Free Republic

Unreal. CNN is now promoting an app which tracks the movement of ICE agents to warn illegals. ICE agents face a 500% increase in assault and threats. CNN knows exactly what they’re doing.

As Senate Republicans rush to pass their hodgepodge tax and spending package — the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — controversy has arisen around an unusual provision: a 10-year moratorium on states passing their own laws regulating artificial intelligence.Congress has been slow to pass any regulation on AI, a rapidly evolving technology, leaving states to write their own laws. Those state laws largely focus on preventing specific harms, like banning the use deepfake technology to create nonconsensual pornography, to mislead voters about specific issues or candidates or to mimic music artists’ voices without permission.Some major companies that lead the U.S. AI industry...

By stripping batteries and hacking Android phones with open-source Linux, researchers built submersible data hubs for AI-powered image recognition. Researchers hacked 15-year-old smartphones into tiny servers that outperform Raspberry Pi at a fraction of the cost. Kadri-Ann Kivastik/ Via Eurekalert ======================================================================== A team at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science has shown that obsolete mobile phones can be wired together to do the sort of heavy data processing normally reserved for expensive server farms while keeping thousands of handsets out of landfills. Led by associate professor of pervasive computing Huber Flores, the engineers stripped the batteries from four...

Why Car Cybersecurity Can’t Be Ignored Imagine treating a ticking time bomb as background noise. That’s how many in the automotive industry have approached ransomware. Ransomware now accounts for 45% of all automotive cyber incidents so far in 2025, making it the leading threat to the sector. The scale of these attacks is also increasing: large-scale incidents affecting millions of vehicles more than tripled in 2024, and nearly 60% of all reported cyber events in 2023–2024 were large-scale in nature There is strong evidence that the number of publicly disclosed automotive ransomware attacks is only a fraction of the true...

Once the king of smartphones, the BlackBerry is making a nostalgic comeback as Gen Z embraces retro tech for digital detoxes and vintage vibes. Before the iPhone, the BlackBerry was the “it” phone. At its peak in the early 2000s, BlackBerry commanded over 50% of the U.S. and 20% of the global smartphone market. But times changed. Physical keyboards gave way to touchscreens, and eventually, BlackBerry discontinued support for its classic phones in 2022. But this isn’t where the story ends. The 2000s have since made a comeback. As The New York Times recently reported, “Everything Millennial Is Cool Again.”...

Astartup led by a Canadian battery chemist is racing to crack a made-in-America energy breakthrough even as Trump’s tariffs cast a long shadow over the battery supply chain. Boston-based Pure Lithium is building a pilot plant for a new kind of lithium metal battery, one it claims could outperform today’s lithium-ion cells, and, crucially, be built entirely without Chinese inputs. These efforts come at a crucial time for the U.S., as the world’s biggest economy moves to loosen China’s grip on the global supply of critical minerals. China dominates minerals China’s dominance in this space continues to pose a strategic...

YouTuber and US inventor Styropyro has assembled and tested a 250-watt handheld laser. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVlL0FNbSE According to him, the laser system he created is 50 thousand times more powerful than laser pointers. Probably, his laser is much more powerful than it can be allowed by american law. This, however, did not stop Styropyro from testing its own development. In a video of the results of field tests, the YouTuber burned several objects and even left burn marks on diamonds. The most common type of handheld lasers are laser pointers, which are mainly used in educational institutions. The power of their...

The Trump administration has told US companies that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, in the latest attempt to make it harder for China to develop advanced chips. Several people familiar with the move said the US Department of Commerce had told so-called electronic design automation groups — which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA — to stop supplying their technology to China.

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis says that China represents an “existential threat” to the United States and that the agency’s top priority is outpacing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a high-stakes technological arms race that spans semiconductors, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.“China is the existential threat to American security in a way we really have never confronted before,” Ellis told Axios in an interview published on May 21, adding that a key CIA objective is to help U.S. companies maintain a “decisive technological advantage” to counter the CCP’s malign actions against the homeland.In separate remarks, including an interview at the...

Approximately 14,000 years ago, the unprecedented solar event—now judged to be the most powerful known to have occurred—marked Earth’s transition into the Holocene epoch, according to the findings of an international team of scientists. The team traces the event to around 12,350 BC using a new climate-chemistry model specifically designed to reconstruct ancient solar particle activity. This expands the known timeline for ancient solar storms and raises the bar on the upper boundaries of their intensity. Although the event in question was already known from past observations of radiocarbon spikes in ancient wood samples, its scale and magnitude remained unknown....

Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar inverters Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries U.S. says continually assesses risk with emerging technology U.S. working to integrate 'trusted equipment' into the grid LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are...

A pair of tweezers squeezes water from the spongy material developed by the team. (Credit: Xingying Zhang) In a nutshell This wood-based material can pull water directly from air using only sunlight, working even in arid regions with humidity as low as 30% and in freezing temperatures down to -20°C. The device captured 2.5 milliliters of water per gram overnight in real-world testing, releasing it when exposed to sunlight with 94% efficiency. Made from affordable materials like balsa wood and lithium chloride, this technology could provide clean drinking water in areas lacking infrastructure or during emergencies. **************************************************************************** MELBOURNE — Love...

Aformer intelligence official is calling on the federal government to make information public about an alleged reverse-engineering project involving unidentified flying objects (UFOs). UFO sightings have long piqued the interests of billions of people across the globe for centuries. Although these sightings are oftentimes easily explained—at times being space objects such as meteors or military equipment—they often lead many to ponder the potential of extraterrestrial life. Recent years have seen renewed focus on UFOs, with many calling for more transparency from the U.S. government about these sightings. Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence who specializes...

Next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS)—the same technology which is powering the development of tailor-made medicines, cancer diagnostics, infectious disease tracking, and gene research—could become a prime target for hackers. A study, published in IEEE Access, highlights growing concerns over how this powerful sequencing tool—if left unsecured—could be exploited for data breaches, privacy violations, and even future biothreats. Led by Nasreen Anjum from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Computing, this is the first comprehensive research study of cyber-biosecurity threats across the entire NGS workflow. NGS is a cornerstone of modern biotechnology, enabling rapid and cost-effective DNA and RNA sequencing that supports...

Lip-Bu Tan, the man chosen to lead Intel, the U.S.'s largest chip maker, has invested in hundreds of Chinese tech firms, including at least eight with links to the People's Liberation Army, according to a Reuters review of Chinese and U.S. corporate filings. The appointment last month of Tan, one of Silicon Valley's longest-running investors in Chinese tech, as CEO of a company that manufactures cutting-edge chips for the U.S. Department of Defense raised questions among some investors Reuters' review found that Tan controls more than 40 Chinese companies and funds as well as minority stakes in over 600 via...

Breakthrough research has shown that twisting light into spiral patterns like those found in nature dramatically improved the efficiency of OLED screens. The researchers behind the novel approach believe their method for twisting light could revolutionize the efficiency of electronics, including display technologies like OLEDs and night vision. In the nearly 150 years since the invention of the light bulb, the science of light has continued to advance. As the use of electronic devices involving display technologies has rapidly spread in recent decades, scientists have been searching for new and innovative ways to control the chaotic behavior of light or...

The Air Force canceled its premiere acquisition seminar and collaborative meeting with industry for 2025 to comply with Trump administration efficiency directives, the Air Force Materiel Command’s Life Cycle Management Center said March 11. The Life Cycle Industry Days 2025 event was to be held the Convention Center in Dayton, Ohio, July 28 and 29.“Based on Air Force guidance on mission-critical categories of exempted travel consistent with Executive Order 14222, ‘Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative’, and in consultation with the Dayton Development Coalition and representatives of the State of Ohio, we have canceled the 9th...

We really do live on the verge of a new era of scientific progress. Case in point, a company called Lila Sciences was started two years ago with about $200 million in seed funding, but until very recently all of its activities have been kept under the radar. So what is Lila Sciences doing? They are training an AI in the scientific method and then prompting it to create new things using a special automated laboratory that the AI itself can operate. Lila’s mission is to achieve “scientific superintelligence” that is able to help scientists generate ideas and hypotheses and...

Researchers have developed a battery that can convert nuclear energy into electricity via light emission, a new study suggests. Nuclear power plants, which generate about 20% of all electricity produced in the United States, produce almost no greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems do create radioactive waste, which can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Safely disposing of this waste can be challenging. Using a combination of scintillator crystals, high-density materials that emit light when they absorb radiation, and solar cells, the team, led by researchers from The Ohio State University, demonstrated that ambient gamma radiation could be...

During the Civil War, Democrats attempted to use cotton and private shipping companies to undermine American security and gain support in Europe for the Confederacy. Today, the blue state of California is leveraging Berkeley to build ties with China and undermine America’s qualitative advantages in dual-use technology and to undermine energy independence.