Free Republic

President Donald Trump on Monday took action to give Americans more freedom to fix their cars’ emission systems. Trump signed a presidential memorandum to the Environmental Protection Agency while flanked by the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin. “I think it’s very important; going to lower the price of your car, and it’s going to lower the price of fixing your car. It has to do with affordability, it has to do with a lot of things,” Trump said. Zeldin emphasized that the Trump administration is not seeking to crack down on Americans working on their own cars, as “past administrations have”...

The transcript from the video would be too long to post here, but the gist of the video is about how Microsoft is extending the ESU program until Oct 2027, and maybe even into 2028. I thought maybe folks here would want to know because it makes getting new hardware to support Windows 11 unnecessary as long your IT device still runs good and has Windows 10, like mine. I was going to put together a system to dual boot W11 and Linux but I'm putting that off for now.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News. Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips. Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked...

One of the big stories concerning free software and open source lately has been legislation in Colorado and California to enforce age restrictions at the operating system level. These are regulations that require, out-of-the-box, operating systems to determine with a degree of certainty the age of the holder of a computer’s user account.Colorado’s law, which won’t go into effect until 2028, already exempts open source operating systems, thanks in part to efforts by CEO Carl Richell and his team at System76, which manufactures servers, desktops, and laptops preinstalled with in-house developed Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux distributions.The law now officially exempts...

Zuckerberg joins several high-profile individuals who are moving out of California because of the proposed billionaire tax, including Google co-founder Larry Page. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act would see residents with a net worth of more than $1 billion pay a one-time tax worth five percent of their assets. The bill has been championed by Democratic Representative Ro Khanna who said in a statement to the Daily Mail: 'We must balance making sure we keep the Silicon Valley miracle and dynamism with ensuring that the working-class benefit from the prosperity with healthcare, education, and childcare. 'Jensen Huang understands this, and...

The rise of the artificial intelligence era is changing expectations about careers. While earlier, there were concerns that arts and humanities subjects would be more impacted, the trend appears to have shifted. According to The Economist, AI companies are actively recruiting philosophers, sometimes even before graduation. This rise in recruitment of philosophers at AI companies is a result of the broader understanding that philosophy offers useful tools for AI development. There is a belief that AI training may be able to benefit from some of the ancient lessons of philosophy. For instance, the Socratic method, developed in ancient Greece by...

A Florida police officer is winning nationwide praise for his message to an illegal alien p*dophile that he busted earlier this week. On Thursday, the Jacksonville Police Department arrested a 34-year-old Mexican illegal alien named Jose Malagon after he used an online site to chat with two different people who he thought were teenage girls and solicited them for sex. But unbeknownst to Malagon, the people at the other end of the line were Jacksonville police detectives. The Jacksonville Police Department's US Marshals Task Force then found Malagon in Neptune Beach, where he initially resisted arrest. Once they had him...

Amelia is right A.I. Full Pathways parody 2:00 VIDEO AT LINK.......... Watch it before it gets BANNED!..................

Despite warnings of revenue deflation, chairman predicts AI will make more work, not less, for services orgsInfosys chairman Nandan M. Nilekani has predicted AI – even AI that does the kind of coding work his company does for many clients – will be good for services companies. Nilekani made his prediction in a speech delivered at the Indian services giant’s annual general meeting on Tuesday. “The industry is going through a major technology transition and whenever there is such a transition, questions are asked about our relevance, leadership or ability to maintain growth and margins,” he said. “Given that AI...

Airbus, Leonardo and Thales announced Thursday that they will combine their satellite and space activities to form a “leading European player in space,” as the region looks for a homegrown rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink. The companies — each a heavyweight in the aerospace and defense sector in their own right — said the joint venture would develop and build, “a comprehensive portfolio of complementary technologies and end-to-end solutions, from space infrastructure to services.” The development of space launchers will be excluded from the new company’s operations. The combined entity is expected to generate mid-triple-digit million euros in annual synergies...

