Free Republic

Last Summer, Microsoft Corporation quietly introduced a powerful tool for getting past security on laptops and PCs running the Windows operations system (which about 90 percent do). The device is a USB thumb drive called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor). When you capture an enemy computer, you plug in COFEE and then use over a hundred software to quickly get whatever information is on the machine. COFEE can quickly reveal passwords, decrypt files, reveal recent Internet activity and much more. A lot of this can be done without COFEE, but with the Microsoft device, intelligence collection is a lot...

The growing use of encryption software -- like Microsoft's own BitLocker -- by cyber criminals has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software, executives at the company said...Microsoft first released the toolset, called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)...Microsoft gives the software to agents for free.

In 1683, over 138,000 Muslim Ottoman Turks surrounded Vienna, Austria. For two months they starved the 11,000 Hapsburg-Austrian defenders. Sultan Mehmed IV sent a message to the Austrian King, Leopold I: "Await us in your residence...so we can decapitate you." Secretly, the Polish King, Jan Sobieski, gathered 80,000 Polish, Austrian and German troops and on SEPTEMBER 11, 1683, led a surprise attack causing the Turks to flee in confusion. Upon entering the abandonded Turkish tents, there were found bags of beans - coffee beans - revealing how the Turks could fight day and night. Shortly after was opened the first...

Ruth Ann Smith, punched in the face hours before her death in July, actually died of caffeine poisoning, according to the state Office of the Medical Investigator. Death by caffeine poisoning is extremely rare; only two caffeine "exposures" resulted in death in the United States in 2003, according to American Association of Poison Control Centers statistics. Smith's death is considered a homicide because the doctor who examined her "said that the injury (from being struck) contributed to the death," said OMI spokesman Tim Stepetic. OMI provided the cause of death report Monday. Stepetic said that Smith's death certificate indicates she...