Free Republic

The U.S. crypto market may have just crossed one of its most important turning points yet. In a major regulatory shift, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Paul Atkins has clarified that most digital assets are not securities, marking a dramatic departure from years of uncertainty, lawsuits, and aggressive enforcement.For investors, this is not just another policy update. It could reshape how crypto markets operate in the United States, unlock institutional capital, and determine which tokens thrive or disappear.Here’s what just happened, what changed, and how investors should think about it going forward.A Long-Awaited Reset for Crypto RegulationFor...

It’s not just the stocks of software companies that are taking hits from worries about artificial intelligence. In the private credit market, where loans to software firms had become a favored sector over the last five years, sentiment has soured. The concern in both markets is that AI threatens the profit margins and underlying business models of many software companies by reducing the barriers to entry and enabling customers to build their own software. Those worries strike at the heart of the reasons many lenders had for issuing the loans: fat profit margins for software companies, stable customer bases, and...

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told DefenseScoop in an email to “Stay tuned!” and included an alien emoji. The White House registered two new government domains this week: alien.gov and aliens.gov, according to publicly available federal records. Their appearance comes about one month after President Donald Trump announced plans to direct the long-anticipated release of U.S. government records about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and extraterrestrial beings. Those new domains were not connected to websites as of Wednesday morning. But public data managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reveals that both sites were registered Tuesday evening and are...

Engineering school taught us to write code. It never taught us to write. Now writing is the whole job. I went to engineering school at the University of Virginia. I appreciated the education. The engineering program is rigorous. I learned differential equations, thermodynamics, signal processing, data structures, and enough physics to respect what I didn’t understand. (And, I barely made it through.) I now wish I had majored in English if you’d told me that thirty years ago, I would have laughed at you, and then gone back to failing an electromagnetics exam. You know what I didn’t learn? How...

Has anyone put Openclaw on their MacOS? It seems beyond my skill set.

A popular Spring Break destination has been rocked by gun violence over the weekend, after five different shootings occurred in just three days, leaving one police officer injured and a suspect in critical condition. Video of one incident shared online showed thousands of screaming people running down Daytona Beach, Florida, while law enforcement agencies from multiple jurisdictions dispersed across the sand. None of the shootings unfolded on the beach itself, though two shootings on Saturday were beachside, officials with the Volusia Sheriff's Office told WFTV. There was also a fight at Joint Bar on Seabreeze in which a shot was...

Microsoft has released an out-of-band hotpatch update, KB5084597, to fix three remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Windows Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) management tool. The update targets Windows 11 Enterprise devices enrolled in the hotpatch program that did not receive the fixes through the standard March 2026 Patch Tuesday cumulative update. The three vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2026-25172, CVE-2026-25173, and CVE-2026-26111. All three were addressed in the March 10 Patch Tuesday release for standard Windows 11 devices.

Some rumored Windows 12 features could frustrate users and be the reason Linux finally starts looking better. First off, the rumor about a 2026 release for Windows 12 is not true. Someone translated a German article about Windows 12 releasing in 2026, and it proved to be untrue (and was later retracted). Second, there are a lot of other "speculations" as to what Windows 12 will be like. What could cause a large migration? I'm going to set the rumors aside, and instead, focus on what I believe will happen (based on the past, the present, and the future of...

The Senate will today debate the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Buried in the sprawling legislation is a section reportedly written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren titled “Homes Are for People, Not Corporations.” It has the backing of the White House and broad support in the Senate. The idea sounds politically appealing. In practice, it could sow the seeds of the next housing crash. The provision targets large institutional investors that own single-family rental homes. It effectively blocks investors that own more than 350 homes from buying additional single-family houses except under narrow circumstances. Even those purchases must generally be...

"Sammy" (@sumiturkude007) on X wrote "This short film made with Seedance 2.0 is absolutely insane. The realism looks like a real movie — no one can tell it's AI." But that's not the real point. Yeah, it's a good demonstration of AI abilities in March 2026, but it's the theme and plot that get me. They are simultaneously brilliant, sad, and prophetic.

