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Solely based on media coverage, you'd think that all of Silicon Valley and the tech world at large was undoubtedly behind Clinton in this critical election. But as has been reported in muted fashion by a few outlets, there is such a thing as the "silent majority" which is going to surprise many this election. I'm confident that polls are having a hard time capturing the factor that quantifies this part of the electorate which isn't being vocal about its Election Day preferences, but will deliver a decisive blow come Tues Nov 8. Those in the tech industry publicly supporting...

Google and Microsoft are butting heads over the disclosure of vulnerabilities. On Monday, Google revealed a critical flaw in Windows after it gave Microsoft a ten-day window to warn the public about it.Google posted about the zero-day vulnerability on its security blog, saying Microsoft had yet to publish a fix or issue an advisory about the software flaw."This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited," Google said. It lets hackers exploit a bug in the Windows kernel, via a win32k.sys system call, to bypass the security sandbox.The search giant originally told Microsoft about the problem...

I’ve been creeped out by Facebook for a long time now. The following story takes it to another level. From Fusion: While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why. “I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone. The next week, things got weirder. Most of her...

Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought ‘why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades—and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits—so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball. She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.”

As people move through a space with a Wi-Fi signal, their bodies affect it, absorbing some waves and reflecting others in various directions. By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.

Florida AG Shuts Down Boynton Beach Tech Support Scam August 24, 2016 11:12 AM TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami) – A Boynton Beach tech support company which reportedly scammed its customers out of $25 million has been temporarily shut down again by court order, according to Florida’s Attorney General’s Office. The company Client Care Experts, formerly known as First Choice Tech Support, LLC, is owned by CEO Michael Seward and his partner Kevin McCormick. The state’s Attorney General’s Office said the operation was run out of a boiler room in Boynton Beach and employed more than 200 telemarketers at the location. The court...

There is no such thing as Pro-Trump free speech as Clinton corporate allies serve up a carefully curated view of the campaign My dad always told me that conservative candidates have to work twice as hard as their liberal opponents to win elections because they’re fighting two opponents: the Democratic Party and the media. The usual suspects from left-leaning major media outlets like The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and even entertainment networks are doing everything in their power to ensure a Clinton victory. Look no further than to Wolf Blitzer mincing around and drinking wine at the Democratic convention,...

OUR SILICON VALLEY ROBBER BARONS08.10.16 11:00 PM ET Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets. A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better....

Four years ago, Meg Whitman burned the midnight oil raising money for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, while Johnvey Hwang volunteered 100-hour weeks building apps for Barack Obama. But today they're on the same side. Eight years after left-leaning technology executives and workers first threw their enthusiastic support to Obama, a new alliance has formed to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance - Morning Consult https://morningconsult.com/2016/07/26/arab-american-groups-join-partner-tech-privacy-fight-surveillance/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRNeE16TmpNR0ZpT0daaSIsInQiOiJ1QXBqd28wWmlEbnpjWUVWRDNOaDZCU2tFMmJ6NXJ2MVJyRHZpcjhGWWxPcGJ1U1VyQXFCXC9PcUN6RmJ3emRKdkJJTWJSUmtBRGRTV09XNlI4QUZHU0xybWYxQ1I5QTRqQkJrZDAxbUEwVzg9In0%3D Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance Amir Nasr   |   July 26, 2016 Privacy advocates in the technology space have a new ally in Arab American groups to help with their fight to keep U.S. surveillance at bay. They are spurred on by anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republicans. In December, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of U.S. borders to Muslim immigrants. In March, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the country needed to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim...

