Free Republic

Look, I'm hardly a computer or technology expert. In fact, it's all I can do to compose a piece of writing on the computer, and attach it to an e-mail to send to my editor at Creative Loafing in a manner that actually reaches the recipient. My attempts at Web-surfing are akin to swimming in a kiddie wading pool, while my kids, grandkids, wife and everyone else in my office is doing hang-fives on the Internet. But what I do believe in is freedom -- freedom that includes privacy, and the expectation thereof whenever I decide to use the Web....

Computer scientists at Rice University say the Internet is developing wrinkles. So they're proposing, along with colleagues at other universities, to radically overhaul America's Internet infrastructure, from the backbones that transport data around the world, to conduits into homes. To jump-start the process the National Science Foundation awarded $7.5 million Wednesday to several academic institutions, including Rice, to develop technologies 2,000 times faster than dial-up and up to 250 times faster than DSL or cable modems. And they want to bring this ultra high speed to 100 million homes. "We need to take the next step," said Ed Knightly, an...

<p>If two companies get their way, pretty soon you'll walk through virtual advertisements in the mall or view television programs the same way Luke Skywalker watched R2D2's playback of Princess Leia's distress message in the first Star Wars movie.</p> <p>The images would float off your TV screen and into thin air, allowing you to interact with virtual characters right in the middle of your living room.</p>

Sep. 1, 2003 Issue of CIO Magazine | Offshore Outsourcing Special Report Offshore Outsourcing > The Money The Hidden Costs of Offshore Outsourcing Moving jobs overseas can be a much more expensive proposition than you may think. BY STEPHANIE OVERBY Read the Executive Summaryof this article Have something to say about this article? Add your comments below..... Offshore Outsourcing Backlash The Radicalization of Mike Emmons Offshore Outsourcing The Money INTERACTIVE WORK SHEET You can figure out your own best and worst case scenarios for going offshore when you calculate the costs for yourself. Use our online calculators. Detailed version:...

NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. - Using phone numbers, remote controls and computer keyboards will likely seem quaint within a decade as new capability to turn human speech into accurate, efficient computer code radically changes the ways we live and work. That's the outlook of Lawrence R. Rabiner, associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in an overview of speech processing, "The Power of Speech," in the journal Science, available Friday (Sept. 12). "We are rapidly approaching the point where entering data to devices by voice - regardless of language or...

I was enjoying the benefits of Free Republic, when a system pop-up said "VSMON has failed..." or something like that. The meaning of that is that my ZoneAlarm software firewall had failed. I had to shut down fast. This has happened infrequently, but it has happened one time too many. I am in the market for a hardware firewall. I want one that can pass the tests found here Gibson Research Corporation. (Will open in a new window.) I am using a DSL modem with an ethernet card. I can spend around $100. Please help, FRiends.

Does the Right of First Sale Still Exist? I just posted an eBay auction for a song I bought from the iTunes music store. It should be interesting to see how this works out. I only spent $0.99 on it but I bought the song just as legally as I would a CD, so I should be able to sell it used just as legally right? [Update 09-03-2003 10:08 AM] Right now I've come up with a couple ways that the transfer of ownership could take place. One is to call up Apple and ask them to do it for...

When Kenneth M. Ford considers the future of artificial intelligence, he doesn't envision legions of cunning robots running the world. Nor does he have high hopes for other much-touted AI prospects—among them, machines with the mental moxie to ponder their own existence and tiny computer-linked devices implanted in people's bodies. When Ford thinks of the future of artificial intelligence, two words come to his mind: cognitive prostheses. It's not a term that trips off the tongue. However, the concept behind the words inspires the work of the more than 50 scientists affiliated with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition...

September 1, 2003 Digital Vandalism Spurs a Call for OversightBy AMY HARMON he teenager accused of creating a version of the Blaster worm that infected computer systems across the world last week has been arrested. SoBig.F, an e-mail virus unleashed on the Internet just as Blaster was being stamped out, is expected to expire next week. But all is far from quiet on the electronic frontier. Security experts are already preparing for SoBig.G. Another worm may already be squirming through newly discovered flaws in computer operating systems. And in the moments between epidemics, the Internet's more run-of-the-mill annoyances — spam,...

Dear Freeper prayer warriors, please keep Ernest_at_the_Beach and his wife in your prayers. From Ernest_at_the_Beach | 08/28/2003: Just to let you know that my wife (Kathy ) is now in her final days. Her pain in the last few months from the cancer was constant and unrelenting . The last several months had been very difficult as she was unable to eat well and not able to eat at all for the last several weeks. God will be merciful soon and relieve her of the misery of the dreaded disease! Prayers would be appreciated!

The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn't be read anymore: Roughly translated from Dutch: The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers. It is presumed that CD-Rs...

