Free Republic

SO in the last few months, I was one of the victims of the GoDaddy hacking, and it has caused serious consternation in my business over the security of our email provider. GoDaddy hosts our email and domain, our website is just a front page with contact info. I am in search of a replacement, a host provider with a good track record for small businesses and able to provide daily backups of our files. Please help me out with personal recommendations and experiences with various email and website hosting providers. Thanks,

This is a true story. The names have been changed because, well, a guy ended up getting charged with a felony, something he’s probably not thrilled about. Call me cautious. "Have you ever had something stolen? Your heart sinks, your mind races, and you become increasingly paranoid about the vulnerability of your personal property. I know because this is a picture of my coworker’s (let’s call him Steve) rental car, a Chevy Impala, after lunch at Slow’s Bar-B-Q in Detroit (amazing food, don’t park on a side street), the Monday after Maker Faire Detriot. There was nothing significant in the...

At a time when legions of people are looking for work, Richard McNeight has an unusual problem. The president of Modus Operandi, a Melbourne-based software company, McNeight has eight job openings he can't fill. He has been looking for months, but hasn't found the right candidates. "I have two full-time recruiters working for me," he said. The problem is this: Programmers at Modus Operandi, which has about 60 employees, must meet two key qualifications. They must be fluent in the computer language Java and be eligible for a U.S. security clearance. The company works almost exclusively for the military and...

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience—in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under...

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple Inc.'s sweeping court victory over Samsung Electronics Co. cements its dominance of the wireless industry and could force carriers, and even Google Inc., to re-evaluate their product plans and strategies. Interviews with jurors and legal experts reveal that Friday's verdict in the patent dispute did much more than order the South Korean company to pay $1.05 billion to its Silicon Valley rival. The nine jurors here also sent a signal that companies need to be much more careful in incorporating basic design elements in their electronic devices, particularly those affecting the way gadgets look and feel. -----------...

[Last week,] a deal between Verizon and a consortium of cable companies to free more spectrum for mobile broadband gained significant traction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) conditionally signing off on the deal and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announcing a vote of approval will come in short order. The agreement is an innovative move without much precedent. Verizon will purchase a significant chuck of spectrum from SpectrumCo, a group of cable companies including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, that covers 80 percent of Americans and is ideal for 4G mobile broadband. Moving forward, those cable companies can purchase...

My twenty something liberal Obama voter colleague (with a stay at home wife and two young children) cited this tidbit of news which I'm thinking is as pumped up as the "jobs" numbers at the White Hut--Anybody care to debunk? Largest IT employment gains in four years reported Network World (US) The nation's employment outlook for IT professionals has suddenly surged, gaining 18,200 jobs, the largest monthly increase since 2008, according to tech employment-research firm Foote Partners.

I am homeschooling a daughter this year. She is bright (the mid 120s) and a little Asperger-ish. She loves tech nothing brings her joy like cracking into one of the laptops and repairing it. She is looking at high school and for a variety of reasons she will need to have a portion of her schooling homeschooled. This gal wants to get going on growing up and living and I don’t think that college is in her future. Rereading Charles Murray's book on REAL EDUCATION has inspired me to try to put together a curriculum that includes some education to...

Battalions of super-soldiers could be selected for specific duties on the basis of their genetic make-up and then constantly monitored for signs of weakness. So says a report by the U.S. National Academies of Science (NAS). If a soldier is struggling, a digital "buddy" might step in to warn about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap the soldier with an electromagnet to increase his alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team.

As Samsung and Apple have been fighting over patents from one end of the earth to the other, most of the coverage, with few exceptions, seems to present Apple's point of view. [Example A, Example B, Example C, Example D, and Example E.] We know how much money Apple is asking for, we know it's claiming treble damages for willfulness, we know it thinks FRAND patents are not deserving of injunction enforcement, and that Samsung is asking too much money for them. But now that we have the redacted trial briefs from the parties, I thought you'd like to see...

Iranian nuclear facilities have reportedly been attacked by a “music” virus, turning on lab PCs at night and blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at Finnish digital security firm F-secure, publicly released a letter he received from an unnamed Iranian scientist. The researcher, who claimed to work for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said that another virus has struck the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran and a secret underground research facility at Fordo, southwest of Tehran. The letter’s author reported that the virus shut down equipment (made by Germany’s Siemens Corporation) and automated systems at...

