Free Republic

[Last week,] a deal between Verizon and a consortium of cable companies to free more spectrum for mobile broadband gained significant traction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) conditionally signing off on the deal and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announcing a vote of approval will come in short order. The agreement is an innovative move without much precedent. Verizon will purchase a significant chuck of spectrum from SpectrumCo, a group of cable companies including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, that covers 80 percent of Americans and is ideal for 4G mobile broadband. Moving forward, those cable companies can purchase...

My twenty something liberal Obama voter colleague (with a stay at home wife and two young children) cited this tidbit of news which I'm thinking is as pumped up as the "jobs" numbers at the White Hut--Anybody care to debunk? Largest IT employment gains in four years reported Network World (US) The nation's employment outlook for IT professionals has suddenly surged, gaining 18,200 jobs, the largest monthly increase since 2008, according to tech employment-research firm Foote Partners.

I am homeschooling a daughter this year. She is bright (the mid 120s) and a little Asperger-ish. She loves tech nothing brings her joy like cracking into one of the laptops and repairing it. She is looking at high school and for a variety of reasons she will need to have a portion of her schooling homeschooled. This gal wants to get going on growing up and living and I don’t think that college is in her future. Rereading Charles Murray's book on REAL EDUCATION has inspired me to try to put together a curriculum that includes some education to...

Battalions of super-soldiers could be selected for specific duties on the basis of their genetic make-up and then constantly monitored for signs of weakness. So says a report by the U.S. National Academies of Science (NAS). If a soldier is struggling, a digital "buddy" might step in to warn about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap the soldier with an electromagnet to increase his alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team.

As Samsung and Apple have been fighting over patents from one end of the earth to the other, most of the coverage, with few exceptions, seems to present Apple's point of view. [Example A, Example B, Example C, Example D, and Example E.] We know how much money Apple is asking for, we know it's claiming treble damages for willfulness, we know it thinks FRAND patents are not deserving of injunction enforcement, and that Samsung is asking too much money for them. But now that we have the redacted trial briefs from the parties, I thought you'd like to see...

Iranian nuclear facilities have reportedly been attacked by a “music” virus, turning on lab PCs at night and blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at Finnish digital security firm F-secure, publicly released a letter he received from an unnamed Iranian scientist. The researcher, who claimed to work for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said that another virus has struck the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran and a secret underground research facility at Fordo, southwest of Tehran. The letter’s author reported that the virus shut down equipment (made by Germany’s Siemens Corporation) and automated systems at...

Okay, Folks, on a recent thread about the demise of NBC News, the following observation was made: Google has gone far left. People are looking to leave Google, but the only real competition in a search engine is Bing, owned by MS. I have seen and made several comments about how I’d like to leave Google, but why hop to MS, of MSNBC?Well, that got me thinking: what alternative search engines are out there?The link I found provides a neat, but HUGE, rollup of various search engines, search sites and alternatives to the Leftist monoliths of the Web. Personally, I...

I was born in Colorado in 1977 and lived there until I was 21. I went to a private Christian school from age 5-18 and then studied Computer Science at Colorado State University.I graduated at the height of the .com Bubble in 2000 and could’ve gotten a job at any tech company in the USA. I was offered ridiculous salaries with signing bonuses of luxury cars. Pretty tempting.Something about it all seemed very predictable though. Go to College, get the job, go to work. I had lived in Colorado my entire life and even though I had tried very hard...

Monitoring a location or person with a camera or microphone has become a lot easier in recent years due to cameras having much higher resolutions while being fitted into ever smaller devices. Just about every smartphone now carries a high resolution camera capable of recording video along with a decent microphone. If you want to record someone covertly though, you still have the issue of hiding your recording devices from view. You’re also going to want to leave them recording for long periods of time without being discovered. Qwonn, a manufacture of security products, has come up with the...

The kinds of drones making the headlines daily are the heavily armed CIA and U.S. Army vehicles which routinely strike targets in Pakistan - killing terrorists and innocents alike. But the real high-tech story of surveillance drones is going on at a much smaller level, as tiny remote controlled vehicles based on insects are already likely being deployed. Over recent years a range of miniature drones, or micro air vehicles (MAVs), based on the same physics used by flying insects, have been presented to the public.

