Free Republic

News AnalysisAmericans and allies are too dependent on China tech, as demonstrated by recent revelations that our Chinese-manufactured credit card machines are sending data back to China for no good reason.The U.S. Treasury Department says that millions of Chinese point-of-sale (POS) devices, the credit card machines found at check-out counters, could be sending customer data back to China for no good reason.Treasury Department lab tests show that the data is encrypted and sent to unknown third parties in China. The transmissions are “superfluous to normal payment transaction processing,” according to a letter from the Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical...

The speed record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip has been shattered once again. Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second. It’s hard to overstate just how fast 1.84 Pbit/s really is. Your home internet is probably getting a few hundred megabits per second, or if you’re really lucky, you might be on a 1-gigabit or even 10-gigabit connection – but 1 petabit is a million gigabits. It’s more than 20 times faster than ESnet6, the upcoming upgrade to the...