Okay, Folks, on a recent thread about the demise of NBC News, the following observation was made: Google has gone far left. People are looking to leave Google, but the only real competition in a search engine is Bing, owned by MS. I have seen and made several comments about how I’d like to leave Google, but why hop to MS, of MSNBC?Well, that got me thinking: what alternative search engines are out there?The link I found provides a neat, but HUGE, rollup of various search engines, search sites and alternatives to the Leftist monoliths of the Web. Personally, I...

I was born in Colorado in 1977 and lived there until I was 21. I went to a private Christian school from age 5-18 and then studied Computer Science at Colorado State University.I graduated at the height of the .com Bubble in 2000 and could’ve gotten a job at any tech company in the USA. I was offered ridiculous salaries with signing bonuses of luxury cars. Pretty tempting.Something about it all seemed very predictable though. Go to College, get the job, go to work. I had lived in Colorado my entire life and even though I had tried very hard...

Monitoring a location or person with a camera or microphone has become a lot easier in recent years due to cameras having much higher resolutions while being fitted into ever smaller devices. Just about every smartphone now carries a high resolution camera capable of recording video along with a decent microphone. If you want to record someone covertly though, you still have the issue of hiding your recording devices from view. You’re also going to want to leave them recording for long periods of time without being discovered. Qwonn, a manufacture of security products, has come up with the...

The kinds of drones making the headlines daily are the heavily armed CIA and U.S. Army vehicles which routinely strike targets in Pakistan - killing terrorists and innocents alike. But the real high-tech story of surveillance drones is going on at a much smaller level, as tiny remote controlled vehicles based on insects are already likely being deployed. Over recent years a range of miniature drones, or micro air vehicles (MAVs), based on the same physics used by flying insects, have been presented to the public.

In an announcement falling somewhere between a suicide note and an expression of optimism for the future Finnish cell-phone has-been, Nokia (NOK) announced yesterday that it would be laying off 10,000 employees between now and the end of 2013. Obviously the negative part was the plan to lay-off nearly 20% of its existing work-force. The upside was that Nokia seems to truly believe the company will exist as a freestanding concern in 18 months. Unwilling to see the glass as anything but half-empty, Wall Street sent NOK shares down 16% Wednesday. Nokia shareholders should be used to such pain by...

Today, a group of 14 free-market organizations, including Digital Liberty, urged the Federal Communications Commission to approve a deal between Verizon and a group cable companies that will free more spectrum for wireless broadband. Under the Obama administration, the FCC has failed to bring new spectrum online to meet rapidly growing demand for wireless broadband. The result is a growing "spectrum crunch," with consumers in dense urban areas already feeling the pinch. (Instead of blaming your wireless carrier for a dropped call or slow speeds, point your finger at the FCC.) The Verizon-SpectrumCo deal presents a rare opportunity to bring...

US computer security researchers said Sunday that the Flame computer virus that smoldered undetected for years in Middle Eastern energy facilities has gotten orders to vanish, leaving no trace. Anti-virus company Symantec said in a blog post that late last week, some Flame "command-and-control servers sent an updated command to several compromised computers." "This command was designed to completely remove (Flame) from the compromised computers." Flame malicious software (malware) appears to have been "in the wild" for two years or longer and prime targets so far have been energy facilities in the Middle East, especially in Iran. The discovery of...

When World IPv6 Launch Day dawns on June 6th, IPv6 services will be enabled on thousands of sites around the world and left on. As the 32-bit IPv4 address space has been exhausted, there is a need for global carriers to move to the larger 128-bit address space that IPv6 provides. But will your organization be ready for the new security issues raised by IPv6? In an interview with eSecurity Planet, Chief Security Officer Danny McPherson of VeriSign cautioned that IPv6 is both an opportunity and a potential security risk. VeriSign is responsible for two of the 13 root DNS...

Researchers have spotted a new banking Trojan subbed 'Tinba' that appears to have hit on a simple tactic for evading security - be as small as possible. An astonishing 20KB in size, Tinba ('Tiny Banker') retains enough sophistication to match almost anything that can be done by much larger malware types. Its main purpose is to burrow into browsers in order to steal logins, but it can also use 'obfuscated' (i.e disguised) web injection and man-in-the-browser to attempt to finesse two-factor web authentication systems. A particularly interesting feature is the way it tries to evade resident security, injecting itself into...