Free Republic

Automated traffic now accounts for the majority of activity on the web, with the share of bad bot traffic surging from 32% to 37% annually last year, according to Thales. The French defense giant’s 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report is now in its 12th year, and based as always on data collected by Imperva’s global network, which apparently blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests across thousands of domains and industries last year. Bot traffic accounted for 51% of the total last year, the first time it has surpassed human activity in a decade, the vendor claimed. It said that malicious...

The Controversial Use of AI Bots by the University of Zurich to Manipulate Reddit Discourse In a shocking revelation, the University of Zurich has been implicated in a clandestine operation involving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) bots to influence discussions on Reddit since November 2024. This information was brought to light in a recent tweet from the account @reddit_lies, which highlighted the significant impact of these AI bots in swaying the opinions of Reddit users. With claims that these bots were six times more effective at changing minds compared to a baseline, the implications of this discovery raise crucial...

Content creator Misha Agrawal, known for her witty sarcasm and relatable rants, passed away on April 24, just two days before her 25th birthday. Her family confirmed the heartbreaking news on Instagram, though the cause remains undisclosed. Fans and friends are still coming to terms with the loss, amidst widespread disbelief

Meta’s Oversight Board expressed indignation at the social media giant for its January policy overhaul that axed fact-checking and eased restrictions on discussions about immigration and gender identity. The independent oversight board railed against the company for implementing the changes “hastily” with supposedly no transparency about “what, if any, prior human rights due diligence” was performed. Zuckerberg acknowledged that previous content moderation efforts had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.” President Trump had frequently criticized Facebook during his first term, culminating in his platform suspension following the January 6, 2021, Capitol events — a ban eventually lifted...

For years, a smug, self-righteous activist named Nandini Jammi made it her mission to silence conservative voices by labeling everything she didn’t like as “disinformation” or “hate”—including Revolver. We covered Nandini Jammi and her dark censorship empire way before anybody else caught on. While the left was busy fawning over her brand safety activism, we peeled back the curtain and showed you what was really going on—an evil censorship racket that shook down conservative companies with empty threats, fake outrage, and social media mob tactics. Here’s a look back at what we uncovered about Jammi’s operation—how she went from memeing...

The left-wing cofounder of a group that received gushing coverage for its efforts to “defund” conservative media will step away from the advocacy organization at the end of next month, The Post can reveal, following a legal challenge and attempts to rebrand in the wake of President Trump’s return to the White House. Nandini Jammi — whose Check My Ads Institute seeks to yank advertiser funding from right-wing figures and outlets purportedly spreading “disinformation” — announced on her LinkedIn “with enormous pride” that she was “stepping down.” The move comes on the heels of a funding shortfall amid impending legal...

People on social media are outraged over a video reportedly taken at the scene of a fatal mass shooting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, on Thursday, April 17. But it's not just over the alleged shooter, identified by Tallahassee police as 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner. It's over video that was seemingly shot by someone walking past a wounded, bleeding woman lying face down on the grass. Rather than stopping to help or even running away from an active shooter, as what sounds like two shots are fired in the background, the person walks by while sipping from a...

Much Drama as 4chan has been taken down, mods doxxed.

Lately, Docker has become a valuable tool for developers and tech enthusiasts. But beyond deployment, Docker containers can be powerful allies in streamlining workflows and boosting personal output. These isolated environments offer a fantastic way to tackle tasks and focus on what truly matters. Here are the Docker containers I use regularly to boost my efficiency and get more done. 7. Nextcloud An ideal Microsoft 365 replacement https://nextcloud.com/ 6. Vaultwarden 1Password, who? https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden 5. Homepage Manage all your self-hosted services https://gethomepage.dev/ 4. Firefly III Keep track of finances https://www.firefly-iii.org/ 3. Excalidraw Brainstorm ideas https://excalidraw.com/ 2. Code-server Level up your development...

A 15-year-old boy killed his grandmother and stabbed his mother in their Long Island home after an argument erupted over content that was discovered on the teen’s computer, according to police. The boy’s mother, 36-year-old Vanessa Chendemi, fled the horror scene at the Selden residence after her son had repeatedly stabbed her with a knife around 9:45 p.m. following a confrontation about the teen’s computer, according to the Suffolk County Police Department. It is not clear what content led to the gruesome attack. The knifed mom flagged down a driver passing by and called 911 when the good Samaritan stopped...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Police shut down one of the largest paedophile networks in the world last month in an operation spanning 35 countries, the EU's law enforcement agency Europol said on Wednesday. Europol said 79 suspects had been arrested for sharing and distributing child sexual abuse material on a platform known as Kidflix. Some of those arrested are suspected of having abused children themselves, it said.

Burning, vandalizing, and even defecating on Tesla EVs have become commonplace despite cameras that capture culprits in the act. Such brazen behaviors are endorsed and encouraged, embracing lawlessness as a moral good. Vietnam War protesters were not this extreme, and their goal was more visible and less self-destructive. Social media algorithms seem to be fueling terrible side effects.Musk Derangement Syndrome and TDSJournalist Fareed Zakaria described the condition known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as “hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment.” This rapidly extended to Elon Musk, and perhaps to MAGA voters and white men in general,...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day...

It was disgustingly called “Kidflix” and contained almost 100,000 videos A massive darknet international pedophile child porn network calling itself “Kidflix” has been discovered and shut down by Europol. Investigators stated that site shockingly had more than 91,000 child porn videos on it, with around three new videos being uploaded to its servers every hour. Users were paying a fee for access to stream and upload their own videos of child sex abuse. They were able to make payments via cryptocurrencies to avoid a paper trail, and were given the incentive of earning tokens to spend on the site by...

Guy on tik tok telling illegal aliens to shoot at ICE agents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9RDTbQdhlM

It's over Freepers...

Research has found that nearly half of adults in the U.S. use, or have attempted to use, a VPN. A majority use VPNs to protect their IP addresses and usage is highest among Gen Z and millennials. … Experts expect America's 43% figure to rise and VPN usage to become more important than ever. But what exactly are people using VPNs for and should you get in on the act too? A survey from CNET has found that 2 in 5 (43%) of American adults have used, or do use, VPNs. Their motivations for using a VPN vary, but over...

In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate.That person was Mark Klein, who died on March 8 this year from cancer. He was 79.After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.The...

“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk told Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow about the attack on his social media platform. “But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Experts told The Post it was highly improbably that Ukrainian government actors were the perpetrator of such an audacious and far-reaching attack one day before diplomats from Washington and Kyiv meet in Saudi Arabia.

Their faces have become a byword for success, exasperation and drama after their photos were shared across the world. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in the early 2000s teenagers found that memes could become a new universal language. Connecting social-media users across the globe, the 'success-kid', 'disaster girl' and 'side-eyeing Chloe' became common fixtures in day-to-day life. But after the split-second image was captured, the real-lives behind iconic memes rarely leave the shadows of the internet. And now the childhood-favourites are all grown up - and while you may instantly recognise their internet personas they are...