In an announcement falling somewhere between a suicide note and an expression of optimism for the future Finnish cell-phone has-been, Nokia (NOK) announced yesterday that it would be laying off 10,000 employees between now and the end of 2013. Obviously the negative part was the plan to lay-off nearly 20% of its existing work-force. The upside was that Nokia seems to truly believe the company will exist as a freestanding concern in 18 months. Unwilling to see the glass as anything but half-empty, Wall Street sent NOK shares down 16% Wednesday. Nokia shareholders should be used to such pain by...

Today, a group of 14 free-market organizations, including Digital Liberty, urged the Federal Communications Commission to approve a deal between Verizon and a group cable companies that will free more spectrum for wireless broadband. Under the Obama administration, the FCC has failed to bring new spectrum online to meet rapidly growing demand for wireless broadband. The result is a growing "spectrum crunch," with consumers in dense urban areas already feeling the pinch. (Instead of blaming your wireless carrier for a dropped call or slow speeds, point your finger at the FCC.) The Verizon-SpectrumCo deal presents a rare opportunity to bring...

US computer security researchers said Sunday that the Flame computer virus that smoldered undetected for years in Middle Eastern energy facilities has gotten orders to vanish, leaving no trace. Anti-virus company Symantec said in a blog post that late last week, some Flame "command-and-control servers sent an updated command to several compromised computers." "This command was designed to completely remove (Flame) from the compromised computers." Flame malicious software (malware) appears to have been "in the wild" for two years or longer and prime targets so far have been energy facilities in the Middle East, especially in Iran. The discovery of...

When World IPv6 Launch Day dawns on June 6th, IPv6 services will be enabled on thousands of sites around the world and left on. As the 32-bit IPv4 address space has been exhausted, there is a need for global carriers to move to the larger 128-bit address space that IPv6 provides. But will your organization be ready for the new security issues raised by IPv6? In an interview with eSecurity Planet, Chief Security Officer Danny McPherson of VeriSign cautioned that IPv6 is both an opportunity and a potential security risk. VeriSign is responsible for two of the 13 root DNS...

Researchers have spotted a new banking Trojan subbed 'Tinba' that appears to have hit on a simple tactic for evading security - be as small as possible. An astonishing 20KB in size, Tinba ('Tiny Banker') retains enough sophistication to match almost anything that can be done by much larger malware types. Its main purpose is to burrow into browsers in order to steal logins, but it can also use 'obfuscated' (i.e disguised) web injection and man-in-the-browser to attempt to finesse two-factor web authentication systems. A particularly interesting feature is the way it tries to evade resident security, injecting itself into...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Security experts discovered a highly complex computer virus in Iran and the Middle East that they believe was deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored espionage. Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that claimed responsibility for discovering the virus. Iran's National Computer Emergency Response Team also said Flame might be linked to recent cyber attacks that officials in Tehran have said...

The complexity of the latest 'Flame' virus bears the hallmarks of a program engineered by a state, a number of Israeli computer experts believe. As details of Flame - the third major virus discovered to have an affinity to Iranian computer systems in recent years - filtered through the media, network security experts in Israel, requesting anonymity, studied the initial reports, and indicated that they believed small groups of hackers could not be behind the virus.

Hello fellow FReepers, Like a lot of folks I'm looking for a job and battling this tough market. I can competently wear either or both of two major hats, either as system administrator or computer programmer. I've had my resume out on Dice for several months, which has resulted in lots of nibbles, maybe about three a week, a mix of contract and permanent jobs that recruiters have asked me to submit my resume to. But virtually nothing has gotten to an interview... that is until this month. Now stuff has started to hop. The recruiters sound more interested and...

The FBI is warning that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their Internet connections come July, unless they take steps to diagnose and disinfect their computers. The problem is related to malware called DNSChanger that was first discovered way back in 2007 and that has infected millions of computers worldwide. In simple terms, when you type a Web address into your browser, your computer contacts DNS (or Domain Name System) servers to find out the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the site you're trying to reach, and then it takes you there. DNSChanger fiddled with an infected machine's...

An investigation by Dr Web suggests that about 600,000 Macs have the malware - potentially allowing them to be hijacked and used as a "botnet". It says that more than half that number are in the US. Flashback was first detected last September when anti-virus researchers flagged software masquerading itself as a Flash Player update. Once downloaded it deactivated some of the computer's security software. Remote control "By introducing the code criminals are potentially able to control the machine," the firm's chief executive Boris Sharov told the BBC. "We stress the word potential as we have never seen any malicious...