Free Republic

From a review of Susan Landau's Surveillance or Security?: To catch up with the new technologies of malfeasance, FBI director Robert Mueller traveled to Silicon Valley last November to persuade technology companies to build "backdoors" into their products. If Mueller’s wish were granted, the FBI would gain undetected real-time access to suspects’ Skype calls, Facebook chats, and other online communications­and in "clear text," the industry lingo for unencrypted data. Backdoors, in other words, would make the Internet -- and especially its burgeoning social media sector -- "wiretappable." This is one of the cyber threats I talked about last week: insecurities...

Anarcho-Doritologist hacker collective has declared war on the New York Stock Exchange and will launch a "raid" on the company's website on Monday, October 10! Or is "Operation Invade Wall Street" a "fake planted operation"? Or maybe it doesn't really matter either way. If you buy the video (which, if it's a "plant," is convincingly self-serious), Anonymous' plan is essentially the same as the one that briefly took down PayPal and MasterCard: Convince a bunch of people to download and run a program that will effect a distributed denial of service attack on the target, in this case the NYSE...

Steve Jobs is dead. I'm saddened. Besides the grief his family and loved ones must feel, his death brings a loss to the world. He was a true innovator. Apple products and the technologies derived from them have reordered our way of living. While Jobs did not invent either the personal computer or the graphical interface operating system, the PCs and personal digital devices he created implement these in a way that has had an impact on society equal to that of the automobile, telephone, and antibiotic drugs. I used Apple products exclusively throughout my thirty years as a graphic...

Little help here please. After the latest automatic update, Firefox refuses to run on my computer (Win XP Pro). I have tried everything I can think of but it just will not run. Firefox is set as the default browser on my computer but will not start by clicking the desktop shortcut, or from the start menu. I have tried starting it from the Run command line and by going into the file manager and starting it from program files. Nothing. Thanks for any help anyone can offer. I have uninstalled, reinstalled and rebooted several times - no joy. While...

Little help here please. After the latest automatic update, Firefox refuses to run on my computer (Win XP Pro). I have tried everything I can think of but it just will not run. Firefox is set as the default browser on my computer but will not start by clicking the desktop shortcut, or from the start menu. I have tried starting it from the Run command line and by going into the file manager and starting it from program files. Nothing. Thanks for any help anyone can offer. I have uninstalled, reinstalled and rebooted several times - no joy. While...

I need a PDF converter quickly.Does anyone know where I can download a free one online;or a legit one to buy online that is good and not filled with spam extras and garbage?How about ADOBE 10 if I have it is there a converter in this program? Thanks ahead for your replies.

A 21-year-old Baltimore man has been arrested for attempting to blow up a military recruitment center in Catonsville with a fake bomb supplied by federal agents. Federal authorities say Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain, attempted to detonate what he believed to be a vehicle bomb this morning at the Armed Forces Career Center in the 5400 block of Baltimore National Pike. Court records paint Martinez as obsessed with Jihad and intent on punishing the military. He praised Nidal Hassan, the U.S. Army major who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, and discussed obtaining weapons and shooting up military...

Taking another step towards creating devices that could be meshed with brain function to help those with brain damage, or perhaps one day, to improve on abilities, researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Professor of Psychobiology Matti Mintz, have developed an adjunct to a part of a rat brain. The team, who will be presenting their results this month at a biotechnology meeting in the UK, has created a computer chip that is able to emulate one of the functions of the rat cerebellum. The cerebellum is the small odd looking part of the brain that looks like a...

This is breaking news, so unfortunately I do not have a tremendous amount of details. This is what is known: Swedish security police have arrested four terror suspects on suspicion of "preparing a terrorist attack." Today being September 11, fear of terrorism is much greater than on normal days. The four were arrested in Sweden's second largest city Goteborg early Sunday, according to Security police spokesman Stefan Johansson. No further comments were given.