You should be able to trust your wireless keyboard. And yet security researchers have been warning people to be suspicious of wireless computer accessories using sketchy radio protocols for years. Those warnings peaked five months ago, when hackers at the security firm Bastille found that millions of cheap keyboard and mouse dongles let hackers inject keystrokes onto your machine from hundreds of yards away. Now, in case you missed that message, the same researchers have extended their attack to millions more devices—and this time, they can not only inject keystrokes, but also read yours, too. On Tuesday Bastille’s research team...

he smartwatch market has hit its first bump, and it’s all Apple’s fault. Vendors shipped a total of 3.5 million smartwatches worldwide last quarter. This Q2 2016 figure is down 32 percent from the 5.1 million units shipped in Q2 2016, marking the first decline on record. .... As you can see above, Apple’s market share decreased 25 percentage points (from 72 percent to 47 percent) and it shipped less than half the smartwatches (1.6 million). But the company still holds almost half the market, with every other vendor shipping fewer than a million units.

A new federal court ruling could make sharing your passwords for subscription services -- covering everything from Netflix to HBO GO -- a federal crime punishable by prison time, according to a judge who opposed the decision. The ruling, issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, pertained to a trade-secrets case and found that certain instances of sharing passwords are prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - legislation predominantly concerned with hacking. The case involved David Nosal, a headhunter who left his former company Korn/Ferry and then used the password of an employee to...

I am having trouble loading the various forum pages. Whenever I open Free Republic all I am getting are the latest comments rather than a list of the latest posts. The only way I seem to be able to get the latest posts is to sign out and then come back to FR as a lurker. I have cleared my cache and cookies without any resolution of the problem. Any suggestions?

Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment. Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company. Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations...

<p>I remember when Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for being a normal human being, I was sort of bummed that I was going to stop browsing with Firefox. I'm not really the organized boycotting type, but I am someone who simply refuses to participate in idiocy. If some anti-American Hollywood liberal wants to fight against a normal civilization, then I just stop watching their movies and buying their music. If a coffee establishment tells their baristas to engage with me about race when I'm trying to get my morning triple venti soy latte, then I go elsewhere. If one of my favorite conservative-leaning talk show hosts starts supporting a liberal for President, then I turn the dial. It's not that I keep a list, but if it's seared into my brain deep enough, then I certainly alter my habits as a consumer of products, services, and content. Conversely, if someone is under attack by Marxists, then I tend to overly support them, like the Chick-Fil-A scenario, where I was stuffing my face with spicy chicken sandwiches several times per week for months. Thank goodness that died down. Anyway, I knew whatever Eich ended up doing, if it was a product or service, I was going to be a customer. I have no idea what Eich's politics are, but I know he is someone worth supporting.</p>

California’s high-tech business wizards like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are in full freak-out mode over Donald Trump, and the key to understanding why lies in the H-1B visa program. As a recent L.A. Times story titled “Donald Trump has done the unthinkable: Unite Silicon Valley” reports: Ambitious start-up CEOs who swore off talking politics for fear of offending investors are enlisting in campaigns to discredit Trump. Longtime valley Republican stalwarts who have voted for every GOP nominee for decades say they can’t do it this year. The libertarian-minded innovators who just want to get government out of their way have less...

Maybe they use the '80s flick "War Games" as a training film, too. The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals. The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Government Accountability Office report.

My Pine64 Media Center Several months back, I participated in a Kickstarter campaign for the PINE A64, First $15 64-Bit Single Board Super Computer. The campaign started in December of 2015, and was designed to fund the production of a 64-bit computer on a card for the masses priced at $15. Initial estimated delivery was January or February. Their initial estimates on shipping were somewhat optimistic, as I just received mine the other day (5/21/2016). Reading through some of the comments on the project, some people were rather bent out of shape about the shipping delays, which is something I...

Have a need to use my rickety old website. It is a 200 page FrontPage monster which has been sitting out at my ISP for quite a few years with little updating. I have recently been approached about restarting my column nationally. Am so excited! I would like to use the webpage as the vehicle and realize that it will need to be upgraded. I run WIN7. There is no extension left for Frontpage and the software currently does not recognize the website, there isn't even a screen to put in the username and code. The ISP states that FTP...