Free Republic

A massive security breach at Northwest Florida State College has affected 300,000 records in the school's computer systems, including information on about 200,000 students statewide who were once eligible for Bright Futures scholarships, the school said Wednesday. The compromised information contained the names and Social Security and bank routing numbers of students, teachers, staff and retirees. Hackers also stole 200,000 records of people who may never have attended or set foot on the Niceville campus in Okaloosa County. The names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for students statewide who were Bright Futures scholarship candidates in 2005-06 and 2006-07...

At a time when legions of people are looking for work, Richard McNeight has an unusual problem. The president of Modus Operandi, a Melbourne-based software company, McNeight has eight job openings he can't fill. He has been looking for months, but hasn't found the right candidates. "I have two full-time recruiters working for me," he said. The problem is this: Programmers at Modus Operandi, which has about 60 employees, must meet two key qualifications. They must be fluent in the computer language Java and be eligible for a U.S. security clearance. The company works almost exclusively for the military and...

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience—in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under...

A multinational engineering project aims to create an intelligent robotics platform that can identify and harvest specific types of crops to help foster sustainable agriculture. The Clever Robots for Crops (CROPS) project -- a collaboration between universities from a number of countries -- is working on technology for a modular intelligent sensing and manipulation platform to harvest so-called “high value” crops, such as vegetables grown in a greenhouse, greenhouse vegetables, orchard fruits, and grapes used in making premium wines, according to the project’s Website. The design goals of the project include creating a robotic platform intelligent enough to specifically spray...

My twenty something liberal Obama voter colleague (with a stay at home wife and two young children) cited this tidbit of news which I'm thinking is as pumped up as the "jobs" numbers at the White Hut--Anybody care to debunk? Largest IT employment gains in four years reported Network World (US) The nation's employment outlook for IT professionals has suddenly surged, gaining 18,200 jobs, the largest monthly increase since 2008, according to tech employment-research firm Foote Partners.

What would you do if your entire digital life started evaporating before your eyes and there was virtually nothing you could do about it? This is the nightmare scenario that greeted US technology journalist Mat Honan, who had all of the contents of his iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air wiped, and lost control of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, all in the span of just over 15 minutes.

Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they’re just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems. Twenty years ago, researchers showed...

HELP PLEASE. My laptop computer suddenly went blue screen of death with a message that some error was detected and windows was being disabled (or shut down) to protect my computer. I rebooted, same thing. I unplugged, pulled the battery and waited, then plugged it all back in and again, same message. I tried to start in safe mode...an option came up to "repair your computer", I chose that option. It says "windows is installing files", then the "microsoft windows" with the scrolling lights, then the same blue screen message. So, I tried in safe mode again, only choosing safe...

I appreciated the comments of Leroy Stucky (Western Front, June 28) defending the biblical view of the beginning of mankind, the world and the universe, otherwise known as creationism. Creationism will always be a very difficult doctrine to accept, as long as people exclude the supernatural influence and presence of an almighty God who, in my opinion, started the whole process. I have never read an issue of The American Spectator magazine, but recently at the library I happened to pick up the May 2012 issue. The magazine, I found out, is very conservative, but not necessary Christian. However, included...

The half-a-trillion dollar company finally admits that its software isn't bulletproof.

The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected critical intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage attacks aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort. The massive piece of malware was designed to secretly map Iran’s computer networks and monitor the computers of Iranian officials, sending back a steady stream of intelligence used to enable an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials. The effort, involving the National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, has included the use of destructive software such as...

A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers. Named Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores.

Got weird phone call (Clearwater, FL number), someone (foreign accent) claiming to be working for company doing support for Microsoft. Verifying that I am running legit Win 7 and they are having problems with my computer sending messages. Asking me to run some program, seeing warning and then asking me to allow them to access my computer remotely and "fix" the problem. Red flag went up, I asked how he got my phone number, apparently from Win 7 registration, which I don't remember providing. Smells like takeover of my computer. Anyone else experienced this? New scam to take over our...

Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million $1.4 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer. Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down. The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they're...

A French physicist with the European atomic research centre near Geneva was charged with terrorism offences by a Paris judge last night after investigators said that he offered to work with the North African branch of al-Qaeda. Adlène Hicheur, 32, who is of Algerian origin, was arrested last week with his younger brother after intelligence agents intercepted his alleged internet contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The physicist, who works at the giant atomic collider at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), which straddles Swiss and French territory, told the Islamic group that he was interested in committing an...

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination...

I've had more and more difficulties with accessing webpages (serious slowdown and pages freezing up) along with rapid bumping-off of being logged in to different websites (such as IMDb, eBay, etc.), for which I should be permanently logged in (or at least in eBay's case, for 24 hours). I go through maybe 5-10 pages or less and I get inexplicably knocked off. Again, it's not localized to just a few websites, but across the board. This computer is less than 2 years old, doesn't have a lot of memory used (or junk cluttering the system). I have Kaspersky anti-virus and...

Computer problems cause tax returns to be delayedBy Curtis McCloud Updated: Feb 17, 2012 6:44 PM EST COLUMBUS, GA (WTVM) - Taxpayers who filed their income taxes early may experience a two to three week delay. Antonio Houston is one out of the hundreds of folks who say they have yet to receive their 2011 tax refund. "I've been waiting for a long time and it's just kind of crazy. I guess the IRS just messed up screwed up but I don't know what's going on," Houston said. Gloria Bowden with Global Tax Service in Columbus told News Leader 9...