Two weeks after announcing the launch of his "Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour," Bruce Springsteen is catching some heat as fans are left outraged over astronomical ticket prices. "If this concert is meant to be a political statement, dynamic pricing makes no sense... It feels contradictory to defend democracy while playing by pure free-market rules where money decides everything," one fan wrote on Springteen's Instagram post. "Big fan and I’m in for a reasonable price, but I can’t help thinking about those who can’t play this game." "Unfortunately no one can afford to actually go.....," another wrote. "It’s...

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a two-word retort after Anthropic leader Dario Amodei claimed in an interview that he isn’t sure if his company’s AI models have gained consciousness. "Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety," read a post on X by cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket, to which Musk replied, "He’s projecting." The comment from Musk, who is also the founder of xAI, comes as Anthropic is at odds with the Pentagon over its use in a separate matter. In an interview with The New...

Researchers at Australian start-up Cortical Labs have taught human neurons grown on a chip to play the classic Doom game. In 2021, they had already used 800,000 neurons to play Pong. Now, with four times fewer brain cells, they can play a much more complicated game. … The technology making this possible is the CL-1, a “biological computer” chip. The biological component of the CL-1 system consists of human neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells, typically repurposed from adult skin or blood samples, are differentiated in a lab into functional cortical neurons. Once matured, approximately 200,000...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed his wife Rama Duwaji isn’t a public figure Friday – despite receiving fawning media coverage – after facing uproar for her liking social media posts celebrating Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack. The democratic socialist, 34, was confronted during an unrelated event about his 28-year-old artist spouse liking Instagram posts that shared graphic imagery of the terror group’s murderous rampage — in the hours after the attack — and trumpeted anti-Israel rhetoric, Jewish Insider reported. “My wife is the love of my life, and she’s also a private person who has held no formal position on my...

Keir Starmer has been mercilessly mocked on social media for 'copying Trump' with an 'embarrassing' TikTok video about the Iran conflict. The clip, set to the guitar riff of Dire Straits hit 'Money for Nothing', opens with footage of Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters flying over the Labour leader's head. 'Our number one priority is protecting our people' Sir Keir is heard narrating, with the word 'our' sounding strangely elongated. As more high-octane footage flashes up of F-35 jets on sorties, the Prime Minister continues speaking - although his voice is at times barely audible over the music. Another clip flashes...

With Russian ground troops bogged down in a grinding war of attrition, Moscow is striving to press home its advantage in the skies – through an ever-evolving army of drones, courtesy of Iran. In early January, wreckage of a drone found in Ukraine hinted at a new high-speed model of drone being deployed by Russia in the conflict. It prompted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to air fears over failing to keep pace. Share article Russia was initially unable to produce large numbers of kamikaze drones,...Tehran had the expertise Russia needed. It also had an existing defense relationship with Russia. Moreover,...

A 4-year-old boy who has autism and is non-verbal went missing from his DeSoto home Sunday afternoon. A police drone spotted him and directed officers to his rescue.The 200 block of Jordan Drive in DeSoto was a buzz of activity on Sunday afternoon, as neighbors joined in a search for a missing 4-year-old boy with autism who is non-verbal, who had wandered away from his home. "Mom radar is all the way up, and I'm just consoling her on the side, because I'm just imagining how she's feeling," neighbor Kandice Middleton said. "It felt like years that we were looking...

One of the co-founders of Xbox recently signaled that the end may be near for the video game console that has shaped generations of gamers. In an interview with Gamesbeat, a business-to-business media outlet for gaming, entertainment, and tech, Seamus Blackley said that Xbox is no longer a priority for Microsoft, which makes the console. Instead, the company is shifting their focus to artificial intelligence. “[Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transform model AI future,” Blackley said. “Xbox, like a lot of businesses that...

Listen to this. I think many FReepers will like it.Weaponized Victimhood | The Alchemy of Agony

"Until we have a better plan, we modified our license to exclude residents of California from using MidnightBSD for desktop use, effective January 1, 2027."