Free Republic

Vanity: Massive IT Outage Hits Major U.S. Hospital Chain: Microsoft Crowdstrike Glitch Forces Cancellation of All Elective Surgeries and Medical Procedures....

Some food for thought about Pres Trump's speech, customer service, and planning for contingencies. 1. Last night during his speech Pres Trump pointed out that so far $6.1M had been raised for the three affected families. He also pulled out a physical check (not a personal check) for $1M. He said softly "thanks Dan." I *do* wonder if the Dan of that donation is Dan Bongino. Dan's there at the RNC; he's a personal friend-acquaintance of Mr. Trump with access; and this is the kind of thing Dan can now do due to his success. 2. For years I have...

An assisted suicide device dubbed the “Tesla of euthanasia” is facing backlash after it was set to be used for the first time next week in Switzerland. The pod, named Sacro, created by 76-year-old Dr. Philip Nitschke was scheduled for use sometime next week in Switzerland, according to Metro. However, prosecutors are now reportedly fighting to ban its use, the outlet reported. While voluntary assisted suicide is legal in the country, some are questioning if it’s idealizing death, with some pro-life groups arguing the pods “glamorise suicide,” the Daily Mail reported. The pod is supposed to fill with nitrogen and...

J. Michael Cline -- founder of movie ticketing app Fandango -- has died after leaping from a building in New York City ... TMZ has confirmed. Law enforcement sources tell us ... the entrepreneur jumped from the 20th floor of The Kimberly Hotel in Manhattan, landing in a third-floor courtyard early Tuesday morning. We're told he left a suicide note in the room that reads, "So sorry. I can’t explain the pain of f****** up this much. I love you all." Our sources say he then went out onto the balcony and jumped. Cline started up Fandango way back in...

I've long used Norton Anti-Virus (I think they used to be called Symantec). But I think it's a memory hog. Sometimes it seems to use all available CPU. When I do a video screen capture on a movie that I'm playing, the movie records all jittery, full of pauses. I Disable Norton's Auto-Protect, but that doesn't help. I wonder if Norton is obeying me?Norton foisted a VPN onto my computer. I tried it several times, but it never works, never makes a connection. Only tells me to try later.When I renewed last year, I checked a box to not renew...

A hacking group known as NullBulge claimed to have released a vast trove of data for download from internal Disney Slack channels, including unreleased projects, login details and raw images and code. The apparent hacktivist group - which purports to defend artists from corporations that use their work to train artificial intelligence systems - said Friday it dumped 1.1 tebibytes of files and chat messages belonging to the entertainment and technology giant online. The hack affected Disney's workplace collaboration platform, Slack, which reportedly contained nearly 10,000 channels, in addition to countless messages and attachments. "Anything we could get our hands...

The e-commerce leader in Europe is Amazon - but Chinese ventures into international e-commerce, for example AliExpress or more recently Temu, have made inroads. The following infographic, via Statista's Anna Fleck, looks specifically at the example of the Chinese company Pinduoduo, drawing from ecommmerceDB figures. You will find more infographics at StatistaAccording to this data, Pinduoduo will only be 13 percent behind Amazon in terms of gross merchandise volume in 2024. To put this in perspective: in 2019, Amazon's gross merchandise volume was more than twice as large as that of Pinduoduo.Pinduoduo also owns the online marketplace Temu.The Temu app...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – The Sioux Falls School District quickly fired an employee Monday who wrote a controversial Facebook post about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. In a statement to KELOLAND News, the SFSD said officials became aware of a social media post by a “district staff member” and “the District’s Code of Conduct Policy (GBEB) clearly outlines the high standards to which we hold all staff members.” “The staff member’s statement does not align with the School District’s values and was not condoned in any way. The individual is no longer employed by the Sioux...

Big Tech consumes more than many countries.. Tech giants Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh each of electricity during 2023, surpassing the consumption of more than 100 countries, new research has claimed. Analysis by Michael Thomas, shared on X, claims both Google and Microsoft consumed the same amount of energy as Azerbaijan, which has an estimated GDP of $78.7 billion. Google’s 2023 revenue stood at $307.4 billion, and Microsoft’s at $211.9 billion. The massive energy usage underscores the substantial environmental impact of these companies. But it also serves as a reminder of their sheer scale, and the positive impact...

