Free Republic

Over a year ago former director of both the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, flat out admitted, "we kill people based on metadata." He quickly distinguished between the metadata about which the debate was focused, telephone records, and other forms of surveillance metadata upon which covert actions are taken. Not surprised about the actions, I confess I was taken aback when I considered the implications that this disclosure has on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in cyberspace. Ever since the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, I have been harping on complications of the Fourth Amendment between content and metadata in data networking. For...

Last weekend I loaded Windows 10 on an old laptop I rarely use. I immediately noticed several privacy issues with new open windows (pun intended) for spying on what I do, where I go and what I say online. After reading some to the reviews and discussions I think it's time to revert back to Windows 7 ASAP. Thanks, but no thanks Microsoft! The police state is doing a fine job without any additional help from you and me. I haven't turned the laptop on since I loaded Windows 10, but the next time I do, it will be for...

When the world’s leading technology firms reported their workforce demographics, the details were uncomfortable, but not surprising: Apple, Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants are dominated by men, many of them white.

Using powerful computer simulations, researchers from Brown University have identified a material with a higher melting point than any known substance. The computations, described in the journal Physical Review B (Rapid Communications), showed that a material made with just the right amounts of hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have a melting point of more than 4,400 kelvins (7,460 degrees Fahrenheit). That's about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun, and 200 kelvins higher than the highest melting point ever recorded experimentally. The experimental record-holder is a substance made from the elements hafnium, tantalum, and carbon (Hf-Ta-C). But these...

Excerpt per posting rules: In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that's corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message.

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

The prolonged hacking into the White House Office of Personnel Management, which put the personal information of at least some 21.5 million past and current federal employees in jeopardy, is only the beginning of the security threat to the Obama Administration and its successors, a number of top-level experts in cybersecurity have told Fox News. The attack has been frequently sourced as coming from China. The experts warned that the entire U.S. national security clearance system could be compromised, that future senior government leaders and advisors could be targeted even before taking office, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials...

The fist bump was their thing in Afghanistan, where both Marines lost legs in the same attack, and the fist bump is still their thing in the hunt for child predators under a special law enforcement program to train and hire medically retired veterans. Cpl. Justin Gaertner and Sgt. Gabriel Martinez in their dress blues bumped fists at an event earlier this year in Florida, just as they bumped fists while recovering from their wounds. Gaertner, 26, of Tampa, Fla., has been partnered for the last two years with retired Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Nathan Cruz, 42, executing the...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

SEATTLE — Microsoft plans to announce a major new round of layoffs as early as Wednesday, as the company seeks to further cut costs in a shifting technology landscape. The layoffs are in addition to the about 18,000 employees that Microsoft said it planned to let go a year ago, according to people briefed on the plans, who asked for anonymity because the details were confidential. The new job cuts are expected to affect people in Microsoft’s hardware group, among other parts of the company, including the struggling smartphone business that it acquired from Nokia last year in a $7.2...

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than...

How a Jailbird Con Artist Uncovered a Secret FBI Surveillance Tool 43,960 7 Kate KnibbsFiled to: Stingrays 6/19/15 2:30pm A convict lawyer, sitting in jail, obsessed with a wacky theory that the government tracked him by sending secret rays into his house... ends up discovering a secret government cell phone tracking program. Sounds like bizarre noir, right? But it’s true.It happened to Daniel Rigmaiden, who found out that the government had used Stingrays—covert surveillance devices that act like a fake cell phone towers—to catch him running a fake tax return scheme. He’s the guy who brought Stingrays to light. Rigmaiden...

The super-sophisticated malware that infiltrated Kaspersky Labs is more crafty than first imagined. We're told that the Duqu 2.0 software nasty was signed using legit digital certificates issued to Foxconn – a world-leading Chinese electronics manufacturer, whose customers include Microsoft, Dell, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. The code-signing was uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who are studying their Duqu 2.0 infection. Windows trusts Foxconn-signed code because the Chinese goliath's certificate was issued by VeriSign, which is a trusted certificate root. Thus, the operating system will happily load and run the Foxconn-signed Duqu 2.0's 64-bit kernel-level driver without setting...

Disney ABC Television Group reversed a decision to lay off about 35 tech workers this week, following recent reports that Disney laid off hundreds of tech workers in January after forcing them to train their replacements. Two weeks ago, Disney ABC told a team of between 30 and 35 application developers they were being laid off, some at the end of July, and that their jobs were going to an IT contractor with large offshore operations, reported Computer World. But on Thursday, Disney ABC told the workers plans had changed and they would not be laid off. Some of the...

The stunning leak of nude and intimate photos of scores of celebrities may reach far wider than was previously known, involving the breach of almost 600 online storage accounts, according to unsealed federal court documents. The "Celebgate" hack resulted in the posting on Aug. 31 of almost 500 purported photos of Hollywood stars, models and other celebrities — including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Kaley Cuoco and U.S. soccer star Hope Solo — to the Wild West-like Internet forum 4chan, from which they quickly spread. Apple Inc. confirmed the next day that the photos were obtained through a "targeted...

".......Annie [composite techie-must read full article to grasp how "she's" defined]has voted for the Democrats in the last few elections, both because everyone she knows does and because they stand against the less tolerant elements of the Republican Party, which seem frighteningly antediluvian to her. The war on terror struck her as about the dumbest thing she’s seen any government do, a massive overreaction with no planning or strategy to it.(She feels roughly the same about the war on drugs.)Yet she saw that Democrats were just as slow as Republicans to sour on the United States’ involvement in the Middle...

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.

Millions of routers and other embedded devices are affected by a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise them. The vulnerability is located in a service called NetUSB, which lets devices connected over USB to a computer be shared with other machines on a local network or the Internet via IP (Internet Protocol). The shared devices can be printers, webcams, thumb drives, external hard disks and more. NetUSB is implemented in Linux-based embedded systems, such as routers, as a kernel driver. The driver is developed by Taiwan-based KCodes Technology. Once enabled, it opens a server that listens on TCP...

University of Utah engineers have taken a step forward in creating the next generation of computers and mobile devices capable of speeds millions of times faster than current machines. The Utah engineers have developed an ultracompact beamsplitter—the smallest on record—for dividing light waves into two separate channels of information. The device brings researchers closer to producing silicon photonic chips that compute and shuttle data with light instead of electrons. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues describe their invention today in the journal Nature Photonics. Silicon photonics could significantly increase the power and speed of machines such...

Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It’s suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached. And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane’s engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days. Hypothetically, the engines could suddenly halt even in mid-flight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s directive on the matter states that...