Free Republic

The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6. Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users. “Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the...

Google employees are receiving regular notifications from management of Covid-19 infections, causing some to question the company’s return-to-office mandates. The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly. Employees are reacting with frustration and memes. The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its...

The Senate’s high-tech funding bill will create high-tech jobs for people in heartland America, not just in immigration-inflated Silicon Valley and other coastal sites, according to Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), the leading Republican behind the bill. “This bill will establish regional technology hubs across our country, which will become centers for the research, development, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing of new key technologies,” Young said in a Wednesday speech shortly before the bill was approved.

As Uber aggressively pushed into markets around the world, the ride-sharing service lobbied political leaders to relax labor and taxi laws, used a "kill switch'' to thwart regulators and law enforcement, channeled money through Bermuda and other tax havens and considered portraying violence against its drivers as a way to gain public sympathy, according to a report released Sunday. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit network of investigative reporters, scoured internal Uber texts, emails, invoices and other documents to deliver what it called "an unprecedented look into the ways Uber defied taxi laws and upended workers' rights.'' **SNIP**...

(video) In 2020 I became immersed in the marvelous world of quadrupedal robots. Viewing YouTube videos of robots such as SPOT by Boston Dynamics, and the MIT Mini Cheetah has inspired me to make my very own. These cleverly crafted bots are known for their dynamic movements and realistic appearances. Over the past year, I've made it my personal goal to create my very own affordable quadrupedal robot. One that could function similar to the high-end quadrupeds. Here I present ARES, a fully 3D printed 12 DOF robot dog capable of omni directional travel as well as many other maneuvers....

LVIV, Ukraine: Ukraine’s IT sector is booming despite the Russian invasion. Workers with stickers on their laptops recline on beach chairs outside a warehouse for startups in the west Ukraine city of Lviv giving off major Silicon Valley vibes. But the atmosphere inside is different. Through the glass doors of the complex, young Ukrainians zig-zag between stacks of bulletproof vests and cardboard boxes filled with helmets ready for the front. They are part of Ukraine’s burgeoning tech sector which was forced to adapt after Russia’s invasion and has become key to supporting the war effort. “Most tech companies had...

Chrome OS isn’t just for Chromebooks now. It’s not pleasant seeing a once-beloved laptop (or desktop) computer slowly slide into obsolescence as it gets too old and tired to keep up with the demands of modern-day computing, but Google has now provided an option for these ailing machines in the form of Chrome OS Flex. Chrome OS Flex is the standard Chrome OS that runs on Chromebooks, in a form that you can install on computers that aren’t Chromebooks. The idea is that the lightweight operating system won’t weigh your old device down to the same extent as Windows or...

Apple and Facebook reportedly provided sensitive customer information to hackers who faked being law enforcement officials in 2021. Facebook parent company Meta and Apple gave the hackers basic customer details — such as phone numbers, home addresses, and IP addresses — in response to forged "emergency data requests," Bloomberg reported. Typically, such data requests can only be granted through search warrants or subpoenas provided by a judge, but emergency requests don't require a full-court order. The hackers who duped the companies are affiliated with cybercrime groups known as “Recursion Team,” who have a history of using fake legal requests to...

In almost every field of science, and technology, US and Russia have always been competitors. Occasionally, though, stuff gets a little crazy.Well, no don’t have to worry because there are no hostilities between them.But the vibes are not calm. It is no secret that Elon Musk is famous for his technological abilities.Therefore, Russia is getting a little jealous of his success and is trying to make things less exciting, and Musk is threatening them in response.The Russian space chief watched in awe as billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson took off into space in vehicles they helped fund - and...

BRUSSELS - The European Union set the stage for a stepped-up crackdown on big tech companies with an agreement on landmark digital rules to rein in online “gatekeepers” such as Google and Facebook parent Meta. EU officials agreed late Thursday on wording for the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, part of a long-awaited overhaul of its digital rulebook. The act, which still needs other approvals, seeks to prevent tech giants from dominating digital markets, with the threat of whopping fines or even the possibility of a company breakup. For instance, they face tighter restrictions on using people’s data for targeted online...