The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen. Hanna – the name she goes by – is now missing her right breast after her skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction surgery was swapped out for a simple mastectomy at the last minute. I never thought it was going to be due to a cyberattack by Russian hackers. That was not something that I would have...

@elonmusk This is the final straw. Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas. RE: @libsoftiktok Gavin Newsom signed AB1955 today which bans schools from making rules requiring parental notification if a child identifies as transgender. ... @elonmusk I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children

From the beginning of recorded history, humans have made monumental decisions based upon the needs of their children. Some parents would move far away from the land in which they themselves were born and raised, because they wanted their children to have a better chance in the world.The Pilgrims, who left England, and many who followed them, came to America both for religious freedom, and a better future for their children. Many may remember the television series based upon Laura Ingalls Wilders’ novel, Little House on The Prairie. It’s the story of a man who moved west so his...

OpenAI’s rumored project Strawberry is focused on enhancing the reasoning capabilities of its AI models. Strawberry is rumored to be based upon the QStar AI advance. QStar was a reasoning advance that supposedly triggered the power struggle inside OpenAI and temporary firing of CEO Sam Altman. Strawberry supposedly enables AI to perform long-horizon tasks (LHT), which require a model to plan ahead and execute a series of actions over an extended period of time. This technology aims to improve AI’s ability to understand and interact with the world, allowing it to autonomously search the internet and conduct deep research. By...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has discovered that a Russian bot farm, with over 900 AI-generated fake social media accounts, has been spreading propaganda and disinformation around the US and other countries. What has the bot farm been posting? Most of the AI-generated fake profiles look like they belong to American citizens, with biographical information, political ideologies, locations, personas, backstories, photos, friends, and families, and have been posting videos, content, and images to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other pro-Kremlin initiatives. One of these fake profiles professed to be a Bitcoin enthusiast and a free speech absolutist, from Minneapolis,...

China is leading the world in adopting generative AI, a new survey shows, the latest sign the country is making strides in the technology that gained global attention after U.S.-based OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in late 2022. In a survey of 1,600 decision-makers in industries worldwide by U.S. AI and analytics software company SAS and Coleman Parkes Research, 83% of Chinese respondents said they used generative AI, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.That was higher than the 16 other countries and regions in the survey, including the United States, where 65% of respondents said they had adopted GenAI. The global average was 54%....

Talk about a mask-off moment. On Wednesday, the Democratic Socialists of America yanked their endorsement of progressive darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, bestowed just a week prior, for the sin of . . . acknowledging the reality of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement. The DSA’s national apparatus had tentatively given the endorsement June 23, on the condition that AOC completely toe the group’s line on Israel, which apparently means staying dead silent on the issue of rampant leftist Jew-hate. The group listed several supposed indiscretions in their indictment of AOC, including her vote affirming the Jewish state’s right to exist last...

Howie Carr brings on American Thinker and Substack columnist Jay Valentine who has worked hard to get the attention of the RNC when it comes to election integrity. STARTS AT 2 MIN - ENDS AT 14 MIN go to: Omega4America.com for more information

Last week, Sony broke the news that it is putting the kibosh on its writeable Blu-Ray disc business. While that’s not catastrophic news for physical media fans, it’s certainly disappointing. The first hint about the death of Sony’s recordable discs business was a rumor about layoffs at the company’s optical media plant that recently circulated the web. That rumor was ultimately confirmed by Japanese outlet AV Watch last week. Tom’s Hardware subsequently picked up the news last week and translated it into English, setting off a minor panic about what impact this could have on Blu-Ray fans’ collecting habits. While...

Cyber experts have urgently warned people to update their passwords after a hacker uploaded billions of login details. The leak, called RockYou2024, was posted on July 4th containing a staggering 10 billion passwords from a compilation of old and new data breaches. Researchers who revealed the leak said the information could allow hackers to target any system that isn’t protected by strict security software including online and offline services, online cameras and industrial hardware. This could prompt a wave of data breaches, financial fraud and identity theft using the passwords, which were collected from more than 4,000 databases over the...

here are some things that computers, for all their prowess, don't do well – and one of them is randomness. Sure, computers spit out data all the time, why not random numbers? The problem is that computers rely on internal mechanisms that are at some level predictable, meaning the outputs of computer algorithms eventually become predictable, too, which is not what you want if you're running a casino. The same issue can cause headaches for cryptographers. When you encrypt information, you want the keys to the code to be as random as possible, so that no-one can work out how...