Free Republic

Care and feeding of Software Defined Radios by WA5VJB. We will cover the various kinds of antennas available to optimized your SDR radio for different types of spectrum monitoring. We will also explain why RF filters are necessary on most SDR's and when Low Noise Amplifiers help, and when Low Noise Amplifiers hurt reception. And they discuss which antennas work best for surveillance.

Professor Charles Lieber’s arrest on Jan. 28 made headlines on all the major U.S. media. After all, he was not only a Harvard professor, he was a world-class researcher in nanotechnology, working on highly sensitive research projects for the U.S. government. The FBI complaint alleges that he had been secretly participating in China’s “Thousand Talents Plan” since 2011, paid some $600,000 a year plus expenses to open and operate a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology (yes, that Wuhan). We know that China contracts with American experts in this way in order to steal their research and gain commercial...

Technology bolsters US dominance of the list, but coronavirus fallout looms largeThe inaugural FT Americas ranking comes at a perilous and uncertain time for many companies, as the coronavirus severely curtails economies, workforces and ultimately growth. Yet the ranking also highlights 500 businesses across the continent for whom innovation and creativity have paid off — attributes that will underpin resilience and enable many of them to thrive once the worst effects of the pandemic are behind them. The FT list was compiled with Statista, a research company, and ranks entrants from across the Americas by compound annual growth rate (CAGR)...

"Classroom can be opened on Xbox and Playstation."

Steve Bannon’s new film “Claws of the Red Dragon” will be screened at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, April 5, on China in Focus, a Youtube channel from NTD that provides compelling, first-hand news from China. The 54-minute film seeks to shed light on the connection between Huawei Technologies—the world’s largest maker of telecommunications gear—and China’s ruling Communist Party.....Huawei’s equipment is used by 45 of the 50 biggest global phone carriers, according to an Associated Press Bannon said the film is for helping average citizens to understand how the Chinese regime uses 'Huawei' and the 'Belt and Road Initiative' to...

Editor's Note: This piece was authored by Young Voices contributor James Czerniawski. The coronavirus pandemic has certainly thrown the world for a loop. Governments are at a loss on how to effectively address the issue, making policy decisions like statewide shutdowns that send local economies into a tailspin. This isn’t a surprise, since the government is pretty prone to mishandling crises.  But the good news is that the private sector is stepping into the gap. Technology companies, for instance, have been playing an increasingly important role in responding to crises. The government can help—by getting out of their way. One of the...

Relocatable mobile surveillance towers that can be mounted on the backs of pickups are the latest high-tech innovation that Border Patrol agents are looking to help them patrol the Southwest border, agency officials said. Border Patrol touted these compact towers as the singular piece of equipment they (most) want to deploy on the border... “Reliable imaging can be relocated very rapidly and useful in rural terrain.”... Bobby Brown, senior director for customs border direction for Elbit Systems of America... says the mobile towers can be up and running in four minutes and have multiple cameras and radar that can “see”...

Lithium is expensive, environmentally questionable in large volumes, and tends to catch on fire from time to time. It's the best solution we've currently got for EV and device battery storage, but other alternatives are starting to surface, and one that could actually make a fair bit of sense is the potassium metal battery.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd choice and the bureaucrat responded that it was a jobs program. “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal,” Friedman said. “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” Friedman’s absurd proposal illustrates the absurdity of make-work bias—the belief that conserving labor makes us poorer. Make-work bias was particularly popular during the Industrial...

Elections are the cornerstone of our republic. The accuracy of the tabulation of votes is critical to the maintenance of a government, “by the people and for the people.” Two recent events – the Iowa Caucus and the accidental exposure Israel's entire voter registry, including personal details such as addresses, ID numbers another other information that could be used for identity theft, spying and even voter intimidation – have forced a rethinking of the pace at which technology is implemented into one of the most basic societal institutions. A big story in the early portion of the Democratic Presidential Primary were the...

