Free Republic 3rd Qtr 2025 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $21,379
26%  
Woo hoo!! And we're now over 26%!! Thank you all very much!! God bless.

Computers/Internet (General/Chat)

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Dell CEO says he’s ‘retiring’ hybrid work, claiming that email exchanges waste time: ‘For all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction’

    02/01/2025 5:59:24 AM PST · by Tolerance Sucks Rocks · 52 replies
    MSN.com ^ | January 31, 2025 | Chloe Berger, Fortune
    Dell workers are being called back to the office full-time. The company’s CEO, Michael Dell, wrote that they are “retiring hybrid policy,” starting March 3rd for all employees that live near the office—according to a memo as obtained by Business Insider. The email, sent Friday morning, lauds in-person human collaboration as the most efficient form of working, an interesting argument for a tech company. “What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” wrote Dell, claiming that a “thirty second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes...
  • Backdoor found in two healthcare patient monitors, linked to IP in China

    01/31/2025 8:49:05 PM PST · by Pete from Shawnee Mission · 24 replies
    BleepingComputer ^ | 1/30/2025 | Lawrence Abrams
    The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that Contec CMS8000 devices, a widely used healthcare patient monitoring device, include a backdoor that quietly sends patient data to a remote IP address and downloads and executes files on the device. Contec is a China-based company that specializes in healthcare technology, offering a range of medical devices including patient monitoring systems, diagnostic equipment, and laboratory instruments. CISA learned of the malicious behavior from an external researcher who disclosed the vulnerability to the agency. When CISA tested three Contec CMS8000 firmware packages, the researchers discovered anomalous network traffic to a...
  • Alibaba claims its AI model trounces DeepSeek and OpenAI competitors

    01/31/2025 8:44:53 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 20 replies
    Live Science ^ | January 29, 2025 | Ben Turner
    Chinese tech company Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims outperforms its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek. The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max model yesterday (Jan. 29) is the second major AI announcement from China this week, after DeepSeek's R1 open-weight model took the world by storm following claims that it performs better and is more cost-effective than its American competitors. Now, Alibaba claims that Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partly open-source, is even more impressive — surpassing a number of rival models in various tests run by the company. "In benchmark tests such as...
  • Trump’s ‘make peace or die’ message to Putin is deepfake. Yet it fooled Russians

    01/31/2025 11:43:37 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 18 replies
    In the video Trump appears as saying: "I do think Putin is a strong leader, and I respect that, but he plays bad games. And that always ends badly. We all remember the story of Saddam, Ceausescu, and, of course, Gadhafi ... terrible death. I tell you, but that's how it ends. So, Vladimir, let's not let it come to that." The video went viral by Jan. 24, spilling over to other social media platforms and even news outlets. Then, BAZA, ce Hʼyuston Telegram channel’s SMM specialists announced in the comment to the original post that the video is a...
  • Why Do We Use “CC” in an Email? An Anachronism that has Survived 150 years

    01/31/2025 8:23:16 AM PST · by SeekAndFind · 144 replies
    Word Smarts ^ | 01/31/2025 | Rachel Gresh
    The evolution of technology is unrelentingly swift. Generations have witnessed state-of-the-art inventions become obsolete in the blink of an eye. The fax machine, the pager, and the landline, all once revolutionary, have earned their place in the annals of history. Yet email — born in 1971 when engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the very first “ping” — has remarkably endured. This persistent form of communication continues to redefine itself for the digital age, but one enigmatic email feature hasn’t changed for over 50 years: the “cc.” The “cc” field is a familiar sight perched within the recipient line of an email....
  • We Asked China’s Newest A.I. Model Five Normal Questions — We Got Five Creepy Commie Answers

    01/31/2025 7:28:03 AM PST · by SeekAndFind · 65 replies
    Daily Caller News via Liberty Daily ^ | 01/30/2025 | Thomas English
    DeepSeek, China’s new artificial intelligence model, refuses to answer certain questions about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and responds to others with brazen propaganda. DeepSeek has captivated Silicon Valley this week, with U.S. tech leaders simultaneously impressed and concerned over the model matching the capabilities of firms like OpenAI at substantially lower costs. While the language model performs similarly to mainstream U.S. companies in programming and scientific benchmarks, it differs in its apparent reverence for China’s ruling party. The AI system refused to answer the Daily Caller News Foundation’s questions entirely when prompted to critique Chinese President Xi Jinping, or...
  • DeepSeek's chatbot achieves 17% accuracy, trails Western rivals in NewsGuard audit

