Free Republic

New research shows that a substantial proportion of children aren’t playing outdoors at all, even on the weekends...researchers focused on a subset of 2,568 children between the ages of 7 and 12, analyzing responses from surveys filled out by the children and their parents... All told, 34% of kids reported not playing outdoors during weekdays, and 20% reported not playing outdoors during weekends. And based on their parents’ responses, the more the children played outside, the better their social-emotional skills were on average. Children with these skills are more able to clearly express their emotions or build positive relationships with...

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...

Anyone who grew up before Y2K remembers what it was like to make a phone call on a landline: You’d punch in your friend’s phone number (which you had memorized), make awkward small talk with their mom or dad until your friend got on the line, and then see how far you could stretch that curly cord to get some actual privacy while you chatted. While landlines never really went away, it’s been many years since their heyday. Most Americans — 76% of adults and 86.8% of children — live in wireless-only households, according to a 2023 report from the...

If you can't resist the urge to check your phone over and over, even if you're out with friends, Meta has a solution: check your glasses instead...Meta's Reality Labs division burns cash at an alarming rate, which has concerned investors over the years...Meta has had its fair share of flops, like the entire promise of its social metaverse...But with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta has created a remarkable piece of technology, unlike any other consumer-facing product on the market -- we have yet to test it ourselves, so we can't quite say just how groundbreaking this really is, but it...

Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding | 44:47 All-In Podcast | 907K subscribers | 681,617 views | September 9, 2025

I have no doubt that God’s Word gives us all the information we need to know, and nothing is hidden from us that we, as Christ followers, must understand. But the Bible is also filled with information that is not yet for us all to understand. This is especially true when it comes to Bible prophecy. There are certain things we can only speculate upon. Even as we see current world events lining up with Scripture references, there are some things we’re not ready to fully understand, and God knows that. Indeed, if we knew with absolute certainty the dates,...

Officers had to form a skirmish line to clear a large mob that vandalized a Metro train, a police car and several businesses in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday night.

Have you ever just had a family dinner conversation over a group holiday or spoken with friends about going to Ibiza to party, and minutes later, relevant ads appear on Facebook or other applications or websites? More than likely you answered yes, and that’s simply because all smart devices are permanently listening in on everything you say and keep track of everything you do. They are constantly gathering behavioural data, mostly for commercial and marketing purposes. In the case of vehicles with built-in smart devices, including sensors, they build complete profiles of the drivers and their passengers. They map their...

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 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...

Smartphone innovation has largely slowed to a crawl over the last few years. We’re long past the days when each successive generation of phones offered up features that drove waves of excitement among consumers, who would then wait outside the Apple Store. But that might be about to change thanks to artificial intelligence. At least, that’s what smartphone makers hope. Yes, we’re about to enter a new phase of smartphone sales spin. Prepare yourselves for the great AI smartphone war. To be fair, smartphone makers have been adding AI and machine learning capabilities to their devices for years — for...

Popular smartphone apps used to track people’s location and provide weather reports may hand over driving data to a firm that sells the information to insurance companies for the purposes of setting rates for unsuspecting motorists... apps Life360, MyRadar and Gas Buddy are providing user data to an Allstate-owned company, Arity, which computes the numbers to create a “driving score” that takes into account any risky behavior behind the wheel... That information is then sold to other insurance firms — with user consent — which set rates for their customers ... Life360, which is used by parents to keep track...

It has been a long time since the West dominated shipbuilding or steel making. We are already aware that we are losing ground in consumer goods, as well as in finance and transport. Add it all up, and we no longer expect the US, Europe or its allies to control the global market in most major industries. Still, even as other industries lost ground there was one thing most economists and industrial experts would have felt sure we could rely on: Apple. Whatever else happened, nothing would knock its world-beating iPhone — without question the world’s most profitable product —...

Two brothers from Nigeria pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with an international sextortion ring, in which they threatened to release a nude photo of a 17-year-old Michigan boy, driving him to commit suicide inside his home. Samuel Ogoshi, 22, and Samson Ogoshi, 20, each pleaded guilty to conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys, US Attorney Mark Totten said in a statement. The Ogoshi brothers await sentencing later this year, and we are still pursuing the extradition of the third defendant, Ezekiel Robert,” Totten added. DeMay, 17, was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound March 25, 2022,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market and uses its control over the iPhone to “engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct.” The lawsuit — which was also filed with 16 state attorneys general — is the latest example of the Justice Department’s approach to aggressive enforcement of federal antitrust law that...

As migrants pour into the U.S. illegally, Mexican cartels are using smartphones to facilitate their smuggling, making payments to drivers and manipulating the Customs and Border Protection app to get more people in. The CBP One app allows entrants to the United States to schedule appointments to appear at U.S. ports of entry. Ostensibly, its users must be in northern Mexico to schedule an appointment, though reporting from the Washington Examiner suggested that users have turned to virtual private networks (VPN) to evade the geographic requirements. House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, R-Tenn., confirmed to the outlet...

They haven’t used them for many purposes that we’ve seen yet, but presumably they are planning to. January 6 was a big deal on this front, as we learned that it was possible and apparently legal for the government to demand location data and identify people as being in a place based on that location data.

This person on TikTok posted a video documenting their unplugged appliances before taking a trip and honestly, it's kind of ingenious. Among all the intrusive thoughts I deal with on a regular basis, one of them involves trying to remember whether or not I did the most important things I should do before leaving the house. Namely, I ask myself if I locked the door, turned the stove off, or performed any other security tasks before stepping out. And even if I check all of those things off and officially leave, alarms will start going off in asking me if...

Washington, DC – The New Civil Liberties Alliance is challenging the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) in federal court for coordinating with Google to automatically install spyware on the smartphones of more than one million Commonwealth residents, without their knowledge or consent, in a misguided effort to combat Covid-19. A newly-released video details how DPH’s actions have violated fundamental constitutional rights. ... Thousands of people do not know DPH’s Covid-19 tracking app is on their phone, as it does not appear on their home screens like other apps. NCLA client Robert Wright, who commutes to Massachusetts for work, was...

In a warning issued this week, the New York Department of State’s Division of Consumer Protection encouraged travelers to protect themselves against so-called “juice jacking” on public charging stations. Officials said thieves can place hidden skimming devices inside USB ports on public cell phone charging kiosks at airports, hotels, and other public locations. “Unfortunately, nefarious scammers are always at work finding new ways to target unsuspecting consumers and steal their personal information,” New York Secretary of State Robert Rodriguez said in a statement. If you need to charge your phone or any device while traveling, it’s important to pay attention...