Free Republic

SNIPPET: "Agents copied the contents of two computers and a thumb drive apparently used by Hosam "Sam" Smadi..." SNIPPET: "The hardware apparently belonged to Smadi's friends..." SNIPPET: "Attempts to reach the friends, who have been identified in court documents, were unsuccessful."

Missy found the warmest place to sleep, it's cold down here! I may even have to start wearing socks!

January 3, 2010 CYBERSECURITY Wanted: ‘Cyber Ninjas’ By CHRISTOPHER DREW FOR a regional competition last spring, eight students from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, spent six months of Saturdays practicing how to defend a typical business computer network from attacks. Then, over two grueling days, they outscored teams from five other schools at blocking worms and other efforts to disrupt their e-mail and Internet systems. For the six seniors in the group, all in computer information systems, the victory was even sweeter. Boeing, the giant aerospace and military company, offered them jobs. Boeing’s decision to snap up all the graduates...

I want to "wipe the slate clean" on my Dell laptop, and reinstall Windows XP. I boot from the operating system CD, and get to a menu that shows existing partitions. FAT is about 10 Gb and NTFS-OS has about 230 GB. The system asks me where I want to put the new XP. I tried the FAT partition but it's too small. I selected NTFS but the system said it is a potential problem to have two operating systems on the same partition. I have backed up what I need, and am OK with wiping the disk clean. In...

Evil has certainly been unleashed. It's a damn firestorm. It sitnks from the top down ......... the free world has been taken siege. And that muhammadan in the White House denands we respect this evil. Molotov Cocktail Found In Downtown Parking Garage CBS3 News hat tip MikeThe discovery was made at about 2:00 p.m. Wednesday inside a parking garagelocated at Callowhill and N. 16th Streets.Philadelphia Police are investigating the discovery of a Molotov cocktail along with anti-Israeli books inside a Center City parking garage. The discovery was made at about 2:00 p.m. Wednesday inside a garage located at Callowhill and...

In many worst case scenarios, a hard drive wipe is the final solution to ridding a system of an infection. But the absolute worst case scenario is if a virus attacks the BIOS, making detection and cleaning an incredible challenge. Viruses that target the BIOS arenÂ’t new, but often they are specific to a type of hardware. Researchers have now demonstrated a new type of attack that could install a rootkit on the BIOS of common systems, making it very lethal and effective. Anibal L. Sacco and Alfredo A. Ortego of Core Security Technologies released a presentation detailing the exploit...

Note: The following text is a quote: Alleged International Hacker Indicted for Massive Attack on U.S. Retail and Banking Networks Data Related to More Than 130 Million Credit and Debit Cards Allegedly Stolen WASHINGTON – Albert Gonzales, 28, of Miami, Fla., was indicted today for conspiring to hack into computer networks supporting major American retail and financial organizations, and stealing data relating to more than 130 million credit and debit cards, announced Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Ralph J. Marra Jr. and U.S. Secret Service Assistant...

I am getting a neighbor / friend's computer running. It's a Dell (4100 I believe) running XP home. According to her, she has never been on the internet or e-mail. I can verify the latter because I set up her Outlook Express. (I know someone was using it, because of the shortcuts on the desktop.) Nevertheless, she had the computer hooked to the internet, but powered off. I removed McAfee and am installing Charter's Security Suite. Began a scan last evening and it's finding a ton of virii. My question is, can a computer be infected w/o active participation of...

Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering. Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling. The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness. However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that...

Home PC, Vista, Windows, Comodo, Malwarebytes. Everything seems clean and fast. Problem: Example: Homepage opens, go to Fox, go to Drudge, go to Free Republic, etc. Here's the problem, and because it's more and more frequent, and yet random, I can't figure it out. If I'm at one of those sites and try to go to an external site, retrace my steps, or even open a post, it won't open and begins to "time out" forever. I had the same problem with AVG before switching to Comodo, which I love! (My son showed me how to clean the registry and...

There is this older Toshiba laptop running Windows XP. It loads but I can not log in. It says it is loading the settings but then it logs off, the desktop never loads. I tried safemode but AVG is hard to use in safe mode. There may be a virus but why would it do this? I think AVG may have quarantined a file the computer actually needs or something. Does anyone have a clue?

Need to buy a laptop for my small business. I have to travel a lot and need a computer that offers decent performance but not too heavy. Please help.

SISZYD32.exe has possibly killed my FR computer. Yesterday it hit suddenly despite the anti-virus and other utilities I run to protect against such stuff. The victim computer is one I only use for FR and the sites it cites. That is the only clue I have to offer as to where it came from. I run several computers off a network and my FR computer is the only victim. This is the worst I have ever encountered and a search for it shows that it is very dangerous and it showed up only about a week ago (AFAICT). From years...

Apple is set to files its brief on Monday detailing the damages and injunction details it wants to see imposed on Psystar for building and selling unauthorized Mac clones. Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar in Northern California several months ago claiming the small PC maker was violating the Mac OS X end user license agreement, and that it was violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with the steps it used to install the Mac operating system on PCs. Psystar claimed that it should be allowed to build and sell PCs with Mac OS X pre-installed and that Apple is...

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn. Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless "what-if" scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key...

From time to time, I get messages saying my earlier email was rejected or blocked for being spam. Is there some way I can get a report on my email address, sort of like a credit check? If my address has a bad reputation, how can I repair it. I am not sending spam, but perhaps someone is spooking me? Thanks.

Now appearing on Google: The story of my life. And yours. Not everyone can read it, but the engineers and advertising specialists at Google can. And now users can get a peek, thanks to Google Dashboard, a new service developed at the search giant’s outpost in Zurich. Dashboard lets registered Google users see what the company knows about them. If you’ve got a Google account, just punch up www.google.com/dashboard, and get ready to feel your skin crawl. Google knows just about everything about me. No deep, dark secrets; just thousands of tiny data points which, when put together, could provide...

A Seattle police officer was shot to death and another officer was wounded late Saturday night while conducting a traffic stop in the city's Central District neighborhood. The officer who died was a veteran of the department, and the woman who was wounded is a student officer in training, Assistant Chief Jim Pugel said

Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography. Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses — the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it's your reputation that's stolen. Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites. Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on...

I need some Freeper help...Usually I'm asking advice about guns or stuff. But I need a different kind of help...a techie solution. A gadget. A CHEAP gadget. I'm setting up a video-conferencing solution for my company. What we'll be able to do is participate in each other's sales meetings, via the web, via webcam and microphone. It's not a static environment, but one where the leader is moving around, from place to place in the room; sometimes at the whiteboard...other times at another place in the room. I've kinda got the camera thing figured out. But what I need is...