  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/969301/posts Beware of Hacker and Cracker Attacks!Vanity ^ | 8/23/2002 | Myself   Go HERE and let ShieldsUp do a scan of your ports. It will determine if you are "in stealth mode" or vulnerable. Spyware removers: Spybot S&DAdAware Bayden Systems Popup Popper: Blocks popup ads well in MSIE MailWasher: Good for pre-screening & bouncing SPAM AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition: Free anti-viral protection Windows Update: At least install the critical ones ZoneAlarm: Excellent Firewall Alternative browsers: MozillaOpera   http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/968431/posts MICROSOFT WORKING WITH THE FEDS, VIRUS ATTACKS MAY BE TERRORISMWorld Tribune.com ^ | August 21, 2003 | special report staff...

University Of Kentucky Supercomputer Breaks The $100 Per GFLOPS Barrier For immediate release, August 22, 2003, Lexington, Kentucky: Researchers at the University of Kentucky have constructed and demonstrated an innovative new, scalable, parallel supercomputer that achieves application performance of more than 1 billion floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) for every $100 spent on building the machine. The approach used to design and build this machine makes it cost-effective for solving a wide range of problems, from drug design using computational chemistry to design of quieter printers using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Thus, this breakthrough is not only a...

Has all the talk about viruses scaring you away from MS Windows? Considering switching to Linux, but afraid to make the leap? Consider going to www.knoppix.org (or do a Google search) where you can create a bootable Knoppix CD-ROM. Boots up the Linux OS without writing to your harddrive. In fact, you don't need a harddrive to use it, just a CD-ROM.There are lots of Linux support groups in your area where people enjoy sharing their Linux knowledge. Been playing with Knoppix and plan on using it for Internet access and keeping a MS Windows partition for games, the wife...

Sobig-F ready to download mystery program By Edward Hurley, SearchSecurity.com News Writer 22 Aug 2003, SearchSecurity.com A new danger has emerged from the epidemic spread of the mass-mailing Sobig-F worm as security experts warned today that the worm is set to download a mystery program as early as a few hours from now. Sobig-F is scheduled to download an unknown application every Friday and Sunday starting today through Sept. 10 between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. EDT. The worm will contact one of 20 remote servers, authenticate itself then receive in turn a URL. It then uses that URL to...

The author is the CEO of Cybersource Pty Ltd, a Melbourne-based IT & Internet Professional Services company. These are his personal views.SCO, in its ever-twisting, ever-turning battle to remain in the press release TOP 40 has trotted out the concept of trying to invalidate the GNU General Public License. This is the same license under which the Linux operating system kernel is published. Does SCO have any chance of succeeding? As information technology managers, it is imperative that we are at least mildly versed in simple matters of law and copyright. This helps us to provide better raw material grist...

SCO's Evidence: This Smoking Gun Fizzles Out Version 1.0 -- first general release 20 August 2003. Version 1.1 -- note significance of the missing 32V copyright. Version 1.2 -- corrected description of the locking calls, added SIII. Executive summary: There are three pieces of good news for SCO about the evidence they revealed on 18 August 2003. One is that the evidence does support a claim of code-copying; the second is that GPL is not in this case a usable defense; and the third is that BSD probably doesn't save us either. But the rest of the news is all...

The ruckus erupted when SCO showed its "smoking gun" to delegates at its conference in Las Vegas yesterday. A German journalist photographed some of SCO's presentation slides, despite attendees being required to sign non-disclosure agreements before attending the event. The slides then came under the full scrutiny of Linux advocates, with one, former Hewlett-Packard open source strategist Bruce Perens, publishing a damning analysis online. Perens claims the code can be traced to AT&T, which developed the Unix code eventually sold to SCO, and was written as far back as 1973. Since then it has been released under varying licences as...

SAN FRANCISCO - A new mass e-mail worm that attempts to download files from the Internet and potentially leave computers vulnerable to further attack was spreading quickly around the world today, anti-virus experts said. The new worm, dubbed Sobig.F, is at least the fourth new, major Internet worm to hit computers worldwide in the past week, prompting anti-virus vendor F-Secure to declare this the "worst virus week ever." Sobig.F, a variant of an older worm, began spreading Monday in Europe and has infected an estimated tens of thousands of Windows-based computers, said Patrick Hinojosa, chief technology officer at Panda Software,...

The latest variant of the SoBig lineage has mulitple infection vectors and hidden exploit channels. For example, spam normally represents 30 to 60 percent of daily e-mail volume on the Internet. The new capabilities embedded in the SoBig.E worm will increase that volume by a factor of 10. The SoBig.E worm , released two months ago on the Internet, continues to spread from unprotected computers. Some Internet security analysts fear that this latest variant of the SoBig family -- much like possible future variants of the new Microsoft Blaster or LovSan worm that began to proliferate early this week --...