AMD has set the world record of fastest CPU with a speed frequency of 8.429 GHz, winning the company a place in the Guiness World Records. AMD’s yet-to-ship Bulldozer-based FX chips drew the Guinness ranking for the "Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor." The AMD-FX CPU is set to debut in Q4 2011. Announced yesterday, the Guiness record news drew kudos and comments from a wide range of sites that closely follow news and events circling rivals AMD and Intel. Some reports noted the timing of AMD's announcement was made on the opening day of the Intel Developer Forum in...

What can we do to help Jim Robinson keep freerepublic robust and online? Freerepublic is important to me and I am willing to pay to keep it up and robust. I believe that many other freepers believe this as well. I do not overstate things when I say that the health of freerepublic is essential to the health of the nation and the restoration of the Constitution. Would it be worthwhile to create a backup fund for freerepublic to buy more equipment/bandwidth/alternate mirror sites? This is Jim's site, and I will certainly defer to his wishes, but if we can...

I have a windows 64 bit machine. Recently MS offered an upgrade to the next version of IE. Except it seems to be a downgrade. There is no taskbar and I cannot change my search engine default. There is no more file print properties dropdown. No more search for words dropdown. All in all it is much less useful. Is there a way I can go back to my old IE which was much better. This isnt even any faster than my old one and get the white screen more often. Please no lectures about needing to change to Firefoxes...

Sony has announced via its webpage the development of a new type of LCD display that uses either half as much power as current same-size LCD displays, or the same amount of power, but doubles the brightness. Called WhiteMagic, the new LCD screen, currently just 3 inches diagonally, achieves these results by employing a third, white pixel to create images on a screen. For the most part, most LCD displays use just three backlit pixels - Red, Green and Blue (RGB) to create one dot of color on the screen; the various colors are produced by filtering the light that...

In our increasingly smartphone-and-tablet computing-centric world, one of the computer engineers who helped design IBM's first personal computer, has made it official: The PC is dead. Thirty years ago, Mark Dean was part of the original team that helped usher in a personal computing revolution when Big Blue announced its PC. On the anniversary of that seminal announcement, Dean said it is time to move beyond the PC. (see: Today is the IBM Model 5150's 30th birthday) "My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn't think I'd live long enough to witness its...

Comcast Corporation is partnering with several metro Atlanta school districts to educate families about a new program to offer discounted Internet access to low-income students. Today at a morning press conference, Comcast executives along with Mayor Kasim Reed, Gov. Nathan Deal and other area leaders will announce the program, which will be offered to families of students who qualify for free or reduced-priced school lunch. Families who qualify will receive broadband Internet for $9.95 a month with no activation fee, no modem rental and a voucher to purchase a computer for $149.99. The Atlanta launch is part of the company's...

I was playing with the settings of my new IE. I was tired of seeing my search subjects on ads wherever I browsed. Somehow I cannot click some links. Like all the threads of FR. What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it Please?

Korean researchers working out of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology report in a paper published in Nature Materials, that they've been able to create a non-volatile Resistance RAM (ReRam) chip capable of withstanding a trillion read/write cycles, all with a switching time of just 10ns (about a million times faster than current flash chips), paving the way for a possible upgrade to flash memory cards. ReRam chips are non-volatile, meaning they can retain stored information in the absence of power and are currently made using a Ta2O5 (tantalum) film, the new chips developed by the Samsung team uses Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x...

The DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) today announced a major step toward creating one of the world's fastest scientific networks to accelerate research in fields ranging from advanced energy solutions to particle physics. Known as the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI), the effort represents a $62 million multi-year investment by the DOE Office of Science in next-generation networking technology. "As science becomes increasingly data-driven and global in scale, it's critical that we create an infrastructure that will enable our scientists to collaborate and compete successfully in the search for solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges in energy,"...

I need some help finding a 'gadget' for Windows 7 and Active Directory and I was hoping perhaps someone on FR could help. What I'm looking for is a simple gadget that shows selected Active Directory user account logons in real time. Meaning I'd be able to see at a glance a small table of users (up to ten maybe) who are logged on and, perhaps, for how long they've been logged on. Thank you for reading this and thanks for your help.

Instapaper and Curbed Network are among the sites hit, though the cause of the raid is unknown The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline. The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid. In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, a DigitalOne employee,...