    01/30/2025 9:33:22 PM PST · by SeekAndFind · 23 replies
    Reuters ^ | 01/30/2025
    Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting in an 83% fail rate, according to a report published by trustworthiness rating service NewsGuard on Wednesday. That was worse than an average fail rate of 62% for its Western rivals and raises doubts about AI...
  • OpenAI says DeepSeek stole ChatGPT data sets to train its AI Model, claims to have 'solid evidence'

    01/30/2025 9:04:55 PM PST · by SeekAndFind · 33 replies
    FirstPost ^ | 01/30/2025
    OpenAI has claimed it found evidence suggesting that DeepSeek used distillation, a technique that extracts data from larger models to train smaller ones. OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which cost over $100 million to train, is an example of a large and complex AI system.OpenAI has raised serious concerns about Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, suspecting the company of using its data to train its own models. DeepSeek has gained significant attention for its cost-effective AI solutions, which are seen as strong competitors to OpenAI’s offerings. Following this, OpenAI and its partner Microsoft are now investigating whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s API to integrate...
  • China graduates more than five times as many iSTEM students each year; Don’t Worry, We Graduate More Gender Studies and Sociology Majors

    01/30/2025 3:31:15 PM PST · by SeekAndFind · 48 replies
    Unleash Prosperity ^ | 01/30/2025 | Steve Moore
    While we’re on the subject of school daze, our friend John Mauldin of Mauldineconomics.com wonders whether the news of China’s Deepseek AI breakthroughs means America may be facing another “Sputnik Moment.” America has completely dominated the global tech sector for fifty years, but U.S. tech leadership now may be hard to maintain in the years ahead. This chart showing that China graduates more than five times as many iSTEM students each year is certainly worrisome. The silver lining is that if OUR kids aren’t learning math and science skills, we can always hand out visas to the brainiacs of the...
  • Vanity: Question about Cell Phone Plans

    01/30/2025 3:18:12 PM PST · by Jamestown1630 · 93 replies
    I am thinking of changing cell phone plans, and have been looking at Pure Talk. I make very few calls on my cell phone, and maybe a couple of texts a week, both usually from home. I need to have some data, in case I’m out and need to call someone, or a cab, road service, find a map, etc. – but I have almost never used that. I do NO business on the cell phone, and most of our telephone use is VOIP from home. Frankly, the main thing I use a cell phone for is listening to the...
  • Hack-Proof Encryption: How AI and Holograms Are Making Data Unbreakable

    01/30/2025 10:56:22 AM PST · by ShadowAce · 6 replies
    SciTechDaily ^ | 30 January 2025 | Optica
    Researchers have designed a cutting-edge optical security system that uses holograms to encode information, rendering it unreadable without an AI-driven decryption key. Credit: SciTechDaily.com By combining AI with holographic encryption, scientists have developed an ultra-secure data protection system.Their method scrambles laser beams into chaotic patterns, making decryption impossible without a trained neural network. This innovation could revolutionize cryptography.Holograms for Next-Level EncryptionAs the demand for digital security grows, researchers have developed a new optical system that uses holograms to encode information, creating a level of encryption that traditional methods cannot penetrate. This advance could pave the way for more secure communication...
  • AI Proof Jobs for 2025: Careers Technology Won’t Replace

    01/30/2025 10:12:10 AM PST · by SeekAndFind · 64 replies
    Vault ^ | 01/30/2025 | Rob Porter
    As artificial intelligence continues to redefine industries, fears about job displacement have grown. While automation is reshaping the workforce, certain careers remain resilient, relying on skills, creativity, and judgment that machines can’t easily replicate. These “AI-proof” roles leverage uniquely human traits, offering stability in a rapidly evolving world.Mental Health ProfessionalsAI may assist with diagnostics or administrative tasks in healthcare, but it lacks the emotional intelligence to provide compassionate mental health care. Along with empathy, mental health professionals possess excellent communication, active listening, and problem-solving skills, most of which are uniquely human. Further, mental health care relies heavily upon deep interpersonal...
  • DeepSeek Launch

    01/29/2025 6:01:18 AM PST · by delta7 · 45 replies
    Armstrong Economics ^ | 29 Jan 25 | Martin Armstrong
    It was only a matter of time before an innovative mind created the next mainstream AI tool to compete with ChatGPT. In a massive step toward AI advancement, Liang Wenfeng of China launched DeepSeek, an open-source large language models (LLM) intended to compete if not one day overshadow ChatGPT. The launch immediately wiped $1 trillion off the US stock exchange and the tech competition between China and the US is coming to a head. ChatGPT is run by OpenAI. Its creation marked the dawn of a new way of interacting with the internet and accessing information. Users can ask AI...
  • "you hear that, it's empty"

    01/29/2025 11:28:19 AM PST · by NohSpinZone · 14 replies
    X ^ | 1/29/2025 | Nature is Amazing
    💢 "you hear that, it's empty"
  • Should You Buy Nvidia Stock in the Wake of the DeepSeek Bombshell? Here's What Wall Street Is Saying.

