Free Republic

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

March 23, 2004 Hotmail, Yahoo Users at Risk of PC Takeover By Ryan Naraine A potentially serious security flaw found in Web-based e-mail services offered by Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Yahoo (Quote, Chart) could put millions of PCs at risk of takeover, an Internet security research firm warned Tuesday. Israel-based security consultants GreyMagic issued the advisory with a chilling warning that attackers could inject malicious code by simply sending an e-mail to an unsuspecting Hotmail or Yahoo user. The vulnerability only affects Hotmail and Yahoo running on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser. "When the victim attempts to read this email,...

One evening late in 2001, Julian Green's 7-year-old daughter came upstairs from the computer room of their home in the resort town of Torquay, in western England, and said, "The home page has changed, and it's something not very nice." When Mr. Green checked the machine, he found that the family PC seemed almost possessed. The Internet home page had somehow been switched so that the computer displayed a child pornography site when the browser software started up. Even if he turned the machine off, it would turn itself back on and dial the Internet on its own. Mr. Green...