Free Republic

Remember during Trump's first term when he used Twitter as a tool to communicate to the people? This was done to avoid having his words manipulated and filtered by corrupt big media and their pro-big government propaganda machine. Genius! Remember when a certain segment of the country protested and mocked Trump using the Internet in this manner? They told us Tweets were not presidential! They told us it was an undignified...A juvenile way to speak to the people! Trump was an embarrassment according to these people! The reality is most of those people did not want Trump speaking directly to...

A federal appeals court has struck down a sweeping gag order that prevented X from notifying users when their data was sought by the US government, declaring that the order failed to meet legal standards under federal privacy law. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled in favor of X, finding that the lower court authorized nondisclosure orders without providing the specific findings required by the Stored Communications Act. [link to order] The ruling addressed a case where X had been barred from revealing to users that their personal data had been subpoenaed. The conflict began when the federal...

Choose wisely. Your PC could end up vulnerable to online threats otherwise. This fall, Windows 10 will reach its end of life—at least, as defined by Microsoft. On October 14, the company ends feature updates to the operating system. Security and stability updates also become restricted—a potential liability, depending on the choices you make now. To help users successfully navigate Windows 10’s extinction event, Adam Patrick Murray sat down with ethical hacker Mike Danseglio to talk options. The goal: To find the best option for your PC to stay current with security updates and patches, no matter the age of...

Shop security guards have complained of a 'massive' rise in antisocial behaviour by teenage tearaways harassing staff and customers for social media views. Supermarkets have started turning off their WiFi to stop mobs gathering at in-store cafes to use the Internet while passing time filming themselves 'trying to get a rise' out of employees. They also face the scourge of influencers carrying out 'pranks' with the aim of going viral on TikTok, as well as other platforms such as YouTube and Instagram.

Department of Government Efficiency @DOGE Unused website update! DOGE continues to partner with agencies to delete unused/obsolete websites. In the last few weeks, 69 sites have been deleted, including: -@NASA: deleted 26 sites for total savings of $500k/yr -@NSF: deleted 8 sites for total savings of $868k/yr -@Interior: deleted 5 sites for total savings of $4.1M/year See before/after images for a recently cut@Energy: site which, until a few weeks ago, was advertising a science workshop that took place in 2004, over 20 years ago! Jul 7, 2025

WILLIAMSPORT - The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that eight Chinese nationals who obtained student visas to attend college in the United States were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those indicated include: Yankun Jiang, 24, of State College, PA, Hanlin Yang, 24, of State College; Chenhao Chen, 25, of California; Xiaoqing Tu, 24, of California; Dongjie Lu, 35, of California; Lei Bao, 22, of New York; Kuo Zhang, 31, of New Jersey; and Jiacheng Zhang, 25, of Florida.According to Acting United States Attorney John Gurganus, the indictment...

A far-left LGBTQ+ activist in France is alleged to have been at the heart of an underground pedophile network that drugged and raped children as young as three years old. Pierre-Alain Cottineau, a former candidate for the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI/France in Rebellion) party during the 2021 regional elections and a former head of an LGBTQ+ activist group, faces accusations of orchestrating a darknet child rape network. French newspaper Le Parisien reported having obtained internal communications as well as video footage from Cottineau’s group, which the paper described as being “unbearably violent” and nausea-inducing. This included footage of a...

(LifeSiteNews) — A leading and highly influential Catholic site, Messa in Latino, was deleted by Google on Friday for alleged and unspecified violations of its “hate speech” policy. In a brief email sent from blogger.com, run by Google, the editors of Messa in Latino (MIL) were informed that the site had been taken offline with immediate effect. The email stated that “your blog titled ‘MiL – Messainlatino.it’ was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL https://blog.messainlatino.it unavailable to blog readers.” The reason given for the sudden removal was due...

Australians will soon be subjected to mandatory age checks across the internet landscape, in what has been described as a huge and unprecedented change. Search engines are next in line for the same controversial age-assurance technology behind the teen social media ban, and other parts of the internet are likely to follow suit. At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children's access to harmful content such as pornography. But experts have warned the move could compromise Australians' privacy online...

A U.S. District Court judge granted a preliminary injunction Thursday that halts the Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act of 2024. NetChoice, a trade organization representing apps like Facebook and Instagram, is challenging the law in a case in the U.S. Northern District of Georgia. It would have required submitting proof of age before accessing social media sites. Judge Amy Totenberg said in the 50-page ruling that the law is constitutionally infirm. "The State seeks to erect barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires, and the inapt tailoring of the law – which...

