Free Republic

A cryptocurrency project described as being "dystopian" has been launched by AI entrepreneur Sam Altman. Worldcoin gives people digital coins in exchange for a scan of their eyeballs. In sites around the world thousands of people queued to gaze into silver orbs on day one of the project's full launch. The BBC visited a scanning site in London where people received free crypto tokens after going through the process. Mr Altman, the chief executive of Open AI which built chat bot ChatGPT says he hopes the initiative will help confirm if someone is a human or a robot. "Worldcoin could...

Elon Musk unveiled perhaps his most vigorous shakeup of Twitter so far on Monday: rebranding the social media platform and the famous blue bird with X. After buying the platform for $44 billion last year, Musk announced a number of changes, including limiting the number of tweets users can see and installing a subscription system for blue ticks that saw the verification taken away from notable profiles. The changes have alienated some users and turned off advertisers, leaving the microblogging site vulnerable to new threats, including rival Meta's new text-based app Threads that directly targets Twitter users. Despite this, Musk...

Elon Musk has taken a wrecking ball to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, first gutting the foundation and now demolishing the façade. But according to Dorsey, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Twitter, Musk's latest idea to scrap the site’s blue bird logo and rename the platform to X as an “accelerant” for creating an everything app — an earthquake in the corporate branding world — is nothing to get excited about. “Keep calm and just x through it,” Dorsey posted late on Sunday on his former platform. Dorsey has been accused of letting the fox into the henhouse when he...

A multi-institutional team of engineers in China has developed a new type of brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be easily slipped in and out of the ear canal. In their project, reported in the journal Nature Communications, the group set out to design and build a new kind of BCI that is less invasive than existing devices. A brain-computer interface is a device that allows communication between the brain and a computer—though to date, most such devices are one-directional. They are used to listen to brain waves for such applications as converting them to text or to electronic signals that...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) responded on Twitter to Hunter Biden’s lawyer requesting the Office of Congressional Ethics take action against her for showing redacted-nude photos of the president’s son during a House Oversight Committee hearing. Greene said Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell’s, letter confirms the pictures she displayed are of the first son and a prostitute and that they confirm “his violation of the MANN act by sex trafficking a victim across state lines.” On Wednesday, during a hearing with the two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Greene held up a poster board that showed Hunter Biden performing sexual acts...

The former US president’s absorbing new playlist also features Ice Spice, Nicki Minaj and Michael Kiwanuka.Former President Barack Obama has shared his playlist of his current favorite songs for Summer 2023. His latest picks include selections by The Rolling Stones (“Soul Survivor,”) Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj (“Princess Diana”) Aretha Franklin (“Dr.Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Buisness”) and Jorja Smith (“Try Me”) in addition to cuts from SZA, Boygenius, Pearl Jam, John Coltrane, Janelle Monae, Marvin Gaye and many more. “Like I do every year, here are some songs I’ve been listening to this summer—a mix of old and new,”...

"DishBrain" computer chips fusing human brain cells with electronic circuits and AI intelligence could underpin the next generation of learning robotsAI-generated by Midjourney =========================================================== Last year, Monash University scientists created the "DishBrain" – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes. The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells...

Absolutely amazing breakthroughs concerning graphene. A new way to make it that is economical, judicial with the energy needed, and makes clean energy in the process. Sounds too good to be true but looks real. Watch and be amazed.

Disgraced former ABC investigative journalist James Gordon Meek is reportedly set to plead guilty to federal child pornography offenses, which could have put him behind bars for decades. Meek, 53, is expected to change his plea to guilty during an appearance in a federal courtroom in Virginia on Friday. The move to change his plea comes after his attorney filed a motion in June to delay his July trial, The Daily Beast reported. The filing argued a delay would allow Meek's team and prosecutors to 'engage in discussions regarding the possible resolution of the case.' A plea deal could allow...

So I have a standard Wix site for my business currently. I'm looking to revamp it to be more interactive with video, booking features etc. Our current site has 6 pages and would likely stay that way. I'm just curious as to what I can expect from a starting cost standpoint.

