Free Republic

Microsoft aims to smoothly transition from one presidential administration to the next. The company recently secured a major win in DC, receiving the official blessing of the President in a $500 billion AI investment partnership between SoftBank, Oracle, and Microsoft’s OpenAI. But as official policy turns against online censorship, the tech giant may have to confront its track record of deep involvement in the suppression of Americans’ online speech. Newly uncovered evidence now shows that Microsoft served as the tip of the spear in the private sector in censorship-industrial complex – the coordinated effort between corporations, government agencies, NGOs and...

The US Postal Service (USPS) said it has stopped accepting parcels from mainland China and Hong Kong until further notice. Letters will not be affected by the suspension, said the company, which declined to offer a reason for the decision, external. However, on Tuesday new rules came into force which closed a loophole that allowed small packages worth $800 (£641) or less to be sent to the US without paying tax or fees. It was one of the measures announced by US President Donald Trump who imposed an additional 10% tariff on all goods imported to the US from China....

I am a fan of these type of safety campaigns. I personally cannot get enough of them.

Another day, another backdoor. In this video, we're talking about the CMS8000, a medical device that contains some interesting features.

Hoping to avoid misinformation about President Donald Trump’s nominees and appointments on Wikipedia? Good luck. Wikipedia has designed a protocol that directly and unerringly produces the worst descriptions about conservatives and Republicans by virtually guaranteeing that right-leaning media sources cannot be cited. The once reliable online encyclopedia ran off the rails under the leadership of its previous CEO Katherine Maher, who made sure that not a single right-leaning outlet was deemed “reliable”—a stark contrast to the 84 percent of leftist media Wikipedia deems reliable. A new study by Media Research Center Free Speech America found that Wikipedia, the encyclopedia behemoth,...

UVeye, the Israeli startup redefining vehicle inspections with AI-powered scanning, raised $191M in a funding round led by Toyota and Amazon; The company, scanning nearly 1M vehicles monthly, plans to expand globally, targeting car dealerships, fleets and insurance markets How can a car be inspected in seconds, generating a comprehensive report on engine condition, chassis, bodywork, and tires? This is precisely the solution offered by UVeye, an Israeli startup that has developed an AI-based automatic vehicle scanning technology with no human contact required. The technology has proven to be a massive success, currently scanning nearly one million vehicles per month....

Today's 52nd issue of the Bee Forum News marks one year of weekly showcasing the funniest headlines on the Babylon Bee subscriber forum. Click here to read our first issue. Congrats to every Bee subscriber who had a headline published in the Bee Forum News this year - it's harder than it looks! There's so much more than bold reporting that happens on the forum, but if I told you, well...you know the thing. Join us to find out for yourself! But that's not all that happened this week.... Read on for exclusive headlines you will only see here on...

BEIJING, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Chinese tech company Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition. "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,"...

01-29-25 This happened over Alaska. Pilot ejected and is OK https://www.eielson.af.mil/News/Display/Article/4047595/press-release-f-35-aircraft-crash-update/ Press Release: F-35 aircraft crash update Published Jan. 29, 2025 By 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska -- An F-35A Lightning II aircraft crash occurred on Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, at 12:49 p.m. Jan. 28, 2025. The aircraft was preparing to land during a training flight when an in-flight emergency occurred. The pilot successfully ejected prior to the crash in accordance with emergency procedures. The pilot was transported to Bassett Army Hospital in Fairbanks for further evaluation and has...

Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people from the internet using dating apps? Well, look no further. Australia’s News.com.au profiled one such person this week, a young worker inside of a “mass scamming call center”. The person, named “Beard”, said that he “fled war-torn Syria for Dubai” and was desperately looking for work. Thinking he landed an advertising role, he told news.com.au he found himself at a “bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport”. He was eventually held captive and forced to scam...

The website for the US Agency for International Development, or USAid, appeared to be offline on Saturday, as the Trump administration moves to put the free-standing agency, and its current $42.8bn budget for global humanitarian operations, under state department control. A message stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appeared when attempts were made to access the website on Saturday. Two sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters on Friday that the Trump administration was moving to strip USAid of its independence as a government agency and put it under state department control. The apparent failure of...

Is DeepSeek inaccurate? … claims of plagiarism … how DeepSeek’s technology works … the risks it represents … a roundtable discussion with our expertsThe DeepSeek story continues to evolve as new information comes to light.Let’s begin with Reuters: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...

This brief post is for recommended extensions and themes for Gecko-based browsers (such as Floorp, Firefox, Waterfox Classic) browsers. First, as one who "needs" multiple tab rows, then unlike with minimalist Chrome, these are possible to obtain in Firefox via The Patcher (as well as Vivaldi - the best Chromium-based browser IMO), but since this takes some time, then I recommend trying Floorp, a Gecko/Firefox-based browser, originally built by two Japanese students, that has no Firefox telemetry options, and comes with the powerful tracking blocker/ad blocker uBlock Origin. And within the Settings section are a multitude of GUI customization...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...