Free Republic

Now when you hear babbling on about the Koch Brothers, you can see the hypocrisy and look at who he is bankrolled by. From Engadget: The murky world of lobby groups bankrolling politicians is garnering more attention, but is there a way to find out which representatives are in the pocket without a lot of tedious research? A 16-year-old programmer has developed a browser plugin that, when you mouse-over the name of a US lawmaker, will serve up a list of which parties have donated to their campaign funds, and the quantities. Greenhouse (geddit?) is currently available for Chrome, Firefox...

The abrupt announcement that the widely used, anonymously authored disk-encryption tool Truecrypt is insecure and will no longer be maintained shocked the crypto world--after all, this was the tool Edward Snowden himself lectured on at a Cryptoparty in Hawai'i. Cory Doctorow tries to make sense of it all.

We sort of expected this to happen after the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held its oral arguments back in December, but CAFC has now spit at basic common sense and has declared that you can copyright an API. As we noted, back when Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to better understand the issues in the case) ruled that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, his ruling was somewhat unique in that it was clearly directed as much at an appeals court panel who would be hearing the appeal as it was at the...

Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy. The truth is that it’s more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills. That’s the kind of admission you won’t often see here in the pages of Xconomy. The X in our name, after all, stands for exponential, a reference to the stunning pace of technological progress and economic growth over the past 75 years—growth attributable largely to advances in computer hardware and software and the organizational...

Silicon Valley is in an uproar. Angry blog posts have been written, resignations tendered, and boycotts organized, with no sign that the furor is likely to abate. Seeing such ruckus, a casual observer might assume that some fallout had finally resulted from the shocking revelation that several of the largest names in the technology industry—including Google, Apple, Intel, and others—have secretly colluded to drive down wages among software engineers and executives for the better part of the past decade. In fact it concerns nothing of the sort, but rather the appointment of a man named Brendan Eich to the role...

I have found myself losing business left and right because of the evolution of the internet. I am looking for a simple program that will import an existing webpage, allow the user to edit and change components and then publish the modified page back to the web. I am willing to pay for something that is proven and can be trusted. All the different platforms and their different video and audio codecs are driving me out of business. I constantly get contact emails saying they cannot see my video and yet it works for me in Chrome and Firefox. I...

Fresh out of Stanford Business School, I started a software company, T/Maker, with my brother Peter. He was the software architect and I was, well, everything else. Our little company was among the first to ship software for the Macintosh, and we developed a positive reputation among the members of the nascent developer community, which led us to expanding our business by publishing software for other independent developers. Two of our developers, Randy Adams and William Parkhurst, went to work for Steve Jobs at his new company, NeXT, and that’s how I ended up head to head with Steve Jobs....

Big changes are coming to the labor market that people and governments aren't prepared for, Bill Gates believes.Speaking at Washington, D.C., economic think tank The American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Gates said that within 20 years, a lot of jobs will go away, replaced by software automation ("bots" in tech slang, though Gates used the term "software substitution").This is what he said:"Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses … it's progressing. ...  Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. ...  20 years from now, labor demand for lots...

Security experts call recent iOS software bug 'scary'A "scary" software flaw that has put users of iPhones, iPads and Mac computers at risk of being hacked has dealt a blow to the reputation of Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, say security researchers. Tech watchers say this bug — which Apple quietly announced on Friday — illustrates that the company’s reputation for strong security may be overstated. "People in general feel, 'It's Apple, so it's secure'," says Brian Bourne, co-founder of Toronto's annual SecTor cybersecurity conference. “Whereas the truth is that Apple operates within the same bounds as every other...

Toyota is recalling 1.9 million hybrid Prius cars globally for a software glitch that could cause them to stall. **SNIP** The software could cause transistors to become damaged, causing warnings lights to go off, driving power to be reduced or the car to stop. The recalled vehicles were manufactured between March 2009 and February 2014.

The Free Software Foundation today has come out for "the first time we've ever been able to encourage people to buy and use a laptop as-is." The Free Software Foundation now backs one laptop model as respecting the customer's freedoms, but are the hardware specs any good? The Free Software Foundation publicly announced today the "Respects Your Freedom" certification for the Gluglug X60 laptops, which come down to refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad X60s... These refurbished laptops come from an Internet retailer in the UK that replaces the proprietary ThinkPad BIOS with Coreboot. The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished...

Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance. They suggest that there is a nontrivial possibility that Obamacare may implode. The first bombshell went off on Tuesday, from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post's Wonkblog. Klein was one of those young writers who formed JournoList a few years ago so that like-minded Obama fans could coordinate their lines of argument. It was like one of those college sophomore clubs, not really necessary in an age of ready contact through email,...

If you happen to do anything other than sleep in a cave today, chances are you have Ada Lovelace to thank for it. She is responsible for the first ever computer program. And she came up with it long before the computer even existed. Today is the fifth annual Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating the achievement of a Victorian mother-of-three who would change the world. Let’s travel back through time for a moment. Before the ZX Spectrum and before the Atari 2600, there was a thing that historians like to call the 19th century. The computer may have existed as a...

At first blush, the Massachusetts “tech tax” appears similar to tax regimes in other states. However, the Massachusetts tax on computer software services has a unique set of implications—and would likely have an unprecedented impact on the state’s tech economy. The software services tax or “tech tax” passed in July would tax all computer software services, including cloud computing and data storage operations. The legislature intended for the tax to raise $160 million for transportation improvements, but many believe the wide range of services eligible for taxation coupled with the law’s ambiguous language would yield upwards of $500 million. Massachusetts...

More than ever, companies need coders. And while tech firms do the bulk of the hiring, the demand for programmers spans industries and only seems to be growing.  From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have. (See also: Why This Guy Quit His Sports-Radio Dream Job... To Write Software)So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for...

With a pool of tech-focused firms and a slew of graduates from top-notch universities like MIT and Harvard, it’s no surprise that Massachusetts is home to a flourishing tech economy. What is surprising, however, are recent tax hikes targeting this sector of the economy, which is recognized as the state’s saving grace amid high unemployment rates and languid economic growth. Legislation passed last month—referred to as the “tech tax”—levies a 6.25 percent tax on software sales and services in order to raise the required funds to pay for roads in need of repair. The legislature expects the tax to raise...

McConlogue approached Leo, a 36-year man who lives on the streets of lower Manhattan, on Thursday and gave him two options. The first was $100 in cash. The second option on the table was a laptop, three JavaScript books and two months of coding instruction from McConlogue. Soon, McConlogue will deliver him a Samsung Chromebook with 3G connectivity, three JavaScript books, a solar charger for the laptop and something to conceal the laptop in. He will spend an hour before work every morning teaching him the basics of software coding.

Last week's OSCON conference served to remind us that open source software is setting the pace. We've come a very long way from the old saw that "open source doesn't innovate." Instead, you might ask: Is innovation in enterprise software happening anywhere else other than in open source land? Hadoop is at the center of the big data trend. OpenStack has the momentum in private cloud. Open source frameworks and IDEs absolutely dominate app dev, while all the leading NoSQL databases are open source. Do I need to mention that Android now powers more smartphones than any other mobile OS?...

The dawn of Software as a Subscription is now upon us. You have to pay $30 a month, or $240 a year, for the privilege of using the latest Photoshop version, called Photoshop CC. Or, if you want to use the full Adobe suite, you’ll pay $600 a year.

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...