Free Republic

The Dank Knight

FBI agents conducting undercover investigations have now been given the green light to impersonate journalists, the Justice Department determined last week — effectively legalizing the government’s most notorious propaganda program, Operation Mockingbird. Last Thursday, the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General published what’s become the subject of outrage for journalists, civil and constitutional rights advocates, and legal experts — “A Review of the FBI’s Impersonation of a Journalist in a Criminal Investigation.” Allowing agents to infiltrate media organizations for any reason threatens to utterly undermine public trust, kill the very concept of journalistic integrity, and throttle the flow of...

Twitter temporarily suspended a prolific academic over his tweet regarding protesters in Charlotte, N.C. blocking access to highways. Wednesday night, protesters were reportedly blocking the interstate in response to the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was shot and killed by a black police officer on Tuesday. In response to the protest, Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor known for his blog, Instapundit, tweeted motorists should “run them down”:

Only to begin furiously deleting all the posts - just yesterday, mind you - when other Reddit users realized who he was If you don’t know the name Paul Combetta, you might simply remember him as Stonetear. That’s how he’s apparently known both on Reddit and on Etsy, and he’s the guy at Platte River Networks who was tasked with trying to wipe Hillary’s server clean of all her e-mails after they became the subject of a congressional subpoena. As you might expect, Hillary neither wanted Combetta to comply with the subpoena nor proceed legally. What she wanted was for...

After Hillary Clinton called out the Alt-Right and established that the fringe political sect was inexplicably linked to a decade old meme called “Pepe”, the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi did an article with two individuals who claimed to have helped establish Pepe the Frog as a white supremacist representing Donald Trump and the Alt-Right. The only thing is… everything the duo told Nuzzi turned out to be a lie. Nuzzi printed the article back on May 26th, 2016 on The Daily Beast. Jared T. Swift and Paul Town, two anonymous individuals who claimed to be white nationalists, fed Nuzzi a...

Trying not to offend someone these days is really hard apparently. When you do, it’s often those people shouting for peace and calm that like to assault people they disagree with. Probably the most hilarious way of offending someone, however, is when they are offended that you aren’t offended by something! That’s exactly what happened to model Christine Teigen earlier this week. As was also reported by Newsbusters, Teigen ran into some unexpected hot water when she made two seemingly innocent tweets about how she found the word “oriental” to be odd when talking about her salad dressing:

I am trying to load an AAMPS stack on my Windows 7 machine. However, no matter what port I set the config file of the Apache server, it comes back with an error message saying that port is already being used by another app (without specifying said app). I'm getting to the point of believing that some rogue program has glommed on to EVERY port.I cannot find any listing of Port assignments or any way to affect those assignments. Typically, Apache listens to port 80.Can anyone advise on how to solve this problem? Thanks!

This is serious and genuinely alarming. Bruce Schneider is an expert in cyber-security, the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient, an IBM Company, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation — an organization defending our rights in the digital world. In a blog post, Schneider sounds the alarm that in the past year, the websites of major companies that provide the Internet’s basic services repeatedly have been attacked, each time more sophisticated than the last, which suggests “someone” is practicing how to take down the Internet by learning from the companies’ defensive moves. Below...

Via dicentra, the Z-Man on the ongoing disappearance of mainstream media comment sections: Z-Man on the ongoing disappearance of mainstream media comment sections: The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The "Minnesota man" in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It's where the "suspect wearing a red shirt" is identified as a black guy named T'Q'ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics...

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed...

What is cyber warfare and why should you care? That question was one that this writer asked himself many times. I thought that it had to do with someone stealing my personal identity. You know, opening a charge account in my name or emptying out my bank account. I, probably like many reading this, paid no attention to it until recently being hit with someone emptying out my bank account. And then, like the proverbial person who closes the gate after all of the horses have escaped, did I try to learn more about it. While there are no easy...

In Medieval times, Kings and Queens interested in maintaining control over small, outlying geographical areas arranged a complex system of fiefdoms, vesting feudal lords with their imprimatur to tell the local serfs and vassals what to do, and granting them the “power” to extract taxes – a portion of which would be given to the royals. Despite Constitutional strictures created to insure the contrary, the United States federal government has followed pretty much the same template, albeit on a bureaucratic, rather than monarchical, level. Case in point, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is showing once more that it is...

Leverage these talented Americans to help teach why America is an amazing, noble, prosperous, charitable and beautiful nation. Why Now? Because truth awakens the spirit and truth is instantly recognizable. Millions have never been respected enough to hear these profound truths. You can share these great gifts with those never taught these insights.

Wanted to check voter registration deadlines, and found Hillary's voter registration ad at the top. (The same seems to happen for other states). Did not enter any info (I'm guessing I'll just start getting spammed from her campaign). ANYway, the offical online application does not require a driver's license or street address. Seems ripe for fraud.I checked a few other states with the same result.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) called GOP mention of the content of the Democratic National Committee's emails hacked and published by Wikileaks "unfair. It's like a football team purloining a copy of the other team's playbook and using that to win a game. It's cheating. It's dishonest." Pelosi brushed aside email content revealing that the DNC cheated by rigging their primaries against Hillary Clinton's main rival for the nomination Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt), saying "since when do two wrongs make a right? We are calling on the GOP to turn aside from a tit-for-tat. Attempting to get even by...

It's the only way to explain his behavior. On first glance, it appears James Comey is the leader of the FBI’s effort to let Hillary get away with her crimes. Not only did he decline to recommend her prosecution when the evidence clearly showed she was guilty of multiple felonies (although not as many as we know about now), but the more we learn about the FBI’s investigative processes in the case - particularly the bizarre manner in which they interviewed Hillary herself - it seems obvious that this whole thing was a setup designed to have the FBI go...

Indonesia has asked the chairman of China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Jack Ma, to act as adviser in the development of the Southeast Asian country's nascent e-commerce industry, according to a video released by the government. Indonesia has the world's fourth-largest population, boasting a young, internet-savvy demographic, and a thriving e-commerce market that is increasingly attracting global investors. Earlier this year, Alibaba bought a controlling stake in Southeast Asian online retailer Lazada Group for around $1 billion, while a group of investors led by private equity firms KKR & Co LP and Warburg Pincus LLC poured more than $550 million...

High-quality graphene would soon be used for the next generation of electronics and energy devices. To produce it a simple method has been done. This method involves only using a microwave oven in order to bake the compound. Researchers at Rutgers' School of Engineering in Rutgers University have found that high-quality graphene could be produced using simple methods. That could potentially mean millions of dollars saved in making the new compound that would be used for new electronic devices. The discovery has been made by students, most of whom are either undergraduates or are post-doctoral associates, as Phys Org reports....

More than 70 percent of manufacturing jobs and more than half of jobs involving data collection might be rendered obsolete by automation and robots, according to a report from McKinsey & Company. One study estimated up to 80 percent of current jobs may be threatened by automation, which could become a critical economic issue for policy makers and global leaders in the coming decades. While Americans celebrate Labor Day weekend, it is a good time to contemplate the rise in artificial intelligence and how it can threaten jobs in all types of industries....

The smart money might be on both Sometimes I feel like I’m flogging a skeleton, telling you day after day what a gigantic liar Hillary is. Even when the things we learn make it clear the reality is worse than anyone previously realized, it’s almost as if people have become desensitized to it. Sure, she’s a total liar, but we’ve known that for years. So what? But it’s more than just that. It’s also the extent to which others who should have been holding her accountable bent over backwards to avoid doing so. Specifically I’m thinking about the director of...