "a well-armed anarchist utopia, where everybody fends for themselves with stupid-looking plastic guns. ... It's a political effort to try to do away...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will test its crowd-scanning facial recognition system, known as the Biometric Optical Surveillance System, or BOSS, at a junior hockey game this weekend, according to the Russian news agency RT. With assistance from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, DHS will test its system at a Western Hockey League game in Washington state. The test will determine whether the system can distinguish the faces of 20 volunteers out of a crowd of nearly 6,000 hockey fans, to evaluate how successfully BOSS can locate a person of interest.