Free Republic

Folks: Pardon the vanity, but I've found over the years that many Freepers are tech-savvy people that have come to my aid in the past on a wide range of subjects. Here's the situation I'm in, and the question at the end: 1. I am working to develop some analytical tools for a project I am working on. This project involves travel data for a fleet of delivery vehicles that are tracked by the company managers and archived for their own records. 2. Before I download the client's data I am using my own GPS data to test the tools...

A couple of weeks ago, word arrived that 120 new missile silos had been discovered in the desert of Northern China. While the press made much of this evidence that China is busy expanding its nuclear weapons program, they did not look at who found the silos and how he did it. As it happens, the silos were spotted by Decker Eveleth, an undergrad at Reed College. He spent weeks poking around on satellite imagery until he happened upon the silos’ distinctive inflatable dome coverings. (Which, in turn, has led some people to describe them as “bouncy houses of death.”)...

An absence of specs has caught the attention of skeptics. A new "free speech and privacy first" phone unveiled this week is raising red flags, with one report suggesting it's just a rebranding of a budget Chinese phone. The $500 Freedom Phone was launched Wednesday by Erik Finman, a self-proclaimed "bitcoin millionaire," as an alternative to popular devices from Google, Apple and other Big Tech companies. The website for the Freedom Phone is void of the usual technical specs but says the gadget works with all major US carriers and is supported by an "uncensored" app store. The phone apparently...

We just had some Major Announcements about ARM Development that changes Intels X86 future! Here's what we found out! (spoiler alert -- they have met the enemy and it is them)

Many argue rural America has been in steady decline for decades. It was particularly hard hit by the “Great Recession of 2007-09,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Task Force on Agricultural and Rural Prosperity, which was created by Executive Order in April of 2017. The report found that rural Americans working in agriculture still lacked access to electronic connectivity, technology-oriented jobs, and businesses that otherwise improve quality of life in metro areas. The effects of the Great Recession, the report concluded, “still permeate throughout rural life, particularly for communities with high poverty rates, low...

Patch antennas are regularly used in ATVs, beacons, MIMO, wi-fi applications, AMSAT, GPS, repeaters, wireless systems and dish feeds. But what are the pros and cons of using them?

Superconductors are highly desirable, especially when it comes to reducing energy consumption. They show quantum properties on the scale of ordinary items. This makes them exciting candidates for building computers that use quantum physics. However, qubits, the elementary units of quantum computers, are extremely sensitive. When contact electromagnetic fields, heat, and collisions with air molecules, qubits lose their quantum properties. The addition of more resilient qubits using topological superconductors can protect qubits from losing their properties. In a new study, scientists led by Kent and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have reported about the discovery of a new rare topological...

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...

Dong Jingwei is a Chinese defector working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He served as Vice Minister of State Security in the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Before defecting, he was responsible for the counterintelligence efforts in China. He was in a position to know about all things “espionage” in China and is perhaps the highest-level Chinese defector the U.S. has ever had. Even though the legacy media is playing it down, this is a big deal. It speaks volumes that the man who knows the identity of all the Chinese spies in our country chose to defect to the...

Sometimes, when deciding on a career path, it can be difficult to know how your chosen industry will fare in the future. Are wages likely to increase? Will jobs be hard to come by? Much can feel unknown. To put your mind at ease, NewEngineer is here to help, crystal ball in hand. In the field of engineering it's clear that the current trend is towards information technology and automation, and this is set to remain the case for the foreseeable future – entering these sectors is as safe a bet as you could hope for. While traditional fields such...

The advertised purpose of the “Endless Frontier Act” is to increase high tech competition with China. This, of course, is a goal that every American should be able to get behind. However, the advertised purpose of the bill, as laudable as it may be, is not actually what the bill will do. In other words, the "Endless Frontier Act" was sold under false pretenses and using fabricated promises. If the Senate were serious about helping America win the high tech competition with China, it would do a number of important things, including, but not limited to: (1) protect our nation’s...

Although the insecure algorithms are still implemented in modern mobile phones, the researchers do not expect them to pose a significant threat to users. Credit: RUB, Marquard ================================================================================== The encryption algorithm GEA-1 was implemented in mobile phones in the 1990s to encrypt data connections. Since then, it has been kept secret. Now, a research team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), together with colleagues from France and Norway, has analyzed the algorithm and has come to the following conclusion: GEA-1 is so easy to break that it must be a deliberately weak encryption that was built in as a backdoor. Although the...

kWh Analytics’ most recent figures place the median annual degradation for residential solar systems as 1.09% and non-residential systems at 0.8%. The report states that over a 20-year asset life, project degradation could therefore be underestimated by as much as 14%, resulting in severely overestimated performance and revenue forecasts produced within a P50 model.

Endgame, Set, Match It’s common knowledge, at this point, that artificial intelligence will soon be capable of outworking humans — if not entirely outmoding them — in plenty of areas. How much we’ll be outworked and outmoded, and on what scale, is still up for debate. But in a new interview published by The Guardian over the weekend, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman had a fairly hot take on the matter: In the battle between AI and humans, he said, it’s going to be an absolute blowout — and humans are going to get creamed. “Clearly AI is going to...

UKuG Yagi Antenna talk by Kent Britain WA5VJB

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...