Free Republic

Months before a whistleblower complaint that would spark the Democrat effort for impeachment, a shadowy liberal group founded and staffed by Obama administration alums and former Democrat congressional staffers launched an outside investigation into whether President Trump’s allies were seeking “foreign interference” from Ukraine in the 2020 elections. The group, American Oversight, began investigating the issue in May — more than two months before the “whistleblower” filed a complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” The group’s purpose is to...

There is a privacy threat lurking on perhaps hundreds of millions of devices, that could enable potential attackers to track and profile users, by using information leaked via the Tor network, even if the users never intentionally installed Tor in the first place. In a session at the SecTor security conference in Toronto, Canada on October 10, researchers Adam Podgorski and Milind Bhargava from Deloitte Canada outlined and demonstrated previously undisclosed research into how they were able to determine that personally identifiable information (PII) is being leaked by millions of mobile users every day over Tor. The irony of the...

Malaysia has arrested a man on charges of hacking into the personal information of more than a thousand U.S. security officials and handing the database to the Islamic State militant group in Syria so it could target the individuals. The 20-year-old from Kosovo, who entered Malaysia in August 2014 to study computer science and forensics at a private institute in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, will be extradited to the United States, police said in a statement on Thursday night. "Early investigation found the suspect communicated with one of the right hand man (leader) of IS terrorist group in Syria to...

The tracking mechanism - Relevant Advertising - put in place by AT&T essentially added an undetectable identification number to all Internet traffic on the cellphones of the users. Since the identification number helped mark all the sites visited by AT&T customers, advertisers could build up profiles on users by following the website trail he or she would visit. ... Revealing that the use of the controversial technology has been stopped by AT&T, company spokeswoman Emily Edmonds said that AT&T subscribers who do not want to be included in the carrier's new smartphone tracking system have the choice of opting out...

These days even a desktop computer is capable of some extreme number crunchingGetting a lot out of a little is one of the most fascinating forms of enthusiasm in the tech community.  Whether it's squeezing Windows 7 onto a Pentium II dinosaur, or making a homebrew SNES handheld, such endeavors are truly intriguing. Perhaps the latest and greatest wonder of hardware overachievement is the story of French native Fabrice Bellard, who now holds the world record in PI calculation.  He calculated Pi to 2.7 trillion decimal digits, surpassing mark of 2.5 trillion digits set in August by the T2K Open...