Free Republic

Over the past few years, a huge number of schools in the United States and around the world have banned cell phone use among their students.Gothamist spoke to students about their experience with the ban, and the number one takeaway didn’t have to do with anything to do with hot-button topics like social media addiction or cyberbullying. Instead, it was that kiboshing phones is forcing kids to actually talk to each other in meatspace again — and it’s making schools way noisier, for better or worse.“Sometimes I would take naps in the lunchroom, but now I can’t because of the...

New research shows attackers could partially transcribe calls by sensing tiny earpiece vibrations with off-the-shelf radar In A Nutshell Researchers at Penn State built “WirelessTap,” a proof-of-concept that uses millimeter-wave radar to detect tiny vibrations from smartphone earpieces during calls. AI transcription of these signals reached up to 59.25% word accuracy at 20 inches, 40.82% at ~3 feet with a human subject, and 2–4% at 10 feet. While real-world risk is currently low, improvements in radar sensitivity and AI could make such eavesdropping more practical, prompting calls for countermeasures. ================================================================== UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — That private phone call discussing your...

Police are investigating the death of a 20-year-old Brazilian woman who died on a bus with 26 iPhones glued to her skin. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, died of cardiac arrest on July 29, according to multiple outlets, including the Daily Mail. Cops suspect the young woman was likely smuggling the iPhones, the Mirror reported. Passengers on the bus told police the woman, who was traveling solo, had become ill during the trip from Foz do Iguaçu to São Paulo, according to the reports. She complained she was having trouble breathing. Emergency responders tried to revive the...

Google has for years been harnessing the power of its Android smartphones to detect and measure tens of thousands of earthquakes. In a new paper published in the journal Science, researchers from the search giant described how they used motion sensors from its two billion-strong network of phones running Android between the years 2021 and 2024 to detect and alert quakes to users in almost 100 countries around the world. Known as "Android Earthquake Alerts" (AEA), this early warning system has uses the smartphones' accelerometers to detect telltale vibrations as they happen and inform residents of quakes in their areas....

By stripping batteries and hacking Android phones with open-source Linux, researchers built submersible data hubs for AI-powered image recognition. Researchers hacked 15-year-old smartphones into tiny servers that outperform Raspberry Pi at a fraction of the cost. Kadri-Ann Kivastik/ Via Eurekalert ======================================================================== A team at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science has shown that obsolete mobile phones can be wired together to do the sort of heavy data processing normally reserved for expensive server farms while keeping thousands of handsets out of landfills. Led by associate professor of pervasive computing Huber Flores, the engineers stripped the batteries from four...

Everything that connects to the internet can be hacked by malware. This includes your phones (both Android and iPhones) and laptops (whether Windows, Mac or even lesser-known systems like Linux). Devices like your Wi-Fi router and security cameras aren’t safe either. But who would have thought hackers are now targeting your smart TVs, streaming boxes, projectors and tablets, too? That’s right, the FBI warns that bad actors have hijacked over a million of these devices with malware, turning them into unwitting participants in a global cybercrime network. The FBI is warning that more than a million smart TVs, streaming boxes,...

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former...

It's hard to imagine going a day without the reassuring weight of a phone in our pockets. A Harvard Business Review study on phone addiction found we're interrupted by our phones about every 13 minutes of our time awake. Research has found that even a short break from smartphones can significantly boost your mood. As more people hope to take back control of their time and attention, digital detox clubs – groups of people meeting up without phones to reconnect with nature, practice hobbies or just talk – are meeting across the world, from New York City to Seoul. Some...

.. . The real story is what’s being done to lock down Android, and why you’ll need a newer model phone in 12-weeks time... The other highlight further narrows the gap to iPhone, removing some of the looser restrictions that enabled threats to more easily fester on its ecosystem than Apple’s. “The Play Integrity API," Google says, “allows developers to check if their apps have been tampered with or are running in potentially compromised environments, helping them to prevent abuse like fraud, bots, cheating, and data theft.” The company also notes that “apps using Play integrity features are seeing 80%...

