Free Republic

ully self-driving vehicles that can go where they please and operate anywhere regulators allow them to do so are a tricky thing to think about, for three reasons. First of all, the technology isn’t here yet. It’s hard to believe in it until it exists, and it’s hard to know how long until it is truly available. Secondly, as a person who drives a Tesla Model 3 with the Full Self-Driving package, I see a handful of edge cases just in my measly amount of driving that seem tricky and hard to resolve. Sometimes the problem is confusing lines at...

The “Clinton Body Count” is an urban legend where people claim that the Clintons have their enemies or associates who “know too much” murdered, but they make it look like a suicide. The term comes from a rather long list of friends, enemies, and associates of the Clintons who have been found dead from “apparent suicide.” If you go on Twitter the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount is very active and filled with all sorts of juicy tidbits and theories. While the #ClintonBodyCount is mostly a funny joke, like with all “jokes” there’s truth in it…why do so many of Clintons “associates” die?...

Lots of incriminating stuff. Here's a good tweet explaining what's in there: https://twitter.com/AnonymousAda/status/1252708336514076672

The app used to report early results in Iowa's Democratic Presidential primary caucus was rudimentary in many ways, according to analyses by multiple Android app development experts and cybersecurity professionals who decompiled and studied the app after it was obtained by Motherboard. The app, called IowaReporterApp and developed by a company called Shadow Inc., malfunctioned during the caucus, causing mass chaos and delaying the public reporting of results until Tuesday evening. The app was designed to rapidly report early results, not tabulate final vote counts. That means its failure will not result in the election result being altered. But, until...

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said. A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center. The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi...

Programmers have pride with good reason. No one else has the power to reach into a database and change reality. The more the world relies on computers to define how the world works, the more powerful programmers become.Alas, pride goeth before the fall. The power we share is very real, but it’s far from absolute and it’s often hollow. In fact, it may always be hollow because there is no perfect piece of code. Sometimes we cross our fingers and set limits because computers make mistakes. Computers too can be fallible, which we all know from too much firsthand experience....

Justice Department documents released on Friday confirm that the DOJ attorney known as Robert Mueller’s “pit bull” arranged a meeting with journalists in April 2017 to discuss an investigation into Paul Manafort.The documents show that Andrew Weissmann arranged a meeting with DOJ and FBI officials and four Associated Press reporters on April 11, 2017, just over a month before Mueller was appointed special counsel.Manafort’s lawyers obtained the documents on June 29 and revealed them in a briefing filed in federal court in Virginia. The attorneys are pushing for a hearing into what they say are possible leaks of secret grand...

A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the Voynich manuscript. Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for over a century, it took Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document. In his peer-reviewed paper, The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained, published in the journal Romance Studies, Cheshire describes how he successfully deciphered the manuscript's...

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued to defend herself against claims promoted by Donald Trump, Jr. and others that she changes her accent to pander to minority audiences. In a string of Saturday evening tweets, the first-term Democrat wrote that her habit of "code-switching" was informed by years of navigating professional and social environments as a woman of color. "Next time you‘re told straight hair is 'unprofessional' and that speaking like your parents do is 'uneducated,' then you can complain about code-switching," she wrote, referring to the practice of changing speech patterns based on environment. "Code-switching is a tool communities...

UPDATE: FEBRUARY 5, 2019After Threat of Prosecution, Free Speech Advocates Seek Restraining Order Against New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal in Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit TRENTON, N.J. (February 5, 2019) — Today, attorneys for six advocacy organizations and one individual, Firearms Policy Coalition founder Brandon Combs, filed a new lawsuit and a motion seeking a restraining order and preliminary injunction against New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. The case was filed just days after Grewal’s Office of the Attorney General sent a threat of prosecution to Cloudflare, a major Internet services company headquartered in San Francisco, about www.CodeIsFreeSpeech.com. A copy of...

A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter. The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time. The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing. A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News...

Newly revealed e-mails show that former Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) deputy director Andrew McCabe was keenly aware of CNN’s internal understanding of a secret briefing about the infamous Steele dossier, days before CNN published any stories on the matter. The e-mails, which were obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), also reveal that top officials used coded language to refer to the salacious and unverified allegations made by Steele. Former FBI director James Comey briefed then-President-Elect Donald Trump on January 6, 2017, on at least one unproven allegation contained in Steele’s dossier, which was jointly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign...

5-12-5-5-12 4-1-21-1 What does this mean?

A mysterious social media user claims to be behind the bombings that have terrorized Texas in recent weeks, vowing that he won't stop until he becomes "as prolific as the Zodiac Killer."

It literally translates to "Danger SOS it is dire for you to evacuate be cautious they are not human SOS danger SOS" and then gives coordinates... i am throwing my phone away

A 500-year-old secret code used in letters between one of Spain's most famous monarchs and a military commander has been cracked. Ferdinand of Aragon's letters have tantalised historians for centuries. Constructed using more than 200 special characters, they were deciphered by the country's intelligence agency. He was behind the final recapture - Reconquista - of Spain from the Moors in 1492 and Columbus's journeys to the Americas. The letters between Ferdinand and Gonzalo de Córdoba include instructions on strategy during military campaigns in Italy in the early 16th Century. They were written using secret code in case they fell into...

WikiLeaks has published hundreds more files today which it claims show the CIA went to great lengths to disguise its own hacking attacks and point the finger at Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. The 676 files released today are part of WikiLeaks' Vault 7 tranche of files and they claim to give an insight into the CIA's Marble software, which can forensically disguise viruses, trojans and hacking attacks. WikiLeaks says the source code suggests Marble has test examples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi (the Iranian language). It says: 'This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for...

The British spy whose body was found padlocked inside a bag in his flat had illegally hacked into secret data on former U.S. president Bill Clinton, it has been revealed. Gareth Williams, 31, was discovered in a holdall in the bath at his London home five years ago this month, but the mystery surrounding his death has never been solved. Today, it has been revealed the spy had dug out a guest list for an event Clinton was due to attend as a favour for a friend. The hack breached Mr Williams' security clearance and this sparked anger among MI6...

MI6 spy Gareth Williams hacked into restricted information about former US President Bill Clinton, it has been claimed. The 31-year-old codebreaker was discovered inside a padlocked bag in a bathtub at his London home in 2010, sparking a real-life mystery worthy of any 007 thriller.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a trove of Civil War era telegrams — many of them to and from Abraham Lincoln — that have never been decoded. The telegrams are owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. They have started a project, "Decoding the Civil War," to transcribe and decipher their collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Lincoln, his Cabinet and Union Army officers. About a third of the telegrams were written in code. The library is crowdsourcing the project through the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research, Zooniverse. They...