Free Republic

It appears as if much of the open source infrastructure we depend on is suffering from neglect. That’s the message brought to the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) by David Nally. Listening to his talk, “The Tragedy of Open Source,” it was hard not to think that some of our infrastructure projects are beginning to resemble some disintegrating municipal water and sewer systems, or maybe compare his examples with our crumbling roads and bridges. Nally is a South Carolina based “recovering sysadmin” who now wears many hats at Apache as well as being an employee at Citrix.The neglect he mentions has caused...

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating whether front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, hacked into internal networks of a rival team to steal closely guarded information about player personnel. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials. Internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports were compromised, the officials said.

Hardly a day goes by without some new article describing the very rapid advance of automation in our lives. As it is right now, more and more manufacturing is done using computer-controlled machining and robots doing the assembling and even testing. We can’t call for customer assistance anymore without going through a battery of mechanical voices asking us which option we want while directing us away from any hope of human interaction. Machines are accurate, dependable and they never sleep. They don’t belong to unions and they never complain about working conditions and best of all for the Captains of...

The super-sophisticated malware that infiltrated Kaspersky Labs is more crafty than first imagined. We're told that the Duqu 2.0 software nasty was signed using legit digital certificates issued to Foxconn – a world-leading Chinese electronics manufacturer, whose customers include Microsoft, Dell, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. The code-signing was uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who are studying their Duqu 2.0 infection. Windows trusts Foxconn-signed code because the Chinese goliath's certificate was issued by VeriSign, which is a trusted certificate root. Thus, the operating system will happily load and run the Foxconn-signed Duqu 2.0's 64-bit kernel-level driver without setting...

An Arlington burial for Jack Wheeler April 27, 2011The murder of Jack Wheeler remains unsolved, but his funeral on Friday might provide a small bit of solace for his family and friends. Wheeler, a former Hampton resident, will be inurned with full military honors in the Columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery. Wheeler was a 1962 graduate of Hampton High School and a member of the Class of '66 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served in the Army from 1966 to 1971 and spent time in Vietnam. He went on to serve three GOP presidents in various...

The head of Iran’s cyber warfare program has been shot dead, triggering further accusations that outside powers are carrying out targeted assassinations of key figures in the country’s security apparatus, reports the Telegraph. Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of Iran’s Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, northwest of the capital Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile program have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations. Ahmadi was last seen leaving his...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina admitted Wednesday she used the H-1b visa program to hire foreign workers while CEO at Hewlett-Packard, but rejected any comparison to Disney’s recently reported use of the program to displace American tech workers. “Did we ask American workers to train foreign workers with H-1b visas so that we can pay them less and lay them off?” she said on the Howie Carr radio show Wednesday. “The answer is most definitely no.” “I can’t remember exactly — it was a long time ago — how many [were brought in],” she added. “But there were some particular...

Next week, a 24-year-old man who knew Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev is scheduled to appear in U.S. Federal Court for sentencing on obstruction of justice charges related to the 2013 attacks. Khairullozhon Matanov, a former taxi driver, did not participate in or have any prior knowledge of the bombings, according to U.S. authorities. What could land him 20 more years in prison — where he has been since his arrest — are the charges that he deleted video files from his computer and cleared his browser history in the days following the attacks. A Grand Jury indictment...

Bethesda has launched a new website almost certainly confirming Fallout 4 will be announced today. The site bears a countdown timer that currently looks like it'll run out today, June 3 at 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm GMT.

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

In 1983, when I started the free software movement, malware was so rare that each case was shocking and scandalous. Now it’s normal. To be sure, I am not talking about viruses. Malware is the name for a program designed to mistreat its users. Viruses typically are malicious, but software products and software preinstalled in products can also be malicious – and often are, when not free/libre. In 1983, the software field had become dominated by proprietary (ie nonfree) programs, and users were forbidden to change or redistribute them. I developed the GNU operating system, which is often called Linux,...

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.

Extreme Networks on Thursday disclosed plans to restructure by cutting 18 percent of its global workforce -- 285 jobs -- and investing in software and cloud services for the channel. Some sales positions were included in the job cuts, and Extreme plans to fill those gaps by working more closely with solution providers, said Ed Meyercord, president and CEO of Extreme, during a conference call. "In certain markets, rather than have the fixed costs of a direct sales team or people in place, we'll cover that through the channel and channel partners," Meyercord said. "We're going to rely more heavily...

A new Chrome extension, called Google Tone, released this week makes it possible to share a URL with another computer in the room using a series of beeps and boops. The concept is dead simple yet instantly instills a sense of disbelief. A computer making seemingly random sounds can transmit the URL for the tab I have open in Chrome across the room? Get out. Full of skepticism, I decided to put it to the test. I installed the Chrome extension on a MacBook Air and a HP laptop running Windows 10. And you know what? It works! Click on...

University of Utah engineers have taken a step forward in creating the next generation of computers and mobile devices capable of speeds millions of times faster than current machines. The Utah engineers have developed an ultracompact beamsplitter—the smallest on record—for dividing light waves into two separate channels of information. The device brings researchers closer to producing silicon photonic chips that compute and shuttle data with light instead of electrons. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues describe their invention today in the journal Nature Photonics. Silicon photonics could significantly increase the power and speed of machines such...

Stephen Hawking today warned that computers will overtake humans in terms of intelligence at some point within the next century. Speaking at the Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London, the internationally renowned cosmologist and Cambridge University professor, said: “Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.” Hawking, who signed an open letter alongside Elon Musk earlier this year warning AI development should not go on uncontrolled, added: “Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom...

An alliance of free-market conservatives is building support for a bill that would thwart the Obama administration's bid to make foreign computers, servers and data farms subject to Justice Department search and seizure.The alliance stepped up its pressure on Capitol Hill with the release of its May 1 “coalition letter” to Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R.-Va.), the two men who chair the judiciary committees in their chamber. The letter calls on the chairmen to move forward on the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act.To put things in perspective, in 1995 the email...

With the sizes slimming down, it is certainly not a huge surprise that we have a Chip sized computer amidst us. What is really astonishing is the fact that this chip sized computer costs only $9 and can do literally everything for you. The Chip as it has been named runs on Linux and includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well.In fact, CHIP from Next Thing Co. also offers a VGA or an HDMI post for monitors, adding immense versatility to it. To be true, this is certainly one invention that all of us might just have been looking forward to.CHIP has...

Storage. It's not a sexy topic. But everyone uses it in some way or another. You have iPhones, you have computers. Everyone knows how important a person's data is. But it doesn't just "disappear." Or does it? New research suggests that newer solid-state hard drives, which are faster and offer better performance, are vulnerable to an inherent flaw -- they lose data when they're left dormant in storage for periods of time where the temperature isn't properly regulated. The worrying factor is that the period of time can be weeks, months, but even in some circumstances -- just a few...

In the mid-1990s, Marc Goodman, then an investigator in the Los Angeles Police Department, tried to convince his boss of the need for a computer crime unit. The reaction? Utter bafflement. “This captain said to me, ‘Computer crime, what is that? Like if you take the monitor and hit somebody in the head and kill them?’” It is a telling anecdote. While law enforcement agencies have become in­creasingly sophisticated technologically, criminals have the edge, according to Mr Goodman. That was something he observed when investigating drugs and vice in LA. “In those days the only people that had pagers in...