    01/29/2025 9:43:48 AM PST · by SeekAndFind · 23 replies
    American Wealth Investing ^ | 01/29/2025 | Danny Vena
    Technology stocks were rocked to their core Monday after claims made by a Chinese start-up threatened to upend the existing artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm.There’s a compelling argument that recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) could have vast implications for the future. Over the past couple of years, advances in generative AI have helped fuel a roaring bull market with promises of significant productivity increases. The potential windfall of increased profits has companies racing to adopt these next-generation algorithms.One of the biggest beneficiaries of these secular tailwinds has been Nvidia (NVDA 8.93%). The company’s graphic processing units (GPUs),...
  • The paradox at the heart of the AI debate

    01/29/2025 7:50:24 AM PST · by Red Badger · 30 replies
    Axios ^ | January 29, 2025 | Felix Salmon
    Investors in energy stocks panicked this week over the release of a new, cheaper AI model, ignoring an argument that reducing the energy needs of such models could actually increase demand for energy overall. Why it matters: The news could end up being bullish for those stocks, which lost more than $40 billion in value on Monday. How it works: The Jevons Paradox, as first formulated in 1865 by English economist William Stanley Jevons, states that greater efficiency in the use of any given resource can result in increased demand for that resource. His example was coal: After the Watt...
  • A Third Type of Magnetism? Altermagnetism Named Top Physics Breakthrough of 2024

    01/29/2025 5:35:40 AM PST · by Red Badger · 16 replies
    Scitech Daily ^ | January 28, 2025 | Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
    Altermagnetism was first theorized in 2019 and experimentally confirmed in 2024 by researchers at Mainz University. It bridges the gap between traditional magnetic classifications, offering practical applications in advanced data storage systems. Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2024 Science and research continuously deliver groundbreaking discoveries, expanding the boundaries of what we know. Each year, the renowned journal Science highlights ten of these achievements in its list of top scientific breakthroughs. For 2024, the journal named the drug lenacapavir — hailed for its potential to reduce HIV/AIDS infections to zero — as the Breakthrough of the Year. In the realm of physics,...
  • Lady Gaga vows 'we're not going down without a fight' in fiery interview after Trump election victory

    01/28/2025 5:36:57 PM PST · by dennisw · 84 replies
    DAILYMAIL.COM ^ | 28 January 2025 | By DEIRDRE DURKAN-SIMONDS
    Lady Gaga vowed to continue fighting for the LGBTQ+ community following the 2024 presidential election, which she called 'devastating' for so many. In a new Elle interview, which took place six days after the results of the American election were announced, the singer, 38, reflected on her reaction to Donald Trump stepping into the role as the 45th president of the United States. 'What's bizarre is I did not write this album thinking that this would happen. I prayed it would not. But here we are,' the Poker Face hitmaker said ahead of the release of her seventh record, Mayhem,...
  • The next driver you cut off on the freeway may be invisible

    01/28/2025 1:45:11 PM PST · by BenLurkin · 44 replies
    ktla.com ^ | Posted: Jan 28, 2025 | : Peter Wilgoren
    Waymo, one of the companies at the forefront of driverless tech, confirmed to KTLA that it will begin testing fully autonomous passenger cars on L.A. freeways this week. Fully autonomous for Waymo means “without a human driver.” The driverless white vehicles with radar gizmos attached to the roof and sides have already been ferrying riders on city streets across the area, from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. However, this is their first time conducting driverless tests on the interstates. “Our initial testing will begin on the 10, 110, 90, and 405 (freeways),” Waymo told KTLA 5 News. The initial tests...
  • Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

    01/28/2025 10:52:19 AM PST · by ShadowAce · 196 replies
    The Register ^ | 28 January 2025 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    Come October 14, 2025, Windows 10 support dies. Despite that, more users than ever are using Windows 10 rather than moving to Windows 11. I can't say that I blame them. Windows 11 sucks almost as much as Vista – remember that stinker? In addition, Windows 11 is less of a desktop operating system than it is a remote Microsoft client equipped with AI-powered Recall, telemetry, and data collection. You may see these as features. I see them as spyware. All this and more is why I use Linux for my primary desktop.True, I've been using Linux as my desktop...