Free Republic

Calling 911 is meant to save lives. But the emergency service, and others like it, are also viewed as ripe targets for criminally minded cyber-attackers, according to a new federal assessment – and any vulnerability in those critical networks can expose victims to a multitude of dangerous ripple effects. The analysis, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and obtained by ABC News, outlines concerns that the Emergency Service Sector can be exploited and mined for sensitive data, in turn hampering medical and law enforcement services and posing an ongoing threat to personal information and public safety. "Cybercriminal exploitation...

The Democratic mayor of Tennessee’s largest city, who has been accused of obstructing federal immigration efforts, defended his office’s decision to publicly dox the names of immigration officers. Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s defense came even after the names of federal immigration officials were removed from a public immigration report detailing a month’s worth of immigration-related interactions between local police and federal immigration authorities. Initially, the public report detailed immigration officers’ names, but following backlash over the move the names were taken down. “I wouldn’t say it was an endangerment process, I would say they may have some concerns – I’m...

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being mocked mercilessly over a slew of bizarre social media posts that resurfaced as the Israel-Iran war broke out — including his musings about treating a woman right and even being “naughty&playful” as a school kid. The odd posts date back at least a decade and are in stark contrast to the anti-Israel and war rhetoric that now fills the social media feed of the 86-year-old leader and most senior cleric in the extremist Islamic Republic. In one from 2013, Khamenei recalled his awkward school days. “I went 2school w/a cloak since1st days;it...

Federal workers frequently violated work-from-home policies under the Biden administration, a government watchdog revealed in a report released Friday. The “rampant telework abuse” was the result of “compliance failures and weak internal oversight” at former President Joe Biden’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), according to the agency’s inspector general, which sampled the badging data, timesheets and remote-work agreements of dozens of federal employees. “Under the previous administration, OPMʼs telework and remote work policies were mismanaged and oversight was virtually nonexistent,” OPM Acting Director Chuck Ezell said in a statement. “That era of telework abuse is over,” Ezell declared. “At President...

After the death of my sister, I was pulled into the troubling world of AI-written obituaries. This is what I learned about grief, scams and the people behind the words. ==================================================================== My sister had only been gone for a few hours and the AI afterlife had already devoured her. Jamie went into the hospital with stomach pain on a Friday last January. By Tuesday morning, she had passed away from an aggressive lymphoma at 36. Later that afternoon, my mom got a text about a suspicious obituary my aunt saw online. The errors jumped out immediately. Her cause of death...

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of instant messaging app Telegram, plans to leave his fortune to the more than 100 children he has fathered. The Russian-born tech tycoon has revealed that his estate will be split between his six children from relationships and the scores of others whom he fathered through sperm donation. In a wide-ranging interview published Thursday in French political magazine Le Point, 40-year-old Durov revealed that he does not differentiate between his legal children with three different women and those conceived with the sperm he donated. “They are all my children and will all have the...

The government of Tamil Nadu has announced a $1 million reward for anyone who can successfully decipher the cryptic script of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Chief Minister M.K. Stalin made the announcement following a new study that suggests significant connections between symbols in the Indus script and markings found on ancient Tamil pottery. The Enigma of the Indus Valley Script The Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished around 5,000 years ago in the fertile plains of the Indus River (present-day northwest India and Pakistan), is known for its advanced urban planning and extensive trade networks. However, one of its...

Once the king of smartphones, the BlackBerry is making a nostalgic comeback as Gen Z embraces retro tech for digital detoxes and vintage vibes. Before the iPhone, the BlackBerry was the “it” phone. At its peak in the early 2000s, BlackBerry commanded over 50% of the U.S. and 20% of the global smartphone market. But times changed. Physical keyboards gave way to touchscreens, and eventually, BlackBerry discontinued support for its classic phones in 2022. But this isn’t where the story ends. The 2000s have since made a comeback. As The New York Times recently reported, “Everything Millennial Is Cool Again.”...

In New York City, it's against the law for trucks and non-city buses to idle -- keeping the engine running while stationary -- for more than three minutes. However, the law is rarely enforced. That's where the big money comes in. James Brown reports. ***** He rides around on his bicycle 6 hours per day looking for idling trucks. He records this on his phone. He gets 25% of the fine which can be from $200 to $600.