A revelation buried in a cache of documents opens a new and potentially important investigative corridor for Special Counsel John Durham. The shady tech executive who featured prominently in the federal indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also communicating with a covert group of computer scientists skilled in mining internet data. This revelation raises concerns that the man referred to in special counsel documents as Tech Executive-1, Rodney Joffe, may have shared sensitive government and private internet data more broadly than previously thought. Joffe’s role in Spygate represents one of the most recent developments exposed by the...

The White House is warning the chip industry to diversify its supply chain in case Russia retaliates against threatened U.S. export curbs by blocking access to key materials, people familiar with the matter said. The potential for retaliation has garnered more attention in recent days after Techcet, a market research group, published a report on Feb. 1 highlighting the reliance of many semiconductor manufacturers on Russian and Ukrainian-sourced materials like neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet estimates, over 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine, while 35% of U.S. palladium is sourced from Russia.

Is this the bubble burst many were expecting once The Federal Reserve starting raising rates? Well, if today’s market opening is an indication, the answer is yes. The NASDAQ Composite Index is down 1.36% and West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil futures prices are down 2%. But if you think the US equities are deflating, look at European equities. The Euro Stoxx 50 index is down 3.20%. Is this a Don Ho “Tiny Bubble” burst? Or a slow deflation of asset prices as The Fed removes its stimulus?

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it's like from the inside right now.

In 2020, the video-sharing platform was ranked No. 7 while Google came in at No. 1. This year, TikTok came in first, followed by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, in that order. Cloudflare's 2020 and 2021 rankings don't offer a perfect comparison; Cloudflare Radar, which compiles this information, only launched in September of 2020, so last year's rankings accounted for just a few months. Regardless, Google is well aware of TikTok's dominance. The site has been looking to become increasingly focused on video and audio as the internet moves away from content people can read and toward content people can...

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Wednesday revealed that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a second bug disclosed in the widely used Log4j logging utility, making it imperative that customers move quickly to install the latest version as a barrage of attacks continues to pummel unpatched systems with a variety of malware. The new vulnerability, assigned the identifier CVE-2021-45046, makes it possible for adversaries to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and follows disclosure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that the original fix for the remote code execution bug — CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell — was "incomplete in certain non-default...

“I still worry about the censorship that occurs,” Nunes remarked. “What happens if these companies just decide next year, ‘Well, Republicans, they’re all insurrectionists. Let’s shut off all their credit cards and banking so they just can’t raise any money.’ They could do that, all these woke corporations.”

Apple is making U.S. states foot part of the bill and provide customer support for its plan to turn iPhones into digital identification cards, according to confidential documents obtained by CNBC. The company requires states to maintain the systems needed to issue and service credentials, hire project managers to respond to Apple inquiries, prominently market the new feature and push for its adoption with other government agencies, all at taxpayer expense, according to contracts signed by four states. Apple announced in June that its users could soon store state-issued identification cards in the iPhone’s Wallet app, billing it as a...

Understanding exactly what about the Bitcoin network implementing Taproot changes is necessary for understanding why the changes were needed. Taproot is the combination of many Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) resulting in a soft fork of Bitcoin’s blockchain. A soft fork is a proposed upgrade that over time is adopted as the only blockchain, meaning the old one will cease to operate once the new one (in this case, Taproot) is fully adopted.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced a companion to a Senate bill that would let people use algorithm-free versions of tech platforms, according to a copy of the text shared exclusively with Axios.Driving the news: Recent revelations about Facebook's internal research findings have renewed lawmaker interest in bills that seek to give people more of a say in how algorithms shape their online experiences.Why it matters: The bill shows that anger over how platforms use their algorithms to target users with specialized content is a bipartisan issue with momentum on Capitol Hill.The algorithms that personalize content on social...