Free Republic

China need not try to interfere with the 2024 election. Joe Biden has partnered with the Communist China owned TikTok. TikTok is a data mining operation masquerading as social media. Consumer Reports: A Consumer Reports investigation finds that TikTok, one of the country’s most popular apps, is partnering with a growing number of other companies to hoover up data about people as they travel across the internet. That includes people who don’t have TikTok accounts.ABC NewsA ban on TikTok in the United States or a sale of the app by its Chinese owner, ByteDance, will not resolve national security concerns...

For years the push to replace physical drivers licenses with digital drivers licenses has relied one one thing; privacy. But all of the "fake news" the public has been fed about their privacy is about to come "crashing" down, literally. A Nevada bill if passed would allow police to search everyone's smartphones. Nevada bill AB200 allows police to search the phones of everyone involved in a car crash. "An act relating to motor vehicles; authorizing a peace officer at the scene of a traffic crash to use technology to determine if a driver was using a handheld wireless communications device at...

VentureBeat reported last week that Netflix has now officially made the decision to kill support for iTunes billing for new and returning customers. Subscribers that are currently subscribed via iTunes will still be able to pay through Apple, but new and returning members will be directed to sign up for direct billing outside of the app. The move follows a similar one from May, when Netflix pulled support for billing through Alphabet's Google Play. That move also allowed existing members to continue billing through Google Play, but that payment method is not available for new and returning customers. That means Netflix...

What do you do to top Google's highly regarded first-generation Pixel phone camera? The same, only more. More HDR+ image processing. More chip power. More artificial intelligence. And more image stabilization. The result for photos: "All the fundamentals are improved," said Tim Knight, head of Google's Pixel camera engineering team. On top of that are new features including motion photos, face retouching and perhaps most important, portrait mode. In the days of film, a photo was the product of a single release of the camera's shutter. In the digital era, it's as much the result of computer processing as old-school...

In 2013, the European Space Agency will launch the Gaia spacecraft. Its billion-pixel imaging sensor will be among the largest digital cameras ever to exist, and over the course of its mission, it's estimated that Gaia will detect 15,000 new alien planets. Gaia's gigantic sensor is comprised of 106 separate CCD detectors, mosaiced together to form a monster camera over three feet wide. The resulting imaging system is so powerful that it will be able to precisely measure the width of a hair from over 600 miles away, and from here on Earth, it could spot a dime on the...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 July 19 Counting Stars in the Infrared Sky Credit: J. Carpenter, M. Skrutskie, R. Hurt, 2MASS Project, NSF, NASA Explanation: The bulging center of our Milky Way Galaxy, dark cosmic clouds, the thin galactic plane, and even nearby galaxies are easy to spot in this sky view. But each pixel in the digital image is actually based on star counts alone -- as derived from the Two...