Free Republic

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported on Apple’s dealings with China. In it, the Times found that China’s President, Xi Jinping, is increasingly exerting influence over the tech behemoth, especially as it relates to Apple’s functions and protocols oriented towards maintaining the integrity of its customers’ privacy and encryption. Congress needs to find out how many functions Apple degraded to do business in mainland China and to what extent those degradations hurt American consumers. Put simply, China does not share the same values as the United States, especially its blatant disregard for human rights. Although China does have...

Amazon Sidewalk launched Tuesday, and those who have privacy concerns about their internet connection should opt out immediately. Sidewalk uses Ring security cameras, along with Amazon Echo devices, to create a shared wireless network, The Washington Post reported. Devices that qualify automatically connect to the system, which would essentially create low bandwidth communal access to the internet, as it would use a part of any available bandwidth on neighbors’ WiFi. But there are obviously serious security concerns, even though Amazon says it will be using “three layers of encryption to ensure data is visible only to the intended party.” However,...

This is so cool! It's an old video, but this is the first time I have heard of this device.

Then there are all the suggestions that the UFOs are optical illusions, meteorological phenomena or electromagnetic events The Silly Season has come early this year. Normally it happens in August, when wicked people all over the northern hemisphere temporarily stop doing evil things to take their children to the beach and enjoy the last of the summer. With no bad news to report, desperate journalists will run any story, however silly. Why is it Silly Season in June this year? Because the US Department of Defence has announced that it will release a report on 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (UAPs), which...

US lawmakers have recently begun discussing the need for a federal plan to find out what types of cash payments are made after ransomware attacks. Cyberattacks have been ramping up in recent months, with each one underscoring the nation’s under-preparedness. The digital infrastructure of private companies and government organizations have plenty of vulnerabilities, and their responses to damaging attacks have been frantically improvised. Worsening the situation are the significant delays in responding to cyberattacks, an inevitable consequence of the fact that the federal government has no uniform approach to combating malicious hackers. In May 2021, $4.4 million in Bitcoin was...

Scientists from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed a reusable mask that is able to kill bacteria droplets within 45 seconds and filter 99.9 per cent of bacteria, viruses and haze particles - better than the medical-grade N95 masks used in hospitals. N95 masks are able to prevent around 95 per cent of aerosolised droplets and particulate matter of around 0.3 microns in size from entering them. The filter of the NTU-developed mask is coated with a layer of copper oxide nanoparticles, which damage the DNA of important cell structures in the bacteria, causing them to die, said Professor...

Operating principle of a spaceplate. a, A spaceplate can compress a propagation length of deff into a thickness d. For example, a beam incident on the spaceplate at angle θ will emerge at that same angle and be transversely translated by length w (resulting in a lateral beam shift ?x), just as it would for deff of free space. b, Adding a spaceplate to an imaging system such as a standard camera (top) will shorten the camera (center). An ultrathin monolithic imaging system can be formed by integrating a metalens and a spaceplate directly on a sensor (bottom). Can you...

WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden signed an executive order on June 3, amending a Trump-era ban that prohibits U.S. investors from investing in Chinese military companies. The new order expands the previous prohibition list by adding more Chinese defense and surveillance technology firms. The order also moves the authority of selecting targeted companies to the Treasury Department from the Defense Department. Biden’s order expands the scope of the national emergency declared by then-President Donald Trump last year and bans more companies involved in “the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse.” The order “prohibits...

The U.S. Commerce Department is failing to do its part to protect national security and keep sensitive technology out of the hands of China’s military, according to a U.S. congressional advisory report (pdf).The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report said the Commerce Department had been slow to create a list of sensitive technology that should be scrutinized before export to China.The lag in developing the list of emerging and foundational technologies, as required by a 2018 law, may exacerbate national security risks, the report said.The Commerce Department, entrusted to strengthen U.S. export control laws, “has, to date, failed to...

Mounting evidence strongly indicates the COVID-19/Wuhan virus escaped from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan in November 2019. An accidental or premeditated release? The motive matters. However, this chain of events is certain: The initial incident caused the disease to spread throughout China. The embarrassed Chinese Communist Party regime failed to alert the world and thus failed to provide life-saving information. That self-serving decision exported the disease to the rest of the planet. In effect, the CCP used the virus as a biological and economic weapon to cripple other nations and make certain China didn't suffer alone. In...