Tech Ping!! Help Please? Nighthawk X8 8500 died. Need to replace with similar router. This is a big one with 4 antenna. Works in big house with three floors. 75 foot length. This one has covered the whole house well. I need to find its newer younger brother. Is there a router expert here? Please Help?

A blacklisted Chinese company claims to have developed a "cyber nuclear weapon" that could be used to hack Western companies and governments. Zhou Hongyi, the chief executive of cybersecurity company Qihoo 360, said it had built an AI system that matched the capabilities of Anthropic's Claude Mythos, the most powerful US AI technology. Qihoo has been blacklisted by the US government since 2020 over claims that it is linked to the Chinese military. Earlier this month, the Pentagon accused Qihoo of being a "military civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defence industrial base" tied to Beijing's intelligence agencies. ...China will...

I've been reading about the expiration of the 2011 Secure Boot certificates today, mainly with regards to Windows OS systems. Many of those users are dealing with older hardware that will not be getting a BIOS firmware update from the PC/laptop manufactures to get those certificates updated to the latest (2023) versions. The big appeal of getting users onto Linux was the ability to use older hardware that Microsoft deemed incapable of receiving the latest OS installs and updates. Sounds great, but now I am reading this issue carries over into Linux. For so long, we've been told something like...

Fake USB sticks used by the Japanese army spread a China-linked computer virus inside a secure network for nearly a year before they were found to contain malware, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported on Thursday. The flash drives were delivered to Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force during disaster relief operations in March 2024 following an earthquake in central Japan, the paper said, citing internal army documents. The infection was not discovered until February 2025, when a Japanese soldier in Itami, near Osaka, reported that a computer was operating slowly. A scan revealed that it had been infected by a virus carried on...

Police said the 14-year-old was a player of Gorebox, a game where players can "obliterate anything [they] desire" and "engage in brutal combat with an extensive arsenal of weapons and explosives", according to its Google Play listing. "We cannot ignore possible online influences that may have contributed to this tragic incident," the country's cyber-security agency said. "Temporarily blocking the game will allow authorities to conduct a thorough assessment into whether the platform played any role in the actions of the suspects," said Aboy Paraiso, an undersecretary at the Cybercrime Investigation and Co-ordinating Centre. BBC News has contacted Gorebox's maker, Germany's...

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right. So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. The model...

Elect this man to lead something. LISTEN: Jacob Rockwell was fined for running a red light in Pensacola, Florida. Only thing is Jacob wasn’t in Florida, he was in Alabama. He sounded off at a local city meeting recently and his concerns go beyond just one citation. pic.twitter.com/kXSlzaLCLI— The Facts Dude 🤙🏽 (@Thefactsdude) June 22, 2026That's Pensacola resident Jacob Rockwell. He was out of town in March and someone else was borrowing his vehicle. Rockwell doesn't dispute that this other individual ran the red light. His problem is the seemingly-insane bureaucratic process to try and prove that he wasn't the...

A supercomputer in Shenzhen was declared the world’s fastest. It uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units.China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics. LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most...

People are tired of paying more to scroll longer. Streaming was supposed to make movie night easier. Somehow, it made it exhausting. When every app wants more money, the old DVD shelf starts looking sane again. BRIEFING Grant here. Streaming literally revolutionized the way we all consume entertainment. Gone were the days of cable boxes and trips to Blockbuster. Instead, from the comfort of your own home, you got to choose exactly what you wanted to watch. But this convenience over the years has morphed. It's become more expensive and more complicated, and people are starting to yearn again for...

Oops: Twenty-eight years ago, Pixar nearly lost 90% of Toy Story 2's digital files – not because a system crashed, but because someone ran a routine Unix command that engineers had been using for years without a second thought. The command /bin/rm -r -f instructs the system to recursively delete everything under a directory without asking for confirmation. At Pixar in 1998, it was apparently executed in the wrong location. The studio's animation pipeline at the time ran across a network of Unix and Linux machines holding hundreds of thousands of production files. Artists and technical staff had broad access...