Free Republic

The B-21 Raider, named after the Doolittle Raiders of World War II fame, could make its maiden flight sometime in mid-2022, according to reporting by Air Force Magazine. B-21 airframe number one has already completed, with construction on the second airframe already underway.

In Look to Windward, a science fiction novel from the late Scottish author Iain M. Banks, perfectly clear video and audio can be instantaneously transmitted across vast interstellar distances, yet people still vie to be physically present at a concert. This is something to consider the next time your local school board assures you that the classroom experience can be recreated on Zoom. Last spring, the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic forced schools across the country to adopt “online learning,” a euphemism for teachers yelling impotently at the disembodied heads of 20 students on a flickering video screen. The...

In The Hedgehog Review, Christine Rosen writes about technosolutionism. If the pandemic has made evident the precarious nature of the global economy (it could briefly be brought to a standstill by a single “bug”), it also showed how advanced our technology had become. We immediately found ourselves on Zoom, or other conferencing platforms, doing business, teaching class, or chatting with family and friends we were otherwise used to seeing regularly. The pandemic hit less than a year ago, and we already have not one but several vaccines. It is astounding. Yet, there are dangers, Rosen argues:

Anger against big tech reached a tipping point during the 2020 Election, as conservative ideas were censored and stories critical of Democrats suppressed. With the ongoing purge of social media accounts, corporations are enforcing a free speech restriction that terrifies not only conservatives but free speech advocates across the political spectrum. The question now is how do we translate anger into tangible actions that will bring about change? To fight big tech over the long-term, we need a comprehensive strategy that marshals the resources of investors and entrepreneurs, donors, elected officials and policy experts. Business leaders can foster an entrepreneurial...

So many satellites are moving and sitting over our heads, and the numbers are ever increasing. Using low cost software defined radio (SDR) and low cost DIY antennas you can make from materials at your local hardware store or garage, a world of fun can be explored. This is a beginners guide on how to get up and running. Exploring which projects to tackle first, from weather satellites, data over Inmarsat and Iridium, to listening to amateur radio and cube satellites. Learn about some hardware you can make or scout for online and use at home. A quick tour of...

A 1940 educational short by Bell Telephone to show customers that were recieving new dial phones how to use the new device, and why they were getting these new sets.

There are a hundred reasons why nuclear energy can play a massive role in the future of American power and prosperity.It creates high-paying jobs better than any other energy source. Its fuel sources are abundant. It fuels NASA’s most innovative projects. It offers a solution to conservation concerns without devastating the economy. And despite its sensationalist image, it is far safer than fossil fuels, and about the same in safety as solar and wind.“Nuclear provides 55% of our country’s clean energy, and about 20% of our power, and it’s one of the most reliable generators that we have on the...

What if forgetting your password for a website could cost you $200 million? That’s the situation facing a programmer living in San Francisco. From the Times: Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

Amazon Web Services filed its response to Parler's lawsuit on Tuesday, blaming the social media platform favored by the far-right for filing a "meritless claim" against the cloud computing giant and citing a liability shield often maligned by President Donald Trump: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. AWS's legal brief argues that it is Parler, not Amazon (AMZN), that breached the terms of its contract and that Parler's removal from AWS's hosting platform was a "last resort." "This case is about Parler's demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services ('AWS') content that...

Now that Amazon Web Services has shut down Parler, will the social network rebuild elsewhere? Parler CEO John Matze says Parler will be back with "many competing for our business." Don't bet on it. There appears to be no major public cloud or hosting company willing to give Parler a home. But, even if there were, Parler would find it almost impossible to return anytime soon. Parler will need to build its own infrastructure.

Despite leaving the EU, London may be source its next main battle tank from France and Germany. According to industry reports, the United Kingdom may be interested in the jointly developed Franco-German Eurotank project to replace their aging Challenger 2 main battle tank, which though not a particularly aged tank, will eventually need replacement.

The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) is preparing for a war in the Pacific against a near-peer adversary–that means China. One of their go-to weapons in the future could be a new type of long-range loitering munition or what could be described as a sort of kamikaze bomb. Changing Times In an effort to become more expeditionary and better prepared for combat in a littoral environment, big changes are coming to the United States Marine Corps. At the heart of the USMC’s pivot from land-based counterinsurgency warfare to their traditional maritime expeditionary role is a need to counter an increasingly aggressive...

A while back we heard a suggestion that it may be possible to use the 5th harmonic on R820T2 RTL-SDRs to receive frequencies much higher than the normal 1.766 GHz limit. After mentioning this to to Hayati Augen he has recently managed to implement this driver hack, and now R820T2 based RTL-SDRs can tune all the way up to 6 GHz if Hayati's experimental driver branch is used. Before everyone gets too excited, we need to temper expectations as sensitivity reduces the higher the frequency so an LNA may be required, imaging/aliasing is a major problem, and you will absolutely...

For those who are interested.....I monitor and track airplanes that fly over North Florida where I live, Civilian Passenger Planes, Military Planes and Private Aircraft, using a Raspberry Pi, ADS-B software from Flightaware.com, it's a hobby... Yesterday during a very busy day, all the traffic I was tracking just dropped off to almost nothing, I was convinced it was my equipment and started to investigate, changing cables, rebooting the Raspberry Pi, etc....nothing worked. I went on the Flightware Discussion boards looking for a solution and ran into an article just posted by someone else from Jacksonville who was reporting the...

Throughout the last year, there’s been a great deal of rancor related to Chinese-owned tech companies that do business in the United States. The Trump administration spent the better part of 2020 attempting to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok. The U.S. government has also devoted energies in recent years to cracking down on Chinese-made smartphone manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, with the FCC, last summer, declaring both companies threats to national security. More recently, security researchers discovered what they described as a “Chinese backdoor” in TCL’s Android TVs that are sold in the United States. The acting secretary of homeland security, Chad...

I received a log periodic antenna designed by ham radio operator WA5VJB from Kent Electronics. They are rated from 2 to 11 GHz, so this model will cover several of the ham bands. These antennas are made on PCB's and are ideal for use in the amateur microwave bands as compromise dish feeds. In this video I do a test of such a feed versus my patch antenna on the 3.4 GHz band. https://www.wa5vjb.com/products1.html I mounted one in place of the original dipole feed on a 2.4 GHz (13cm) gridpack at the same focal point. Whilst gain will be down...

A high school student held onto a 2016 video of a young girl saying a racial slur, then posted it online after she had chosen to attend her dream school, the New York Times reported. “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” 18-year-old Jimmy Galligan told the New York Times. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. In 2019, Galligan was sent a three-second Snapchat video of fellow Heritage High School student Mimi Groves saying “I can drive” before uttering a racial slur. When...

You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."--George Orwell, 1984 It had the potential for disaster. Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube. The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the...

Imagine: Blank ballot paper pre-printed over the entire surface with “Q” codes in permanent inks not visible to the naked eye, and then provided to all states ONLY from the Federal Election Comission to state election offices. States then use that paper to print the “human readable” ballot in permanent black ink. Those ballots are then “read” by optical scanners also provided ONLY by the FEC and whose software source code and construction specs are publicly available to all citizens interested. Those optical scanners then retain all scanned ballots in locked compartments, whose keys are also issued to state elections...

In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child. The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was...