Free Republic

Much has been written, often with considerable glee, about the worsening divide in the Republican Party between its corporate and Tea Party wings. Yet Democrats may soon face their own schism as a result of the growing power in the party of high-tech business interests. Gaining the support of tech moguls is a huge win for the Democrats — at least initially. They are not only a huge source of money, they also can provide critical expertise that the Republicans have been far slower to employ. There have always been affluent individuals who backed liberal or Democratic causes, either out...

What a year 2013 turned out to be. We saw all-new PC form factors, interesting innovations in mobile hardware, and an explosion of gadgets in the home tech and entertainment spaces. And after testing, beating on, and writing about hundreds of products, the editors at PCWorld and TechHive have carefully compiled a list of our 50 favorites.

"An article at Ars Technica explains how, following stories of NSA leaks, FreeBSD developers will not rely solely on Intel's or Via's chip-based random number generators for /dev/random values. The values will first be seeded through another randomization algorithm known as 'Yarrow.' The changes are effective with the upcoming FreeBSD 10.0 (for which the first of three planned release candidates became available last week)."

Each trade results in a bitcoin being sent from the currency counter in red to the country on the map. The value in BTC is listed in green and plotted across the map. The last exchange rate for each currency is listed in @purple and updated for each trade....

merica’s traditional phone system is not as dependable as it used to be. Just last month, the Federal Communications Commission told phone companies to start . According to one estimate, as many as 1 in 5 incoming long-distance calls simply doesn’t connect. The problem may be in the way those calls are being routed — often via the Internet, which is cheaper. It may also have something to do with the gradual decay of traditional landline infrastructure. Dan Newhouse, a farmer in eastern Washington state, hears that decay on his home phone every day. “We live out in the country,...

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner. Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."

The White House’s refusal to make a top technology official available to Congress is drawing some heat on the Hill. The White House declined this week to make Chief Technology Officer Todd Park available to testify at a House Oversight hearing next Wednesday on the rollout of Healthcare.gov. White House Assistant Director for Legislative Affairs Donna Pignatelli said Mr. Park is currently too busy helping fix the troubled healthcare website to appear, and suggested he testify in early December instead.

State-owned channel Rossiya 24 even showed footage of a technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a "spy chip" with what he called "a little microphone". Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks. Other products found to have rogue components reportedly included mobile phones and car dashboard cameras.

A week after the contractors who built HealthCare.gov blamed the Obama administration for the site's failures, the administration is shifting the blame right back. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will tell a House committee tomorrow the site's botched rollout was the result of contractors failing to live up to expectations – not bad management at HHS, as the contractors suggested. "CMS has a track record of successfully overseeing the many contractors our programs depend on to function. Unfortunately, a subset of those contracts for HealthCare.gov have not met expectations," Sebelius said in prepared testimony for tomorrow's hearing before...

Greek marketing group has created the first "Tweeting Bra" as part of a campaign from Nestle Fitness for October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The social networking bra utilizes a special mechanism hidden under the hook of the bra. When it is unhooked, a signal is sent to a cell phone which in turn notifies a server that generates a tweet.

Sebelius told Congress this afternoon that she will indeed agree to testify about the O-Care rollout — just not this week, as she has a scheduling conflict. Here’s a question for her when she does via Byron York: How are they paying for this all-hands-on-deck salvage operation of Healthcare.gov, which even The One himself described as a “tech surge” in the Rose Garden today? I’m not asking that rhetorically, either. Appropriations can be very confusing; plenty of people watching the “defund” pageant play out assumed, I think, that a shutdown would mean choking off funding for ObamaCare until it was...

Authorities have arrested a man in San Francisco, California accused of operating an underground website that allowed users to purchase guns and drugs from around the world using encrypted, digital currency. Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in the Silk Road online marketplace, according to court papers published this week. A sealed complaint dated September 27 was unearthed by security researcher Brian Krebs in which Ulbricht is accused of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy money laundering conspiracy and more. According to prosecutors,...

Devices running iOS 7 can be remotely secured when lost, making it so that a device's associated Apple ID and password must be entered before it can be wiped and used again. In effect, the new system could make an iPhone almost unusable when stolen, should the system work as planned. The NYPD is evidently hoping that it will discourage thieves, as so-called "Apple picking" theft has become a major problem. Last year, New York City's annual crime rate rose for the first time in two decades — a fact that Mayor Bloomberg blamed squarely on the theft of Apple...

The National Security Agency's director of information assurance today said the "way to achieve confidence in cyberspace" is to increase collaboration between the government and the high-tech industry--remarks that rang ironic given former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about how NSA works with industry. NSA documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA's goal is to build backdoors into commercial products and weaken encryption to make it easier for surveillance, allegations that the U.S. government has not even tried to refute. When asked about that today, NSA director of information assurance Debora Plunkett, who gave the keynote address at the...

The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses "It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible...

Since the beta test launching of Google Glass along with rumors surrounding the secretive Apple iWatch, “wearable tech” is a term frequently popping up in the headlines. We only have conjecture as to what the full scope of Apple's iWatch might be, however, it is difficult to imagine that it will bring revolutionary functions beyond what is already provided by the iPhone and iPad line. It begs the question... (continued)

Samsung unveiled its highly anticipated digital wristwatch Wednesday, beating Apple to what could become this year's must-have holiday gift item. So-called smartwatches, which can perform tasks such as displaying email and Twitter messages on a device worn around the wrist, have been around for several years but have failed so far to inspire great interest among ordinary consumers. But with smartphone behemoths Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. joining the fray—and Google pushing its Google Glass gadget—experts see a chance of wearable computers breaking into the mainstream. That is, if consumers can get used to talking to their watch, secret...

Georgia Tech sophomore Nick Selby on Sunday delivered quite possibly the craziest and most impassioned “welcome back” pep talk in the history of ever. And if it doesn’t excite or inspire you, you made need to check your pulse and make sure you’re breathing.

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

The number of digitally-connected schools has increased 83 percent during the past 15 years, thanks in part to E-Rate, a $2.3 billion federal program centered on providing schools and libraries with high-speed broadband and wireless Internet. The program has helped to revolutionize learning by facilitating schools’ access to modern telecommunications services and equipment. Today, 97 percent of American classrooms are connected to the Internet. But the needs of schools and libraries have shifted with the ever-evolving technological landscape since Congress established the program in 1996. Bipartisan reports dating back to 2005 called the E-Rate program “a well-intentioned program that nonetheless...