Free Republic

UC Berkeley officials are sending alert notices to approximately 80,000 current and former faculty, staff, students and vendors following a criminal cyberattack on a system storing their Social Security or bank account numbers. The campus has no evidence that any unauthorized individual actually accessed, acquired or used any personal information; however, it is informing those potentially impacted so they can be alert to signs of any possible misuse of their information and take advantage of credit protection services the campus is offering free of charge. The attack occurred in late December 2015, when an unauthorized person or persons obtained access...

<p>Silicon Valley may have plenty of millionaires, but the road to U.S. billionairedom is increasingly paved through finance.</p> <p>Nearly 27% of all U.S. billionaires in 2014 worked in finance (read: hedge-fund managers and a few others), according to a study by Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Sarah Oliver, a research analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.</p>

Feburary 14, 2016 Paul_Behan Don’t Keep Your Personal Or Financial Data On A Windows 10 Machine! Well not if you want to keep it private. Like many people I was surprised at the Edward Snowden revelations a few years ago. Nothing has seemed to change and in many cases things have got worse. Some corporations are in partnership with government agencies in regard to collection of data.(snip) According to this an article, (1) even after turning off all the tracking options on a computer, the researcher left the computer on overnight and tracked the traffic. He was surprised to find...

In 2014, the Northeast Utilities Company in Connecticut -- now known as Eversource Energy -- allegedly laid off around 200 of its American tech workers and replaced them with low-wage foreigners admitted on H-1B guest worker visas. Now a photo has emerged depicted the workers' final, silent patriotic protest -- silent because the workers reportedly were forced to sign non-disparagement agreements to shield their employer. The image depicts the display of American flags around cubicles of the company's IT department -- circulated by trade magazine ComputerWorld -- before the Americans were replaced with foreign labor. The powerful image seems to...

Congress plans to question about two dozen federal agencies on whether they were using backdoored Juniper network security appliances. In December, Juniper Networks said it had discovered unauthorized code added to ScreenOS, the operating system that runs on its NetScreen network firewalls. The rogue code, which remained undetected for two years or more, could have allowed remote attackers to gain administrative access to vulnerable devices or to decrypt VPN connections. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wants to determine the impact that this issue had on government organizations and how those organizations responded to the incident. The...

Gotcha: Symantec fires reseller nabbed in tech support scam Malwarebytes sting operation catches out Silurian Tech Support 22 Jan 2016 at 10:52, John Leyden An authorised Symantec reseller has been caught hoodwinking users into buying security software by employing underhand marketing tactics. Silurian Tech Support was spotted flinging fake Norton-themed security warnings in an attempt to drum up business by Symantec rival Malwarebytes. The alerts were used to direct users towards a tech support service that researchers discovered offered to fix non-existent problems for a flat fee of $199 or more. All the well-worn themes of the far-too-prevalent tech support...

If you're using a PC running Windows 7 or 8, you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10. And you may be worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update. Microsoft will start pushing out a Windows 10 upgrade as a recommended, virtually mandatory, update very soon (it's right now only an optional download). Some people are tempted to turn off Windows Update completely to avoid getting the new operating system – don't. It'll leave your computer vulnerable to attack as you'll no longer get security...

X-ray vision, a comic book fantasy for decades, is becoming a reality in a US lab. A group of researchers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dina Katabi has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements. Researchers say the technology will be able to help health care providers and families keep closer tabs on toddlers and the elderly, and it could be a new strategic tool for law enforcement and the military. "Think of it just like cameras, except that it's not a camera," said Fadel Adib, a...

Researchers at the Gedik Lab at MIT use strong ultrafast laser pulses to stimulate changes in material, followed by a weaker probe laser pulse after some time delay to monitor the changes with femtosecond time resolution. Tungsten (W) atoms are black, and sulfur (S) atoms are yellow. Credit: Edbert Jarvis Sie =================================================================================================================================== Monolayer films of tungsten disulfide, just three atoms thick, have unique electronic valleys which can be manipulated with laser light. This finding, by MIT physics graduate student Edbert Jarvis Sie, Associate Professor Nuh Gedik, and colleagues, was significant enough to warrant placement on the cover of Nature Materials...