YouTubers Shane Dawson and Ryland Adams have announced that a woman they hired to be a surrogate is now pregnant with twins. There is concern over the well-being of the children due to Dawson’s past inappropriate behavior regarding children. In a video announcement, Dawson and Adams traveled to Seattle, Washington, to attend the six-week ultrasound the surrogate was undergoing, which was delayed a week so that the men could be present, according to People. In the newly released video which was filmed back in May, Adams states, “We’re pregnant, b***!” “Whatever God wants for us is what it’s gonna be,”...

Linux is now a little more than three 3 per cent of the desktop OS market, excluding the just over four per cent that is ChromeOS. Which is also Linux, but the wrong kind of Linux. Web server statistics aggregator Statcounter announced last week that as of June 2023, Linux accounts for 3 per cent of desktop operating system use. However, this is still surpassed by ChromeOS, which means that desktop Linux has less than half of the desktop Linux market. If you feel that this is a bit weird, we agree with you.Apparently, desktop Linux use measures 3.08 per...

We just created a new website and aren't keen on the company we engaged to do that, who are currently handling the hosting/maintenance. We'd like to contract directly with an entity to host it ourselves and possibly even maintain it ourselves, as there should be very little changes to it overall. The site was created through wordpress. Would love some guidance on taking over the daily/monthly ourselves.

My last computer question here on FR generated a lot of furor and only limited useful information (mostly positive comments regarding the Firefox browser.) But I'd like more info (feedback) from FReepers who may have used Brave or Opera, for comparison, as I got none in my prior thread. Pro's and cons from hopefully extensive use would be great to receive! In online articles, Brave seems particularly well thought of from a privacy and security standpoint, without going to the extremes (and more limited functionality) of TOR.

Anyone who downloaded File Recovery & Data Recovery or File Manager are urged to wipe the allegedly compromised apps from their devices. According to cybersecurity firm Pradeo, the supposed file management applications are actually “programmed to launch without users’ interaction, and to silently exfiltrate sensitive users’ data towards various malicious servers based in China.”

I do a lot of printing of receipts and such from the Web, and print previews become "an issue". I both screen capture them as png files, and of course often print them. Internet Explorer gives one a WYSIWYG preview / display, and the WYSIWYG includes a (roughly) std. 8-1/2" x 11" image to view or even screen capture and save. I really like that 8-1/2" x 11" image. But, of course, IE is old hat, doesn't work on many sites, and probably isn't what you want to use if paying some company via the Web, anyway. Chrome's security issues...

There seems to be no way to get certain desired exe files (apps) to show up in the "All Programs" list in the Windows 10 Pro Start Menu. (This is common to Win 7 also, I believe, and perhaps earlier OS's as well.) I can add such exe's* to the Start Menu "tiles" in Win 10 Pro, but not to the "All Programs" list. This seems quite odd, but maybe I'm missing something? *Examples of such apps / exe files are "IV_Player" (Irfan View Player, a very handy & lightweight media file player), as well as "Wavosaur", a handy and...

Woman Remains Certain Boyfriend is Not a Romance Scammer

A 13-year-old girl in China spent around $64,000 of her parents' money on mobile games this year, wiping out their savings account without their knowledge. Gong Yiwang learned about the spending spree in late May after receiving a call from a teacher at her daughter's boarding school, who worried the child was addicted to pay-to-play games, according to Elephant News, a regional TV channel in the Henan province. When Gong checked her bank account, she realized it was left with a bank balance of only seven cents. She later discovered that from January to May, her daughter had spent around...

Propelling ahead at breakneck speed, the globalist elite are implementing their plan to utilize CBDCs embedded under the skin, aiming to abolish the Second Amendment.The World Economic Forum has called on Western nations to “urgently” ban cash and implement a Chinese-style social credit score system amid growing public rejection of the globalist agenda.The WEF urged world leaders to begin fast-tracking the implementation of CBDC’s during the “Summer Davos” event last week.For years now the globalist elite have been telling us about their plans to seize control of every aspect of our lives and turn the world into a giant prison,...