President Joe Biden is moving to surrender to China U.S. patent and trade secret protections on America's COVID-19 vaccines. Two of those vaccines, made by American-based Pfizer and Moderna, employ revolutionary mRNA technology. Specifically, the Biden administration has agreed to support a request by India and South Africa for waivers that would permit members of the World Trade Organization to not enforce laws protecting patents and trade secrets covered under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs). "This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures," declared U.S. Trade...

Surprisingly, the virus affects only the countries that may have a capacity to control China’s hegemonist ambitions and not those securing aid and assistance from it. It is widely suspected that the COVID-19 virus was manufactured in a laboratory in China and was let loose on the world. It is China which is thus claimed to be largely responsible for the loss of more than 3.3 million lives and causing untold suffering to a far greater number of people. If we look at the list of death by countries, we will see that over half a million died in USA,...

Australian company Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) has announced exciting performance test results for a new type of aluminum-ion battery that can charge 10X faster than today's lithium-ion units, while lasting much longer and needing no cooling.

It seems that one of the major objectives of the Biden administration, and I guess all Democratic politicians, is to dismantle everything that built this nation and made it great, and of course to spend us into oblivion without acknowledging any consequence for their actions. The one warped initiative that may end up being the most painful is the push to shut off the energy spigot and somehow replace it with fairy dust and unicorn farts. Yes, I'm talking about the fantasy that green "renewable" energy can replace our current, efficient and abundant fuel sources like coal, oil and gas...

A self-driving car went rogue in Arizona, stalling, then speeding off before assistance could arrive. A YouTuber caught the nearly 20-minute episode on video from the backseat of the car.... ...About 12 minutes into the ride, the car attempted to turn into a lane that had been blocked off with construction cones. Mid-turn it stopped and the rider called an online tech for help...before roadside assistance could get there the car sped off only to stop in the middle of the road, forcing the cars behind it to go into oncoming traffic in order to pass the vehicle. The situation...

Every year, more people in the United States purchase electric vehicles. While electric vehicles can be charged at home or at many charging locations, many people wonder why these electric cars don’t have solar panels. The following guide explores some of the main reasons that electric vehicles don’t have solar panels on the roof. Solar panels work by converting energy from the sun into electric power. Modern solar panels are very efficient, with many capable of turning more than 60 percent of the sun’s power into electricity. However, they still have some significant limitations. On average, a 10 square foot...

Signs of our time in the news: — America moving over, allowing China to take the leading role over the world — In the struggle against Marxism-Leninism, that second word is the most dangerous today. The Chinese communist regime is deeply Leninist in its nature and operation... The "Marxism" side has been somewhat cast off by the Leninist drive to punish and exploit their adversaries. Unless the nature of the Chinese system itself changes, we are going to face with this Leninist threat for decades to come. - Anointing Satan - Biden’s Handlers Get the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict They Wanted —...

The author of 'Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order' discusses mass surveillance, smart cities, and the history of technocratic control.In many respects, technology has eroded personal autonomy. This insidious trend has only accelerated due to governments’ response to the global pandemic. The average citizen is left disoriented by rapid changes brought on by automation, mass surveillance, dizzying propaganda, and the proliferation of invasive technologies.Patrick Wood has been making sense of the technocratic movement for more than a decade. His 2015 book “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation” tracks the current implementation of technological central planning: mass surveillance,...

SiFive, a company established by researchers who invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture in the University of California Berkeley several years ago, has this week announced two platforms which could be used to design semi-custom SoCs based on RISC-V cores. SiFive is the world’s first and yet the only company developing chips featuring the RISC-V ISA and it already has initial customers interested in designing SoCs for machine learning, storage, embedded, IoT and wearable applications. SiFive: World’s First Developer of Commercial RISC-V Chips RISC-V is an open-source microprocessor architecture developed by researchers in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and...

IBM today unveiled a breakthrough in semiconductor design and process with the development of the world's first chip announced with 2 nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.Demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency continues to rise, especially in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. IBM's new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the state-of-the-art in the semiconductor industry, addressing this growing demand. It is projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than...