Free Republic

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul hit back at YouTube "censors" on Saturday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that cloth masks do not work as well against the coronavirus as N95 makes. The Kentucky Republican wondered if YouTube would be apologizing for suspending him earlier this year for saying the same thing. "Does this mean snot-nosed censors at YouTube will come to my office and kiss my … and admit I was right?" Paul wrote. In August, YouTube suspended Paul over a three-minute video questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks, which several studies have shown are not effective...

@DarrenJBeattie On @Timcast's Show Breaking Down Revolver News' Reporting On Ray Epps & January 6th Darren Challenges Everyone To Read This Piece And Tell Him There's Not Something Fishy Here Segment...[8 mins]

Chances are unless you're a JavaScript programmer, you've never heard of the open-source Javascript libraries 'colors.js' and 'faker.js." They're simple programs that respectively let you use colored text on your node.js, a popular JavaScript runtime, console, and create fake data for testing. Faker.js is used with more than 2,500 other Node Package Manager (NPM) programs and is downloaded 2.4 million times per week. Colors.js is built into almost 19,000 other NPM packages and is downloaded 23 million times a week. In short, they're everywhere. And, when their creator, JavaScript developer Marak Squires, fouled them up, tens of thousands of JavaScript...

resident Biden in a moment of brutal honesty on Thursday admitted that his push to enact changes to voting laws and the Senate’s filibuster rule may be doomed. “The honest-to-God answer is I don’t know whether we can get this done,” Biden said after leaving a more-than-hour-long meeting with Senate Democrats to persuade them to change the Senate’s rules. “I hope we can get this done but I’m not sure,” he said. Biden pledged to keep fighting for election reform and voting rights legislation even if Republicans again block an effort to move legislation this weekend. “Like every other major...

Software Update Apple on Wednesday released iOS 15.2.1 and iPadOS 15.2.1 to the public with minor bug fixes and other improvements.Wesley Hilliard for AppleInsider:Apple says that the release addresses a HomeKit denial of service issue, a problem where third-party CarPlay apps may lose touch sensitivity, and a bug where Messages may not load photos sent using an iCloud link.The HomeKit DDoS attack was revealed by a researcher on January 1 and could be executed by entering a device name of over 500,000 characters. Devices that tried to load the device name could be placed into a reboot cycle and made...

Titled, "I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone," .... ...In their original post, the anonymous IT employee said that they handle all of the digital evidence their employer uses during trials and that when COVID arrived, they requested to work from home. Within a week of working from home, the Redditor said that they wrote, debugged, and perfected a simple script to perform all their entire job for them... "I clock in every day, play video games or do whatever, and at the end of the day I look over the logs to make sure...

The International Monetary Fund is warning there is a growing connection between cryptocurrency and financial markets, which poses risks to the financial system. In a report, the international body says digital assets are no longer on the “fringe” of the financial system. Given their high volatility, the rising correlation between cryptocurrencies and stocks could soon pose risks to financial stability— especially in countries that have adopted digital units. “The correlation of crypto assets with traditional holdings like stocks has increased significantly, which limits their perceived risk diversification benefits and raises the risk of contagion across financial markets,” the IMF wrote....

Tech PING! Thinking I need a camera security system. Has anyone looked at them? Thoughts? I want a stand alone camera system with night vision and recording capacity. Something that would work with my wifi? Something that works in the dark? (we live in the woods) Is there such a duck?

Norton has an interesting feature tucked inside its Norton 360 antivirus subscription—a cryptocurrency miner. It’s not turned on by default, but it is installed as part of your antivirus package whether you want it or not. The crypto-miner actually rolled out in July 2021 to some users, but the company has started a wider rollout recently. Some users are upset because the mining software is installed automatically as part of Norton 360, and the software pushes mining on users through a prompt that says, “Turn your PC’s idle time into cash,” as shown in the image above.Thankfully, you have to...

Owners who buy these chip-less toner cartridges should be able to print normally, Canon notes. However, toner levels might be reported incorrectly as either “100%” or “OK” regardless of the remaining quantity, or correctly as “0%” or “Empty” in case the toner has run out. Canon says the chip-less cartridges will start arriving in February, calling them an interim measure in the ongoing silicon crisis. The company expects to resume supply of chipped parts once normal supply is restored. Given that these cartridges will ship without a DRM chip, they might also have a lower asking price than regular parts....

Why doesn’t the government listen to the complaints of the people until they come out in numbers on the streets? Kazakhstan’s government, like so many of its authoritarian counterparts, has chosen to wreck its feedback mechanism. It has parlayed considerable funds into a system known as the “state order”, funding media outlets – even those not belonging to the state – to convey news about the government’s policies with a cheery gloss. The few outlets trying to strike out and produce critical coverage face harassment and legal action. Some issues are absolutely off-limits. In October, one news outlet, Hola.kz, took...