Bad weather can render the cameras and lidar on self-driving cars useless. Researchers at MIT suggest ground-penetrating radar as the fix.

PARIS -- If the UK allows Chinese multinational Huawei to participate in building a new-generation cellular communications network, the CIA is going to take its ball and go home. That's the message Mick Mulvaney, U.S. President Donald Trump's acting chief of staff, delivered in a speech at the Oxford Union last week just before his meeting with British officials. Mulvaney and Trump are concerned that your selfies and your mom's Facebook rants about the neighbor could be laughed at by some military intelligence officer in Beijing via secret backdoors installed in Huawei equipment. Those who don't know any better say...

The U.S. Department of Defense officially adopted a series of ethical principles for the use of Artificial Intelligence today following recommendations provided to Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper by the Defense Innovation Board last October.

Not many people would complain about a 60-degree day in February. But this winter’s temperature spikes could mean even earlier exposure to one of spring’s downsides: potholes. Tech gurus can’t stop the weather conditions that cause asphalt to weaken and crack — eventually opening up gaping holes large enough to swallow a Goodyear tire or mess up a Jeep’s alignment. But armed with smartphones, algorithms and self-healing asphalt, they’re trying to make road maintenance a little more manageable. While some are experimenting with high-tech ways to fill the pothole once it pops up — like using a 3D printer and...

Despite China’s incredible economic success as of late, it’s important to remember that it is still fundamentally a communist country. Recent events have been a stern reminder. Freedom can be messy, but it’s nothing like the mess an authoritarian regime creates when it fears losing power. The disturbing outbreak of the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China and the communist government’s response to it should be a reminder of the consequence of a system based on state control, without rule by the people and a vibrant civil society. Many are impressed by the fact that China built a 1,000-bed hospital in 10...

Moscow (AFP) - Gripping a scalpel, Vladislav Zaitsev makes an incision in the fold of skin between his client's thumb and index finger and pushes in a small glass cylinder. Alexei Rautkin, a 24-year-old programmer in a hoodie, is having a chip inserted in his hand so he can open the door to his office without swiping a card. "It's something I decided a long time ago," he says. "Mainly because it's convenient but there's also a kind of exclusivity, because practically no one else has this." Rautkin and Zaitsev are among a growing number of Russians interested in biohacking,...

Margaret Cudia thought her Ring doorbell camera was "the best thing since sliced bread." She loved watching the world pass by through her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, guarding vigilantly for suspicious strangers and porch pirates from the comfort of her phone. She hadn't expected the camera also might capture awkward moments closer to home, like the time it caught her daughter grabbing a beer and talking about how controlling her mother was. "I never told her about that one," she said with a laugh. Amazon's Ring, Google's Nest and other Internet-connected cameras - some selling for as little as $59...

It’s no wonder he chose to skip the Iowa caucus, given that former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg apparently thinks farmers and manufacturers all across America lack “gray matter." In a clip just now circulating online, Bloomberg, while speaking at Oxford’s Said Business School back in 2016, explained that "anybody [can] be a farmer," but that it takes "a lot more gray matter" to "think and analyze" enough to work in the tech field. “I could teach anybody – even people in this room, no offense intended – to be a farmer,” Bloomberg explained. “It's a process. You dig a hole,...

The U.S. Justice Department has accused Huawei Technologies of helping Iran track protesters in its latest indictment against the Chinese tech giant as Washington steps up pressure on the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker. In a new indictment unsealed on February 13, Huawei was also charged with conspiring to steal trade secrets from six U.S. technology companies and to violate a racketeering law typically used in the fight against organized crime. The indictment supersedes one unsealed last year in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. According to prosecutors, Huawei provided surveillance equipment to Iran that enabled the monitoring of protesters...

Can the creation of a U.S. military space force boost the economy, maintain American sovereignty, and preserve world peace? General Steve Kwast joins Candace Owens this week for a discussion on how a national space force will impact global relations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLiwKqL5nko