Free Republic

Here is the full 50-minute conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky. There are a lot of politicians claiming Zelensky was "ambushed." There was a full 40 minutes of dialogue before the "fireworks" started. The president insisted throughout the first 40 minutes that he was focused on peace. Zelensky responded by strongly pushing back on a ceasefire with Russia and demanded that Putin pay for the entire war. JD Vance jumps in at the 40-minute mark to clarify the difference between Trump and Biden and their approach to the war. This apparently ticked off Zelensky which is when the fireworks...

One of America’s biggest banks accidentally transferred more than $80 trillion (£64 trillion) to a customer’s account after a “fat finger” input error by an employee. Citigroup, one of America’s “big four” lenders, erroneously transferred $81 trillion to the account in April last year instead of the $280 requested because of a keyboard mistake by a bank staffer. The huge sum, worth more than 20 times Britain’s entire gross domestic product (GDP), was approved after being checked by two of the bank’s employees, before being sent to the customer account the following morning. The payment was only flagged after a...

After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Skype users have 10 weeks to decide what they want to do with their account. It’s not clear how many people are impacted. The most recent numbers that Microsoft had shared were in 2023, when it said it had more than 36 million users — a long way from Skype’s peak of 300 million users....

Several months ago I bought a new laptop, 128 GB RAM, 13th Generation i9 CPU, running Win 11.Should be faster than my nine-years old laptop, 32 GB RAM, i7 CPU, Win 7.Two days ago I bought two external HDDs (Western Digital Passports), 6 TB each.I then copied (drag & drop method) a folder from an old WD passport to the new, larger one. Folder contained over 2,900 MP4 files, 29 subfolders, at about 1.97 TB total.It took over 8 hours to copy.Then verified that all the files were copied by clicking Properties on the old and copied folders. My new...

Taliban's police force proudly shows off its newly-acquired network of 90,000 CCTV cameras - used to watch over the day-to-day lives of millions of people. "We monitor the entire city of Kabul from here," says Khalid Zadran, a spokesperson for the Taliban police chief, pointing to one of the screens. The authorities say such surveillance will help fight crime, but critics fear it will be used to clamp down on dissent and to monitor the strict morality code enforced by the Islamist Taliban government under their interpretation of Sharia law. The BBC are the first international journalists allowed to see...

Nothing like giving the Christian progressives fuel. Apparently it was on Truth Social, but I could not find it

Verizon, the biggest carrier in the United States, is also the fastest when it comes to 5G upload speeds, at least in theory. The Big Red claims it successfully completed a trial in collaboration with Ericsson and Qualcomm, achieving North American uplink speeds of 480 Mbps.During the test, Verizon made use of Advanced 5G technologies, which combines two TDD carrier component aggregation with C-band spectrum and uplink MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output). The combination of these technologies enabled the companies to achieve a US record-breaking 480 Mbps uplink speed using sub-6 GHz spectrum...Verizon expects to attract numerous businesses with its...

Meta Platforms (META), the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is in discussions to construct a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence projects, with potential costs exceeding $200 billion, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta executives have informed data center developers that the company is considering building the campus in states including Louisiana, Wyoming or Texas, with senior leaders having visited potential sites this month, the report said. Since the launch of Microsoft (MSFT) backed OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, investment in AI has surged as companies across various sectors strive to incorporate...

TikTok refugees fled by the millions to RedNote, a Chinese app, in response to the TikTok ban, which went into effect Jan. 19, 2025. The company shut down the app shortly before midnight on Jan. 18 but restored service the following day. The app was unavailable to download from the Apple and Google app stores on Jan. 19. Through cat memes, shared jokes about the ban and honest conversations about usually avoided topics, former TikTokers and RedNote natives are bridging years of U.S.-China digital separation. This spontaneous convergence recalls the internet’s original dream of a global village. It’s a glimmer...

Researchers have developed a new type of photochromic glass that can store and rewrite data indefinitely.By embedding magnesium and terbium, they’ve created a material that changes colors under different wavelengths of light, allowing for high-density, long-term storage without power. This breakthrough could revolutionize data preservation.Exploring the Potential of Glass for Data StorageFor years, scientists have explored the potential of glass as a long-term data storage medium, drawn to its ability to preserve information for eons without requiring power. One promising candidate is photochromic glass, a special type of glass that changes color when exposed to different wavelengths of light. Now,...

