Free Republic

Epidemiologist Eric Lofgren says the experience was a valuable snapshot into human behaviour during a pandemicIn the late summer of 2005, a mysterious plague affected an estimated four million people, but caused no deaths — at least not in the real world. When an update to the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft introduced an in-game condition called Corrupted Blood that acted as a viral disease, players around the world faced a virtual pandemic as their characters unwittingly infected others and rapidly perished. Today, some epidemiologists believe it can offer insight into the spread of viral infections, including a new...

Ethan Ralph’s had trouble with big tech for a long time, being one of the early conservatives to get purged from YouTube. Now, Spotify has followed suit in taking Ralph’s messages down.

New students at the University of Missouri will be required to participate in a tracking program designed to measure and enforce class attendance, according to a new report from The Kansas City Star. Despite privacy concerns, officials defended the decision as one to the benefit of students, as the school's athletics department has already been using the same app, SpotterEdu, to track certain student-athletes.

A federal judge on Monday pressed lawyers to prepare for an April trial in the prosecution of a Russian company charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential election, expressing frustration over delays in a case that was originally brought by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s office. “We’re now on a trial track,” declared U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich of the District of Columbia, during a 90-minute court hearing in Washington’s federal trial court. She added: “If I left this up to you all, we wouldn’t be trying this case until 2021.” Friedrich, federal prosecutors and defense lawyers for the...

SNIP A road-tripping German woman was rescued from the treacherous Norwegian wilderness when she set up a Tinder account — and enlisted help from one of her matches, according to a report Friday. Lonia Haeger, a pro kite surfer and self-styled “adventurer,” was traveling through the remote Nordkapp region in a camper van with two friends when they became stranded on the side of a mountain by a deluge of freezing rain, according to Central European News. SNIP She soon learned emergency responders were too far away to help them quickly, so she set up the location-based dating app to...

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot itUpdated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.On 13 January, infosec biz UpGuard discovered a 954MB repository containing AWS resource templates – used to create cloud services – plus hostnames, and log files generated in the second half of 2019. There were also internal Amazon training resources marked "confidential." "Several documents contained access keys for various cloud services," UpGuard reported today. "There were multiple...

Dayglored Note: This is a real article from 2001. Ballmer really did say this, and believe it... Contaminates all other software with Hippie GPL rubbish Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, 2001.Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source."The way the license is written, if you...

I am trying to help some family out who want to use a VPN both while on public wifi, and at home for simple privacy from their ISP. They are using 2 Mac laptops, 2 older iPhones, 2 iPads, and 1 old android phone. They do not need to use every device at the same time. They have Apple email accounts, gmail accounts, and Outlook and Hotmail email accounts; all email accounts are run through OSX Mail and iOS Mail. Whenever the VPN is enabled on the Macs, Microsoft instantly sends warning notices to the Outlook and Hotmail email accounts...

Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted of involuntary manslaughter for persuading her boyfriend to kill himself, was released from prison Thursday, months ahead of schedule due to good behavior. Carter, now 23, began serving a 15-month sentence in February, but she earned time off her sentence for good behavior, according to Jonathan Darling, spokesman at the Bristol County Sheriff's Office. She left the Bristol County House of Correction at about 9:30 a.m., video from CNN affiliate WHDH shows. Wearing a black turtleneck, a light blazer and black pants -- the same outfit she wore the day she was sentenced --...

It just popped up on my FB page and I now use very crappy (with ads) Chrome

Google is clearly hiding bad news about democrat scandals. I was trying to find an article about the democrat illegal campaign contribution scandal where AG Barr recently indicted a bunch of people. So I searched for "democrat arrested for illegal campaign donations" The front two pages nothing but Trump scandal fake news. So I'm like WTF. Let me try bing. And then the entire page is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Try it yourself. GoogleBing

A new report reveals that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning 14 years, have been exposed online without password protection. Microsoft has been in the news for, mostly, the wrong reasons recently. There is the Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't issued a patch for, despite it being actively exploited. That came just days after the U.S. Government issued a critical Windows 10 update now alert concerning the "extraordinarily serious" curveball crypto vulnerability. Now a newly published report, has revealed that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning an incredible 14 years in all, have been exposed online in a...

Rwanda’s Mara Group has grand ambitions. The company hopes to help turn Rwanda into a regional tech hub, and it just got one step closer to completing that mission. This week, the company released two smartphones, earning Mara Group the title of the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. advertisement Rwanda President Paul Kagame has announced Africa’s “first high tech smartphone factory,” CNN reported. While smartphones are assembled in other African nations (Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa all have assembly plants), according to Reuters, those companies all import the components. But at Mara, they manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging,...

Today’s Web is far different from the electronic public square it was originally created to be. Yet there is realistic hope the Web can be liberated from the stifling restraints of Big Tech and Big Government. Last summer, Facebook slapped this magazine’s parent organization, The John Birch Society, with a “hate speech” violation and demonetized the organization’s Facebook page for 30 days. The reason: Our July 8, 2019 print magazine cover, which included a real photograph of immigrants illegally crossing a border fence. That cover article was headlined “Immigrant Invasion” and a caption for that photo inside the magazine included...

Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 — several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings — when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he...

Still using Internet Explorer? Don't. There's another zero-day Microsoft let slip on Friday an advisory detailing an under-attack zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2020-0674) for Internet Explorer. The scripting engine flaw can be exploited to gain remote code execution on a vulnerable machine by way of a specially crafted webpage. The flaw can be mitigated by restricting access to the JavaScript component JScript.dll, and thus far there is no patch available. "Microsoft is aware of this vulnerability and working on a fix," the software giant noted. "Our standard policy is to release security updates on Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of each...

A new study claims that YouTube is rife with misinformation about climate change and that some major advertisers inadvertently have their ads running alongside these videos. The new report comes from activist organization Avaaz, a relatively new global group that harnesses the power of collective action via campaigns and petitions. The Avaaz study found that not only were a significant number of climate change denial videos surfacing on the platform, but that YouTube's algorithm was sending viewers to even more of those types of videos. Additionally, in a move that might actually cause YouTube to do something about it, Avaaz...

A startup focused on “invisible computing” Thursday unveiled a smart contact lens which delivers an augmented reality display in a user’s field of vision. The Mojo Vision contact lens offers a display with information and notifications, and allows the user to interact by focusing on certain points.

Adam Gorlitsky hit the wall hard during his second marathon attempt around the mile 20-mark this past Saturday at the Charleston Marathon in South Carolina. The only other time he had ever run this far was during his first marathon attempt last March at the Los Angeles Marathon. While battling against pain in his wrists and legs and pushing the limits on the motors on his ReWalk Robotic Exoskeleton, Gorlitsky fought on, not only hoping to capture his first marathon finish, but also better the world record for fastest marathon in a robotic walking machine. He did just that after...

Apple could be forced to abandon its Lightning connector cable if European lawmakers get their way. The cable is used to charge and sync Apple devices, including the iPhone. But members of the European Parliament urged the European Commission on Monday to force tech giants to adopt a single universal charging method. Apple products do not accept the other two non-wireless types of charger which are available - USB-C and micro-USB, which work on Android devices. Regulators will vote on the matter on a yet to be determined date, but Apple says the proposed regulation would stifle innovation and be...