Free Republic

An apparent rip-off of Donald Trump’s social media network Truth Social has racked up downloads in the six figures on Google’s Play Store, causing confusion by MAGA types who failed to realize the distinction. Insider first reported that the app, which is titled “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump” on the Play Store, has crossed 100,000 downloads as of Tuesday. While the app itself was launched in August 2021, well before news broke that Trump was pursuing the “Truth” branding for his social network, most of the downloads appear to have been in the last few weeks. Trump Media &...

Research published earlier this week shows that a nasty Android banking malware has evolved, bringing with it a number of alarming new features—including the ability to factory reset your device after stealing your money. The malware in question is called BRATA, short for “Brazilian Remote Access Tool Android.” As you might expect from its name, it originally popped up in Brazil several years ago but has since spread to many other parts of the globe. Researchers with security firm Cleafy wrote this week that the newest version of the malware, first spotted in December, has a number of additional features...

From social media platforms to email providers, tons of places on the web want to scoop up your private data. Don’t forget about online stores and personal services, either. Your details are major commodities to most businesses on the web - and most have little regard for your privacy. Advertisers and marketers don't know who you are. But your behavior is tracked and assigned a unique identifier, called a Mobile Advertising ID (MAID). This tiny snippet of information contains where you live, what you shop for or what you recently searched online. Until recently, there had been very little that...

Received a mandatory update (34) alert on my Samsung Galaxy S10e. You can delay the install, but not avoid it. Now all internet access starts from a Google Chrome page. While you can uninstall Google Chrome, you also lose access to Google maps. And those duckduckgo searches you thought were private....uh, no, they are sitting there listed as "recent searches".

Steve Bannon talks about artificial intelligence, the singularity, and life-extension technology with Luke Rudkowski and Tim Pool on TimcastIRL.

If you have a smartphone, you probably use its front-facing camera for selfies and the occasional video call. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, you’ll shoot the next viral TikTok masterpiece. You might use your next smartphone’s front camera for the same things, but there’s a chance that camera won’t completely turn off once you’re done with it. This week, chipmaker Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon processor, which will power many of the high-end Android smartphones you’ll see in stores in 2022, including models from Motorola, Sony, OnePlus. And a new feature built into that chip could allow smartphone makers to keep...

Georgia Tech Researchers have now shown that one of the very measures meant to keep data secure on a low-end phone can enable attackers to steal it. Their paper, presented on September 10 at the 6th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, demonstrates successful attacks on two different types of low-end Android phones, a ZTE Zfive and an Alcatel Ideal. In accordance with standard practice, the researchers reported their findings to software developers before releasing their results so that the problem could be fixed. The attack relies on placing a radio sensor within a few centimeters of a device,...

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Lithuanian cybersecurity experts are urging the country’s government agencies to abandon the use of Chinese-made smartphones after an investigation identified security vulnerabilities and censorship concerns with certain devices. Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center said it found four major cybersecurity risks for devices made by Huawei and Xiaomi, including two relating to pre-installed apps and one involving personal data leakage, and warned against using these two brands. There’s also the risk of possible restrictions on freedom of expression with Xiaomi phones, which contain a content-filtering feature for 449 keywords or groups of keywords in Chinese characters. The...

This should be very concerning for tech companies that operate in the Chinese market. 'It is not clear how much pressure was put on SoftBank to form the merger, but this looks like one of the most blatant examples of IP theft that we've seen. The Chinese arm of a company has gone rogue and refused to obey the ruling of its own board. The head of that company is essentially treating it as a personal fiefdom, and Chinese authorities do not appear to have taken meaningful action to reign in Mr. Wu.'

The de-googled Android fork /e/OS is a passionate step towards removing Google from your daily driver (i.e. your smartphone).

EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump senior adviser Jason Miller is launching a new social media platform on July 4 to declare "independence" from Big Tech, billing it as a "cancel-free zone" focused on free speech, with "superior technology" that he says will "be the envy" of Silicon Valley. The platform is called "GETTR," which Miller, the CEO of the company, told Fox News evolved from the idea of "getting together." GETTR is officially launching on Sunday, July 4 at 10:00 a.m. ET, but the platform is already in the App Stores.

Massachusetts state officials recently announced the launch of the “voluntary” MassNotify app, which monitors the spread of COVID-19 in the state. The only problem is the app appears to be installing itself on residents’ and their kids’ smartphones, unbeknownst to users, and without their consent. The news creates a disturbing new dimension to privacy laws and even private property concerns as hundreds of users have reported their Android phones have had the app surreptitiously installed, without their prior knowledge. “Thank you MA/Google for silently installing #MassNotify on my phone without consent. But I have a request: Can you also silently...

Last September, when Arm trotted out the Neoverse V1 design and made it available, the N2 design was not yet available. But as of this announcement, today, it is. Both the Ampere Computing Altra and the Amazon Web Services Graviton2 processors, which are the two production-grade Arm server chips in the market today, are based on N1 cores and platform designs, with various customizations...With the V1 platform, Arm is designing cores and the uncore regions of a hypothetical processor using either 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer processes, presumably either at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp or Samsung Electronics, which have fabs...

The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

If you're experiencing a bunch of apps suddenly crashing on your recent Samsung phone, you're not alone. This afternoon US time, reports from dozens, then hundreds of users on the Samsung subreddit started coming in, complaining of apps crashing on their phones, constantly and seemingly at random. It's causing some major headaches.

Google appeared to remove nearly 100,000 negative reviews for the Robinhood app after outraged investors bombarded the stock-trading startup with complaints. Amateur traders urged each other online to leave negative reviews for the app in the Google Play Store after Robinhood froze trading on shares of GameStop and other stocks whose prices have exploded this week. The campaign appeared to work — Robinhood’s Android app had a one-star rating based on nearly 275,000 reviews on Thursday, according to a screenshot captured by 9to5Google. But that number had fallen to just over 176,000 by midday Friday as Google apparently purged the...

Google controls what the vast majority of the world finds on the internet. Being put at the top of the Google results for search is not only immensely lucrative, it is also almost mind-bogglingly powerful in global affairs. Since 2016, according to multiple reports, Google’s algorithm has been increasingly manipulated to bury and elevate specific information, especially politically charged information. This appears to have strong effects on what people believe and therefore how they vote and respond to polls that inform what politicians do with their power. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation concluded, “The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm...

Booting up your new phone and going through everything in there is always a special experience, but this ritual is often soured by the presence of bloatware and unnecessary third-party apps.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that additional steps must be taken to deal with the national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain declared in Executive Order 13873 of May 15, 2019 (Securing the Information and Communications...

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:Pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, I hereby report that I have issued an Executive Order declaring additional steps to be taken concerning the national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain declared in Executive Order 13873 of May 15, 2019 (Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain) to deal with the threat posed by applications and other software...