Tesla owners speak to CNBC about how they’ve used the internal computer and battery power of the car to mine cryptocurrencies. San Francisco-based Siraj Raval mines ethereum and polygon by using JavaScript to hack into his Tesla’s native CPU. Others have tried hooking up graphic processing units directly to the Tesla car battery. But Raval’s favorite way to mint crypto coins like ethereum is to use JavaScript to hack into his Tesla’s native CPU. The CPU is the car’s internal computer that helps with system navigation and provides entertainment to riders. “It’s much faster, and it’s much more energy efficient,”...

Broken keyboard keys are quite a common occurrence on laptops and netbooks. Although it’s not a terrible problem if the keypress still registers without the key, it is quite difficult if a common key doesn’t work at all. Maybe there’s keys you keep hitting by mistake such as Caps Lock, or would just like a certain key to be in a more convenient location. Or, there might be a key on your keyboard you never seem to use or need.In all those situations, a simple solution would be to change the keyboard keys to do something else...or run a shortcut/hotkey...

The Mozilla Foundation, the entity that oversees the Mozilla Firefox internet browser, is now accepting donations in cryptocurrency. One of the browser's founders is not happy about it. The company tweeted on Dec. 31: "Dabble in @dogecoin? HODLing some #Bitcoin & Ethereum? We're using @BitPay to accept donations in #cryptocurrency." Jamie "jwz" Zawinski, who helped build the Mozilla Project that was released in 2002, tweeted in response that he's "here to say f.. you and f... this."... ...He wasn't the only one to level criticism at Mozilla's move on Twitter this week. Peter Linss, the founder of Gecko — the...

Lenovo unveiled two new laptops made out of materials including recycled aluminum and “recycled black vegan leather,” delivered in packaging made from compostable bamboo and sugarcane. But beneath the environmentally friendly hardware there’s another innovation: Microsoft’s Pluton security processor. The new Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, announced Tuesday at the International CES tech show in Las Vegas, are the first PCs to be unveiled with Pluton since Microsoft announced the security architecture in November 2020. Pluton takes security technologies that otherwise exist in a separate hardware component in Windows PCs and integrates them directly into the central processing unit. In...

After a long day at work, the modern goldfish no longer has to take public transportation home—it can drive via a fish-operated vehicle (FOV), according to new research published in Behavioural Brain Research. Documented in a report published in the February 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, set out to unpack how well goldfish can navigate terrestrial environments when tasked with the right tools. They created a small camera-equipped fish tank on wheels, which they call an FOV, and put six goldfish in it, one at a time. Over a...

Last year, several security vulnerabilities were discovered, making it difficult for system administrators to patch the systems without downtime quickly.What if some improvements can be made to update some critical components for security/performance improvements without rebooting a system?Intel aims to achieve that with its new PFRUT (Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry) driver.Intel Plans to Make PFRUT Available With Linux Kernel 5.17While Linux Kernel 5.16 is due later this weekend, Intel aims to merge this new addition with the upcoming Linux Kernel 5.17 stable release.But, what exactly is it?With PFRUT driver, specific components (or the system firmware) can be updated...

Computer maintenance workers at Kyoto University have announced that due to an apparent bug in software used to back up research data, researchers using the University's Hewlett-Packard Cray computing system, called Lustre, have lost approximately 77 terabytes of data. The team at the University's Institute for Information Management and Communication posted a Failure Information page detailing what is known so far about the data loss. The team, with the University's Information Department Information Infrastructure Division, Supercomputing, reported that files in the /LARGEO (on the DataDirect ExaScaler storage system) were lost during a system backup procedure. Some in the press have...

A physics problem that has plagued science since the days of Isaac Newton is closer to being solved, say a pair of Israeli researchers. The duo used "the drunkard's walk" to calculate the outcome of a cosmic dance between three massive objects, or the so-called three-body problem. For physicists, predicting the motion of two massive objects, like a pair of stars, is a piece of cake. But when a third object enters the picture, the problem becomes unsolvable. That's because when two massive objects get close to each other, their gravitational attraction influences the paths they take in a way...

It can be the final straw to come home after a hard day, curl up ready for your favorite streaming show only to find that the Wi-Fi is crawling and nothing will load. While the human urge to firmly hoist your router out the window is tempting, there are some tried and tested ways to boost Wi-Fi signal. In defense of waning Wi-Fi signal, the past few years have been particularly straining for The Internet. With the world plunged into lockdown and many businesses adapting to WFH life, more and more of us have been inside and engaging with online...