An analyst note flagging a possible slowdown by Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab in leasing data center capacity grabbed the market's attention on Monday, lending credence to skepticism among investors worried that the AI-led stock-market boom might be running out of steam. TD Cowen analysts in a note Friday said the tech giant had scrapped leases for sizeable data center capacity in the United States, suggesting potential oversupply as it builds out artificial intelligence infrastructure. The brokerage, citing its supply chain checks, said Microsoft has canceled leases totaling "a couple of hundred megawatts" of capacity with at least two private...

Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, the AI suggests a response, but it’s humans who are ultimately responsible for the message. Sonar...says it’s now available to more than 4,500 middle and high school students across nine districts. The company says the chats are currently being monitored by a team of six people with backgrounds in psychology, social work, and crisis-line support. CEO Drew Barvir told the Journal that he makes it clear to students and schools that Sonny isn’t a therapist and that Sonar staffers...

Ryan Duff, a self-described internet sleuth, published evidence that the person running the account wasn’t who she claimed.The person behind a popular “tradwife” social media account apologized Monday for misleading followers into thinking the account owner was an ultraconservative married mother of 14. “I just want to say that I am sorry for the lies I told and the hurt I caused. I never intended for this account to become as big as it did, and once things started snowballing, I enjoyed the relationships I’d built and didn’t know how to put an end to it,” the person behind the...

The Wagoner County Sheriff's Office is warning of a new scam where hackers are compromising accounts using clickjacking. WCSO said clickjacking is an old scam with a new variation. Clickjacking is an method where hackers, scammers or other criminals hijack your clicks on one website, to perform malicious actions on another site. You might think you are clicking a button on the site you are currently browsing, but that click will be used for something different. WCSO said hackers have now added another click to this attack method to get around modern browsers no longer sending cross-site cookies. In the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration moved its fast-paced dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development toward what appeared to be its final phases, telling all but a fraction of staffers worldwide that they were on leave as of Monday and notifying at least 1,600 of the U.S.-based staffers they were being fired. The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps in what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old aid and development agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government. The...

I've been talking with Grok about random things. It really is incredible. ProtectOurFreedom ("POF"). How are you Mr. Grok? Grok 3 ("G3"). I’m doing great, thanks for asking! Just hanging out in the digital ether, ready to help and chat about whatever’s on your mind. How about you—how’s your day going so far? Anything exciting happen since you last worked with Randy Keiser? [Randy was a guy I worked with five decades ago] POF. Can you please emulate Eliza again? G3. I assume you mean ELIZA, the classic AI chatbot developed in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum, known for its...

It’s official: after 10 years of noble service, Windows 10 will reach its end on October 14, 2025, and what a great decade it’s been. For many users, Microsoft redeemed itself after a run of disappointing operating systems – the mere mention of Windows 8 still sends some people into a rage – but Windows 10 got it right. That’s why the announcement of Windows 11 came as a shock. It felt too soon, too rushed – and unnecessary. Many believed that Windows 10 deserved more time to marinate. At least until it finally managed to migrate the whole Control...

Back in 2012, “learn to code” was an optimistic mantra. Born from a viral marketing campaign for one of the earliest coding boot camps, it promised recession-burned career-changers a future-proof option. But that was when the future looked somewhat different.Recent cohorts of aspiring software developers are now looking for jobs in a post-pandemic tech sector riven by rampant layoffs. The Coding Bootcamp subreddit, a community with 48,000-plus members, is teeming with recent posts from graduates who are struggling to find work. Prospects have gotten so dire that one of the leading boot camps, Launch Academy, recently paused enrollment, citing a...

Freedom of expression is guaranteed in Article 5 of the Basic Law, the German constitution, which also makes clear that this freedom has limits in order to, for example, to protect young people, privacy or personal honor. The protection of personal honor plays a particularly important role in the German legal system, said lawyer Ralf Poscher, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg. “This originates from the time in history when notions of honor were even more important. They were then embraced by the middle classes too, and were incorporated into...

Microsoft (MSFT) on Wednesday announced a new kind of quantum computer chip that it says will make quantum computers useful in years, rather than decades in the future. The chip, called Majorana 1, uses what Microsoft says is a new type of material called a topoconductor, which the company claims takes advantage of a new state of matter that is not solid, liquid, or gas, but a topological state. The upshot is that Microsoft says its approach will help lead to chips that can perform complex tasks needed to research topics including material sciences and healthcare. Quantum computers are specialized...