Free Republic

Has the U.S. government secretly retrieved exotic craft of “non-human” origin? Newly declassified documents, along with extraordinary legislation, illustrate how two successive Democratic Senate majority leaders appear to have believed so. Notably, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were not alone in their focus on UFOs. The Democratic heavyweights received critical support and encouragement from a bipartisan group of high-profile senators over the years, including former fighter pilot and famed astronaut John Glenn (D-Ohio); Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who observed a UFO as a World War II pilot; Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations...

Russia has been capturing some of the US and NATO-provided weapons and equipment left on the battlefield in Ukraine and sending them to Iran, where the US believes Tehran will try to reverse-engineer the systems, four sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Over the last year, US, NATO and other Western officials have seen several instances of Russian forces seizing smaller, shoulder-fired weapons equipment including Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft systems that Ukrainian forces have at times been forced to leave behind on the battlefield, the sources told CNN. In many of those cases, Russia has then flown the...

The technology behind China's J-20 stealth fighter may have come from a US plane shot down during the Kosovo war, Balkan military sources say.

Russia's government said last week that China's prototype J-15 jet fighter is a pirated copy of the Sukhoi Su-33 fighter bomber, highlighting China's continued reverse-engineering and technology acquisition piracy. Russia’s Novyy Region news agency reported June 4 that Chinese engineers have assembled the first prototype of the J-15, an advanced warplane considerd a “fourth-generation deck-based fighter.” “The copy was developed on the basis of one of the first Sukhoy prototypes — the Soviet-era T10K experimental aircraft, which China received from Ukraine in 2005,” the report said. “Earlier, Beijing tried to purchase two Su-33 aircraft from the Russian Federation, but Moscow...

These people are coping every single thing. Now they copied these well known cars and selling them for 1/3 the price.

PORTLAND, Ore. — The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic...

What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all. Or have we? Joining the open source and commercial melee is a document that pretty much rules out using a new JavaScript tool by anyone working in - or associated with - the pharmaceutical, farming and food, and some manufacturing industries. Oh, and certain universities are out, too. ExtTLD, for developing components on the open source...

A company that specializes in rights-management technology for online stores has declared its plans to reverse-engineer the FairPlay encoding system Apple uses on iTunes Music Store purchases. The move by Cupertino-based Navio Systems would essentially break Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) system in order to allow other online music retailers to sell downloads that are both DRM-encoded and iPod-compatible by early 2006. “Typically, we embrace and want to work with the providers of the DRM,” said Ray Schaaf, Navio’s chief operating officer. “With respect to FairPlay, right now Apple doesn’t license that, so we take the view that as RealNetworks...

'DVD Jon' Cracks Google Video Viewer a Day After Release Contributed by Ryan    Thursday, 30 June 2005 The Norwegian programmer - famous for cracking the copy protection on DVDs - modified Google's Video Viewer and made the code available only a day after the search giant released the product to the public. On Monday, Google announced the availability of their Video Viewer software as a component of their new Web-based video search service.  The video search allows users to enter keywords and find results from a database of videos from numerous sources.  Consumers must use Google's Video Viewer...

A galactic mystery hovers over the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland: How many of the 2,280 global leaders, including 31 heads of state, gathered in this Alpine resort conduct business with extraterrestrials? This is no whimsy for Davosians. It's on the agenda of the annual powwow of the influential and affluent who will ask forum participants such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Coca-Cola Chairman Douglas Daft and De La Rue Chief Executive Ian Much if the aliens have landed and are collaborating with them to concoct government policy, brew soda pop and mint Iraq's new bank notes. "The...