The Invisible LeashOpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s io Products isn’t just the largest deal in the company’s history—it’s the ritual completion of what I warned about in “Node Without Consent.” Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone, iPad, and Apple’s most iconic products, is now building something far more insidious. If “Node Without Consent” revealed the architecture of biodigital control, this moment represents its activation—where the theoretical framework snaps shut and the dream of human agency must now be fought for at the level of metaphysics itself.The philosophical sleight-of-hand is breathtaking. Ive frames their goal as building “a...

Valve seems to have made a silent change to its Steam client on Linux. The Beta version of the app enables Proton by default for games. The Proton compatibility layer, based on Wine, was released nearly 7 years ago, and is used by millions of gamers. But there are still many people who don't know that Windows games can be played on Linux. The change to make Proton enabled by default, was spotted by GamingOnLinux. For those unaware, you had to enable Proton in Steam manually by opening the Settings > Compatibility > and toggle an option that says "Enable...

Polymarket @Polymarket · 2h BREAKING: It’s a bad week to be an Iranian nuclear technician. 59% chance their underground Fordow nuclear facility is destroyed. https://x.com/alx/status/1935366805507424649

A pro-life marketing agency has tapped into artificial intelligence to quickly bring answers and counsel to pregnant women considering abortion. Choose Life Marketing has announced that its new AI chatbot for pregnancy centers is called Olive, a name inspired by the peace and hope symbolized in olive branches throughout the Bible. According to the agency, Olive is the only pro-life AI advocate to exist and is always available in order to extend “calm and guidance to abortion-minded women searching for answers.” “Designed specifically for Pregnancy Help Centers, Olive doesn’t follow a cold script; she listens, responds with warmth, and engages...

צבא ההגנה לישראל @idfonline ״נפלה, התפוצצה, המטרה הופלה״: במהלך הלילה - חיל האוויר יירט כ-30 כטב״מים ששוגרו לעבר מדינת ישראל Israel Defense Forces @idfonline "Fall, explode, target downed": Overnight - the Air Force intercepted about 30 drones launched towards the State of Israel 0:08 VIDEO AT LINK................

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here? The “dead internet theory” has an explanation: AI and bot-generated content has surpassed the human-generated internet. But where did this idea come from, and does it have any basis in reality? What is the dead internet theory? The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet,...

"We're done with Teams!" declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter, speaking via an open-source video platform, in his announcement that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will phase out all Microsoft software from government workplaces. The goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months. Also: Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and LinuxThe decision will affect nearly every civil servant, police officer, and judge, about 30,000 employees. Eventually, the rest of the civil service employees, primarily school teachers, will make the open-source shift. The radical change is being...

The Department of Defense (DoD) has repeatedly voiced intention to maintain “appropriate human levels of judgment” over autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems, but those who study frontier AI technologies have identified many challenges to aligning AI with human intentions. While questions of AI alignment occasionally smack of science fiction, frontier AI developers grapple with these challenges for product optimization and safety. Two challenges relevant to military AI applications have emerged recently: sycophancy and emergent misalignment . In the technical sense, sycophancy is the tendency of AI models to offer responses that are pleasing to their users at the expense of...

IRANIAN STATE TV STUDIO HIT BY ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE LIVE ON AIR

A massive outage has been reported in the Los Angeles area on Father's Day after internet and cable provider Spectrum linked the issue to "criminal acts of vandalism." "We are currently working on a Fiber cut affecting the Los Angeles area. We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. Thank you," the company shared in an alert on X. A spokesperson for the company told Fox News Digital that they discovered that lines had been cut due to vandalism in Van Nuys on Sunday morning, which also impacted other areas. "Early this morning our fiber optic lines were intentionally...

Everything that connects to the internet can be hacked by malware. This includes your phones (both Android and iPhones) and laptops (whether Windows, Mac or even lesser-known systems like Linux). Devices like your Wi-Fi router and security cameras aren’t safe either. But who would have thought hackers are now targeting your smart TVs, streaming boxes, projectors and tablets, too? That’s right, the FBI warns that bad actors have hijacked over a million of these devices with malware, turning them into unwitting participants in a global cybercrime network. The FBI is warning that more than a million smart TVs, streaming boxes,...