Free Republic

We have also learned something very disturbing – that search engines are influencing far more than what people buy and whom they vote for. We now have evidence suggesting that on virtually all issues where people are initially undecided, search rankings are impacting almost every decision that people make. ..... In one of our recent experiments, biased search results shifted people’s opinions about the value of fracking by 33.9 per cent. ..... Remember what the search algorithm is doing: in response to your query, it is selecting a handful of webpages from among the billions that are available, and it...

Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Facebook Staff for Replacing ‘Black Lives Matter’ with ‘All Lives Matter’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reprimanded employees for replacing “Black Lives Matter” slogans with “All Lives Matter” on the walls of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. In a private Facebook post obtained by Gizmodo, Zuckerburg told employees that their behaviour was “malicious” and “disrespectful,” and reminded them that there are “specific issues affecting the black community in the United States.” “This has been a deeply hurtful and tiresome experience for the black community and really the entire Facebook community, and we are now investigating the current...

Over the years, I've heard some people claim that Linux is finally ready for the masses. I would suggest that outside of a completely locked down OS such as ChromeOS (which is Linux powered), no OS is genuinely ready for the masses. Instead, it has been my experience that the masses should stick to tablets and Chromebooks. Smartphones make us dumb I can see how my view of most computer users would seem a bit harsh. But I'd also be the first to point out that using smartphones have made all of us "dumb" in the sense that our complacency...

SlySoft Inc. is a software company registered in the Carribean country of Antigua and Barbuda. For the past few years, the firm has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood studios and game makers by creating and releasing software that would circumvent DRM and copyright protections on CDs and DVDs. Its product line includes tools like AnyDVD, AnyDVD HD, Clone CD, CloneDVD mobile, Virtual Clone Drive, Game Jackal, and Game Jackal Enterprise. With no doubt, the company's most known product is AnyDVD, a device driver used by many movie, game, and software piracy groups (and even home users) to...

Almost four out of every five Israeli youths has encountered anti-Semitism on social networks, the Anti-Defamation League found. This is the highest amount in the past three years. The survey, which questioned 500 Israelis between the ages of 15 and 18, was carried out by the Geocartography Knowledge Group. Eighty-four percent of the respondents reported that they witnessed clear anti-Semitic material online in 2015. Of these, 16 percent said that the content was sent directly to them. By comparison, 69 percent of teens reported encountering anti-Semitic material in 2013, and 13 percent said they received it directly. ...

A few months back, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against Taiwan-based hardware maker Asus accusing it of misrepresenting its products' security features and failure to address security vulnerabilities. The two parties have agreed to a settlement, one that forces Asus to subject its procedures and products to independent security audits for the next 20 years. According to the FTC's complaint, Asus has failed numerous times in addressing severe security issues and has made false claims about its products to its customers. Asus had flaws in its AiDisk and AiCloud router features The FTC pointed to numerous...

When Ugandans went to the polls last Thursday in presidential and parliamentary elections, they participated in the most heavily-contested political battle since multiparty democracy began in 2005. But they also discovered that their access to social media and mobile payment services had been cut off, part of a three-day ban by the government that limited political discussion and temporarily halted financial transactions across the country. When the dust had cleared, incumbent, 30-year president Gen. Y.K. Museveni had been re-elected for another five-year term along with his National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, the leader of the largest opposition party was under...

Security vendor Palo Alto Networks has issued a security advisory covering four vulnerabilities affecting its PAN-OS operating system and is advising users to patch immediately. Two vulnerabilities in particular appear to be particularly dangerous, according to Johannes Ullrich of security vendor SANS Institute. Rated as "critical" by Palo Alto Networks, a buffer overflow in the PAN-OS GlobalProtect SSL VPN web interface could be abused to bypass restrictions to limit traffic to trusted IP addresses only. "An attacker with network access to the vulnerable GlobalProtect portal may be able to perform a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the device, and may be...

Microsoft PC users be alert. I was notified Tuesday of an important Windows 7 update. It turned out it was an update to install the Windows 10 upgrade app on Windows 7 (and maybe 8 and 8.1) machines, KB 3035583. I thought it might have been the earlier upgrade from last fall, but it was released February 23, 2013 with some file updates from February 17. I have a sticky note on my monitor with this MS update number (and some others) and when I receive notice of Windows updates I check the list. In this instance, I immediately hid...

