Free Republic

Reality is scarier than fiction -- especially when it comes to what hackers can do. In many bizarre-but-true ways, your home is wide open to hacker attacks. Right now. While you're reading this, a criminal could be logging in to your router and using it as a porn server. He could be using a Bluetooth "sniper rifle" (like the one shown above) to tap into your phone while you chat by the window. He could even physically steal your printer and capture from its circuitry the financial records you printed last week. Here are 10 scary -- and real --...

FEBRUARY 22--The overwhelming majority of New Jersey state employees are courteous, hard-working individuals eager to aid the public for whom they work. And then there is the small number of toll collectors employed by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority who regularly go rogue on motorists. On the following pages you'll find an entertaining selection of complaint letters sent to turnpike officials by motorists who ran into assorted trouble when trying to pay their way on the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike. More than 550 letters--covering the past 18 months and addressing a variety of types of complaints--were...

China Wasn't The Source Of The Hacks, eh?Friday, February 19. 2010 Posted by Karl Denninger in International at 08:55 If you remember China's government claimed that the hack attacks on Google and elsewhere didn't originate in China and angrily lashed out at Google (and others) for suggesting that they were involved. Well? SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation. And if you remember, China's military...

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. U.S. officials...

Sarah Palin Attacks the 11 AP Hacks Assigned to Destroy Her Book November 15, 2009 Jim Hoft It looks like Sarah Palin learned a thing or two from the election. Today she slammed the 11 AP fact-checkers assigned to pick apart her book. From her facebook page: Really? Still Making Things Up? …Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the AP somehow nabbed a copy of the book before it was released. They’re now erroneously reporting on the book’s contents and are repeating many of the same things they spewed during the campaign and afterwards. We’ve heard 11 writers are engaged in this...

Howie thread starting w/ his Sunday Herald column

Making work pay … Washington DC style. My guess is this isn’t what Hope n Change was talking about. The Courant does the digging. Every day we see more and more why people will spend so much money for a job that pays so little. Today’s Hartford Courant reports that Dodd’s wife, Jackie Clegg has seen her income soar since marrying the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. No … nothing illegal here on its surface, and in fact that is the problem. As the Courant points out, appointing the spouses or relatives of high powered Congress people to corporate...

Longtime conservative leader Morton Blackwell, a Reagan administration alumni and once the youngest Goldwater delegate at the GOP convention, is perhaps best know as the originator of the phrase “Personnel is policy.” Blackwell’s observation speaks a great truth about American government. Since no one man or woman can do it all, alone, we have followed the French in the development of bureaucratic systems that allow for power and authority to be delegated to subordinates who are responsible, on a daily basis, for the administration of public policy. It is these people, even more than the president, who directly impact the...

Howie thread starting with his Sunday Herald column

The Pittsburgh Public Schools will operate on a two-hour delay Monday because of the Super Bowl, Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said today.

Howie thread starting with his Sunday Herald column. By the way starting tomorrow, the Felon, Tom Finneran loses a half hour of his show--or technically an hour. He is moving to 5:30-9 am (from 6-10 am) so Ingraham will now have all 3 hours of her "healthy radio addiction" 9-noon. And from what I hear, the 5:30-6 am segment will be a "radio rewind" of the previous day's show so now FelonMan, with his new permanent co-host Todd Feinburg, will only have to do 3 hours every day. Nice work if you can get it Mistah Speakah! In the dreaded...

Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest by Robert McMillan It may be the quickest US$10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.He took the first of three laptop computers -- and a $10,000 cash prize -- Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a...

Exclusive: After Obama Complaints, CNN Bans James Carville And Paul Begala From Appearing As Analysts Until Dem Primary Is Settled January 24, 2008 -- 7:11 PM EST

ASSESSMENTS CHANGE WITH THE CANDIDATES: The NumbersUSA staff updates the candidate information pages every day. NumbersUSA Founder and CEO Roy Beck looks at those updates and adjusts his grading of the candidates based on the newest information of changes in candidate comments. ROY BECK’S CRITERIA FOR ASSESSING: “I look at these candidates ONLY in terms of what they have done about immigration and what they are promising to do on the issue. “I grade all these candidates on how well they promise to carry out the recommendations of two national commissions in the 1990s and on other widely accepted goals...

Gov. Deval Patrick has dangled job offers in front of anti-gay-marriage lawmakers to persuade them to switch their votes and kill a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex nuptials, sources said. Two sources close to the gay-marriage debate said Patrick has used the controversial tactic as lobbying has intensified in recent weeks. The Legislature adjourned a Constitutional Convention yesterday without voting on the proposed ban, tabling the matter until a session scheduled for June 14. Supporters of gay marriage said Patrick has worked extremely hard behind the scenes to defeat the proposed ban, and the sources said those efforts have included...

Two campaign consultants with close ties to the Legislature and governor proposed a ballot initiative Thursday that would modify California's term limits and give some current lawmakers a shot at an additional four to six years in office. The measure, which supporters hope to put on the ballot in February, would let lawmakers serve up to 12 years, spending all their time in one house or splitting it between the two chambers. State law now limits lawmakers to six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate. They can serve a total of 14 years with stints in both...

The hack du jour is Lynn Mayor Edward J. Clancy Jr. They call him Chip, on account of all the chips off the old block from his family who are slumbering on public payrolls. The Clancy family motto: “Once you go hack, you never come back.” Let’s start with his wife, Beth, an assistant clerk at the Essex Juvenile Court . . . and his brother James, an assistant clerk at the Salem Superior Court . . . and his brother-in-law Scott Mooney, who was just hired last summer at the Registry of Deeds in Salem as a “project manager”...

Pirates are circulating a hack that lets them activate counterfeit copies of Windows Vista using a spoofed server that Microsoft relies on to make sure enterprises switch on the new operating system. The software, loaded with the long name of "Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activation.Server-MelindaGates" is available on several pirate Web sites. It spoofs a Key Management Service server, one of the two technologies that Microsoft debuted last month that let businesses activate a large number of copies of Windows Vista. KMS requires that at least 25 PCs be connected to a corporation's network. Vista is the first version of Windows that Microsoft requires...

If I told you that there was something in Washington called the Baker commission but didn't tell you what it was about, you still could probably name many of its members. If you are of a certain age, you might wonder, "Jim or Howard?" And you might have a quibble or two. Where is Dick Holbrooke? Does Sandra Day O'Connor's new availability mean that Madeleine Albright is out of luck from now on? Are they sure that Larry Eagleburger is still alive? But Vernon Jordan is there, along with Ed Meese and Alan Simpson and Lee Hamilton. This is one...

POP POLITICS Marketing the new Dixie Chicks after they left country By Armond White Shut Up and Sing Directed by Barbara Kopple & Cecilia Peck How many times can celebrities insult President Bush and then complain that their freedom of speech is being questioned? The inability of celebrities to accept criticism is a theme that gets lost in Shut Up and Sing, the Dixie Chicks documentary that Barbara Kopple co-directed with Cecilia Peck. Kopple, best known for the landmark documentaries Harlan County and American Dream—films from the era when documentaries had integrity—is expected to bring her wide-ranging, deeply humane social...