SNIP On 20 May 2025, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company's annual developer conference. It's been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you've probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. "For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode," he said. "It's a total reimagining of Search." You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal. "If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current...

Three weeks after sparking a war of words with anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, apologizing for her targeted remarks, and being inundated with comments about the incident since, seven-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles has deleted her account on X, formerly Twitter. Biles de-activated her account, which had nearly two million followers, after she came to the defense of a transgender high school athlete that Gaines had been attacking. But after Biles personally insulted Gaines (for which she later apologized), it opened up a flood gate of attacks which appears to have led the 28-year-old gymnast - considered the greatest of...

At the moment, a virtual private network (VPN) is a great way to protect your data from hackers. It offers sophisticated encryption that will keep your data hidden from third parties, including cyber criminals, government bodies, and advertisers.However, not even all the best VPNs offer protection that’s future-proofed. You may not be aware of them yet, but there are already highly sophisticated quantum computers that use quantum physics to render their computations significantly more efficient than those performed by classical computers. Because of their superior processing power, these quantum computers have the ability to break encryption methods used to protect...

[H/T bitt]In what experts are calling the largest data breach ever recorded, researchers have confirmed the exposure of a staggering 16 billion password leaks, affecting platforms including Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram, GitHub, VPN services, and even government portals. This unprecedented breach is believed to be the result of multiple infostealer malware campaigns operating at a massive scale throughout 2025. If the recently reported 184 million credential leak was alarming, this latest development represents a full-scale cybersecurity disaster that demands immediate action.What Happened? Understanding the 16 Billion Credential LeakAccording to an ongoing investigation by cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews, led by analyst...

I saved this image to imgur.com yesterday: Today when I wanted to link to it I got this: Evidently the meme hits a nerve. We'll see how long it lasts this time.

I’ll keep this short and sweet so I can get this out faster to you. As headline says, 16,000,000,000 passwords have been leaked. Most likely the biggest password leak in history. It would probably be a good idea to change your passwords. If you have Google, maybe start there and change your Google password, since a lot of people have numerous saved passwords to bank accounts, social media accounts, email, etc, all under Google. Forbes: Update, June 19, 2025: This story, originally published on June 18, has been updated with comments from the founders of Keeper Security regarding the 16...

Vice President JD Vance was suspended from the left-leaning social media platform Bluesky on Wednesday, just minutes after joining and sharing his first post. “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” Vance wrote in his first post on the X competitor. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” The vice president went on to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on transgender medical treatments for minors. “To that end, I found Justice [Clarence] Thomas’s concurrence on medical...

You’ve got to give Vice President J.D. Vance some credit here. The man knows how to trigger the snowflake set without even trying.Vance joined the oh-so-bumptiously named X-competitor Bluesky yesterday. It didn’t take long for the fun to start.One moment, he was creating an account; the next, the platform was reacting like Alec Baldwin at the prop department—panicked, unhinged, and a lot of imprudent pointing going on.Let’s start at the beginning.Vice President J.D. Vance joined Bluesky on Wednesday and posted a polite, even warm greeting:Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense...

An apparent internet service outage has disrupted operations on countless major websites including Google, Spotify, and Amazon Web Services.Around midday Thursday, outage monitoring service DownDetector.com reported widespread service disruptions across commonly used platforms like SnapChat and YouTube, with many social media users reporting difficulty accessing several sites.Some notable web services experiencing disruptions include: Spotify, Discord, Google and related services like Google Maps, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, SnapChat, YouTube, OpenAI, CharacterAI, FuboTV, Etsy, Vimeo, UPS, Shopify, Microsoft Azure, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Gemini, DoorDash, Calendly, Paramount+, IKEA, Twitch andMicrosoft 365.A full list of shuttered services can be found on DownDetector.com.Cloudflare, an...

Google has found a new way to police the speech of its users: scolding them for typing factual terms into its search bar. After a Justice Department lawsuit resulted in Texas ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens at state universities, I used Google to look up more details about the case. In response to the search “texas scholarships for illegal aliens,” the search engine’s AI overview slapped a patronizing warning at the top of the page, scolding me that “the term ‘illegal alien’ is considered pejorative and offensive.” “It is more accurate and respectful to use terms like ‘undocumented students’...