Called Unfavorable Semicircle, it joined the video-sharing website on March 30, 2015, and began uploading videos on April 4, 2015. So far, there are more than 84,000. The videos are the sort of thing, in isolation, that no one would look at twice. They seem like test videos of some sort. They show abstract, pixelated images, some not unlike a TV test screen. Others are just a single dot in a field of brown. Some are completely silent. Others feature distorted sounds. ... Because the videos are so strange, some believe that Unfavorable Semicircle is a testing channel, not dissimilar...

For the record I happen to agree with Apple on unlocking these phones. With that being said, there is a lot of pressure for Apple to do just that. So I propose a Compromise: Go Ahead and produce an update that UNLOCKS this Phone, but in so doing make the Update MANDATORY FOR ALL IPHONES, Make the update automatically DOWNLOAD ALL INFO from EVERY IPHONE to a Public Website for ALL AMERICANS to see. Then listen to the Government Cry because ALL INFO from Every Government Employee with an Iphone is NOW PUBLIC! Why would they complain anyway, if they...

They broke in like it was nothing. They could have wiped my hard drive, stolen my files, or practically anything nefarious you can do with a computer. All because I had a wireless mouse dongle plugged into my laptop. And all they needed was a simple antenna that costs as little as $15 at Amazon. Thankfully, "they" were a pair of security researchers from a company called Bastille, and every company that builds wireless mice and keyboards has already been alerted to the issue. If you have a Logitech Unifying receiver, there's already a fix. (Here is a link to...

Messaging service now delivering 15 billion messages every day, adding 350,000 users a day. Secure messaging app Telegram has hit 100 million monthly active users -- with 350,000 new users signing up each day. The company said it is delivering 15 billion messages a day, up from August last year when the app was transmitting 10 billion messages each day. Telegram allows users to send messages, photos, videos, and files of any type (doc, zip, MP3, etc), as well as create groups for up to 1,000 people or channels for broadcasting messages to larger audiences. It's free to use, which...

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you've likely heard the term Internet of Things, or IoT, at some point. But what does it mean? In short, the IoT is a network of objects connected to the Internet that can collect and exchange data. That brand new car loaded with apps? Internet of Things. The smart home devices that let you control the thermostat and lights with one voice command? Internet of Things. That fitness tracker that lets you share your exercise progress with friends? You get the idea. The IoT is set to...

Wes Clark, the computer engineer whose work largely influenced the design of DEC minicomputers, CAD software, graphical user interfaces, and the ARPAnet, died Monday. Wesley Allison Clark, a revered computer engineer whose work from the 1950s through 1970s underpinned the revolutions in personal computing, computer graphics, and the internet, died Monday. He was 88. Clark trained in physics at the University of California / Berkeley and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in 1952. His first computer job was to test the nascent memory technology for MIT's Whirlwind, which was a vacuum tube computer for the U.S. Navy....

Moms push strollers, guys jog along sidewalks and tucked behind a couple of classic cars is a small house where the future of the NFL scouting combine might be hatching. "We're in a freaking townhome," says Derek Belch, 30, the former Stanford graduate assistant coach who now has the attention of several NFL teams. He is surrounded by a gaggle of co-workers, some sitting on stairs, some at desks. There's a whiteboard with "Combine" scrawled on it, though that gets erased after a reporter enters. He is intense in the way a lot of coaches are: eye contact, rapid patter,...

In June, a team of programmers will release a ground-breaking new video game called No Man's Sky, which uses artificial intelligence and…

Last night, the Linux Mint team announced that someone had hacked their servers and started pointing user downloads to malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. Our Linux editor already covered the initial details of the attack, which we recommend reading before going forward with this article. Since then, in the last ten hours, the Linux and infosec communities have been working hard to investigate what happened and how the hackers operated. Linux Mint Team: They hacked us via our WordPress site The first to provide an answer was Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project,...

If you have Chrome as the default browser on your Windows 10 computer, you'd better check to make sure Microsoft didn't hijack it last week and set Edge as your new default. The same goes for any PDF viewer: A forced cumulative update also reset PDF viewing to Edge on many PCs. Do you use IrfanView, Acdsee, Photoshop Express, or Elements? The default photo app may have been reset to -- you guessed it -- the Windows Photos app. Music? Video? Microsoft may have swooped down and changed you over to Microsoft Party apps, all in the course of last...

The 20ft tall (6m) sculpture, called The Kiss, was positioned at Salisbury Cathedral, inviting people to walk in-between the wrists. But it has been shifted off North Walk as a decision was taken that it was not well enough illuminated in the dark. Artist Sophie Ryder wrote online that people were "walking through texting". Some had "bumped their heads", she said.