Duo Security researchers found a second weak digital certificate on a new Dell Inspiron laptop The fallout from a serious security mistake made by Dell is widening, as security experts find more issues of concern. Researchers with Duo Security have found a second weak digital certificate in a new Dell laptop and evidence of another problematic one circulating. The issue started after it was discovered Dell shipped devices with a self-signed root digital certificate, eDellRoot, which is used to encrypt data traffic. But it installed the root certificate with the private encryption key included, a critical error that left many...

Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley, the only black engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, just publicly announced that he has left the company. In his post, he says his reasons for leaving have everything to do with the way Twitter is addressing diversity and inclusion. Though Miley was laid off as part of Twitter's cuts in October, he says he had already told Twitter that he had planned on leaving at the end of October. He also passed on the severance package so that he could speak openly about his experience at Twitter. So, it seems as if Twitter...

His name is Morgan, but it hasn’t always been his name. What it was before doesn’t legally matter any longer. What does matter, to us, is the concentric circles by which “Morgan” arrived…came to be. Morgan doesn’t know any better. Many metaphors of consciousness can be applied, but for Morgan, your arguments on his condition fall outside of his realm of concern. Morgan is Morgan, and what Morgan does in the present is all that matters. What might have been his reality, to you, before “the incident,” is simply pabulum to Morgan. To Morgan, you are children trying to complete...

Batteries are so 20th century. The Lumen is a new flashlight that skips the AAs, producing light by harvesting your body heat, and it's looking for funding on Kickstarter. There are no switches, ports, compartments or anything — just a machined metal frame, a single bright LED, and a big thumbprint where you need to touch the device.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who hopes to make coding a requirement to graduate high school. Currently, Emanuel is aiming to make coding an essential requirement for high schoolers in Chicago by 2018, and it's his hope that the entire nation might follow its example. So what do you folks think about Mayor Emanuel's thoughts on coding?

The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called unicorn companies have been created every week in 2015, according to data from CB Insights. But now it looks like winter is coming to Silicon Valley. Fortune's Dan Primack went to San Francisco this week and met with a number of people involved with unicorn companies with ballooning valuations. He says the mentality of people in Silicon Valley is starting to change, and people are getting scared. "As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment,"...

I just clicked on a thread titled 'Steve King Endorses Daniel Webster for Speaker of the House' posted by E. Pluribus Unum from Breitbart, and both times, my Avast virus protection popped up with 'threat detected'. Anyone else get this when clicking on this title? First time I've EVER gotten this while browsing FR.

When you think of tech innovation, places like Silicon Valley and Boston spring to mind. But flying under the world's radar is Switzerland, where inventions like a solar plane that just completed the longest solo-flight ever without fuel are born. And while Europe was busy debating bitcoin's future, Switzerland already opened up the region's first bitcoin ATM earlier this year. The country has managed to maintain its No. 1 ranking on the Global Innovation Index for four years in a row. Switzerland's résumé is definitely impressive: The country boasts the second-highest number of patents per person — second to Japan....

A significant number of Apple Inc customers are reporting their mobile devices have crashed after attempting to upload the new iOS 9 operating system, the latest in a line of launch glitches for the tech giant.

Heat-vision cameras have been used widely in many industries for decades: Soldiers find targets through heat-vision rifle sights, police mount them on helicopters to search for people on the ground and contractors use the sensors to look for cold air seeping into homes. Now you can buy a simple smartphone attachment to reveal the widely varying temperatures of the people and things around you. Maybe you’re not up for hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger, like the heat-seeing alien hunter in the classic 1987 film “Predator.” There are many practical home uses for the latest thermal camera accessories from Flir and Seek, too:...

The current state of the Republican Party may seem like a demolition derby, but there’s an equally fascinating, if less well-understood, conflict within the Democratic Party. In this case, the disruptive force is largely Silicon Valley, a natural oligarchy that now funds a party teetering toward populism and even socialism. The fundamental contradictions, as Karl Marx would have noted, lie in the collision of interests between a group that has come to epitomize self-consciously progressive megawealth and a mass base which is increasingly concerned about downward mobility. For all his occasional populist lapses, President Obama generally has embraced Silicon Valley...