Subtitle: A unanimous jury verdict was reversed by an Obama judge shortly after the Democratic administration apparently took interest in the case. Jeff Parker, the CEO of the small Florida-based technology company ParkerVision, explained to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck Thursday how tech giant Qualcomm allegedly stole one of the most revolutionary patented innovations in American history with the help of elements of the Obama administration — technology that was ultimately offshored to China, possibly giving America's pre-eminent adversary a competitive edge. "We are at the beginning of seeing corruption exposed like never before in America," said Beck. Long war...

A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a...

The FBI seized Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s phone and electronics early Wednesday morning — just a week after the election-betting platform successfully predicted President-elect Donald Trump’s win, The Post has learned. The 26-year-old entrepreneur was woken up at 6:00 a.m. in his Soho home by law US enforcement officers who demanded his phone and electronics, a source close to the matter told The Post. It’s “grand political theater at its worst,” the source told The Post. “They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the...

Concord, N.H. (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed the conviction and sentence of a former Republican National Committee official accused in a phone-jamming plot on Election Day 2002. James Tobin, the former regional chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign, was convicted in 2005 of helping to arrange more than 800 hang-up calls that jammed get-out-the-vote phone lines set up by the state Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters' union for about an hour. Republican John Sununu defeated then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for the Senate that day. Tobin was sentenced to 10 months in prison. But the 1st U.S....

Find out if you're accidentally sharing your location with Google, Apple apps and services blog.google, support.apple.com When mobile apps first hit the scene, many were designed to make our phones more useful. This included new tools for productivity, as well as apps for entertainment. Many of today’s apps, though, are packed with sneaky permission requests and hidden trackers. These tactics are legal because app developers (and the companies behind them) have to give you a choice to opt in or out of these tracking permissions. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do that … or the developers make it really...

24 hours after a deadly school shooting in Georgia, local parents are speaking out, worried about strict cell phone policies. Many Apalachee High School students said that they used phones to tell their parents about the shooting. This comes as school districts in Ohio and many other states, including Georgia, are adopting stricter policies on mobile devices. … In the Cincinnati Public School District (CPS), seventh through twelfth grade students are required to lock their phones in a pouch during the school day. It's supposed to limit distractions in the classroom, but not all parents are on board, especially after...

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “America Reports” that people who do not want electric cars were like those who wanted “landline phones forever.” Buttigieg said, “Let’s be clear consumers have wanted and purchased more EVs every single year than the year before. Tesla is facing more competition as GM and Ford and Stellantis and other competitive players make sure they get a piece of the EV market. Let’s be clear, the automotive sector is moving toward EVs and we can’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes, when these debates happen, I feel like it’s the early 2000s...

So I'm sitting at SeaTac airport. By my count there are no less than 8 people within earshot loudly playing videos, video chats, or in 1 case having a conversation over speakerphone. It's obnoxious. A bunch of noise I don't want. The interesting thing to me, and this holds with observations I've made over the last couple years, is this: every single person doing this is over 50 years of age. There are plenty of younger people playing videos, music, making phone calls, etc, but they're all using headphones. So what happened? I'm in my thirties, and I'm pretty sure...

**SNIP** 1. Using out-of-date software Keiran told MailOnline that one of the first things he and other hackers look for when preparing an attack is out-of-date software. 'Out-of-date software is a really big issue because, if the software has been updated, it's probably because there is a security issue', he explained. Software, whether it is the operating system of your iPhone or the control system for a factory, often has some sort of vulnerability. While these can quickly fixed by developers, they are also often shared online through forums and hacker communities. If you haven't updated your software to include...

18GB of RAM in a smartphone? It's no secret that modern Android phones often pack unnecessary specs - I'm looking at you, 108MP cameras and 4K screens - and the new Nubia Red Magic 7 Pro brings some more. This is a new gaming phone from a company that's made quite a few at this point (hence the '7' in the name), so you'd think it'd know exactly what gamers need. Well, what they apparently need is more RAM than your average gaming PC. That's right, the newly-unveiled Red Magic 7 Pro comes in a few configurations, and they top...

ROME – Pope Francis telephoned U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the need to identify “paths to peace” in the Middle East and elsewhere, the Vatican press office revealed Monday. According to papal spokesman Matteo Bruni, the phone conversation, which took place Sunday afternoon Rome time, lasted about 20 minutes. The White House released its own statement on the call, noting that President Biden spoke with Pope Francis “to discuss the latest developments in Israel and Gaza.”