Free Republic

Combination of a Hubble Space Telescope image of SN 1987A and the compact argon source. The faint blue source in the centre is the emission from the compact source detected with the JWST/NIRSpec instrument. Outside this is the stellar debris, containing most of the mass, expanding at thousands of km/second. The inner bright "string of pearls" is the gas from the outer layers of the star that was expelled about 20,000 years before the final explosion. The is the fast debris are now colliding with the ring, explaining the bright spots. Outside of the inner ring are two outer rings,...

An aircraft owned by "RHS Consulting" (a cloud seeding company) left KFAT (Fresno/Yosemite Intl. Airport) this AM for presumably some cloud seeding over the Sierra Nevada. Wonder who is footing the bill? Ag interests? The state? Fill those reservoirs! Tracking: https://www.flightradar24.com/N7344L/336eca3e "N7344L" registration: https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberResult?nNumberTxt=7344L Company Website: https://www.skywaterventures.com

Microsoft has announced the launch of what they are calling “Windows app,” a new service designed to stream the full Windows desktop operating system from the cloud to various devices, including Chromebooks. This new offering from Microsoft signifies a major shift in how the company thinks users will be using Windows in the future and is clearly a response to the “Chromebook threat.”Let’s first dive into what this new service entails exactly. The Windows App is essentially a new remote desktop hub that enables users to stream Windows Cloud PC and remote desktop services on a range of devices. This...

Explanation: What kind of cloud is this? A type of arcus cloud called a roll cloud. These rare long clouds may form near advancing cold fronts. In particular, a downdraft from an advancing storm front can cause moist warm air to rise, cool below its dew point, and so form a cloud. When this happens uniformly along an extended front, a roll cloud may form. Roll clouds may actually have air circulating along the long horizontal axis of the cloud. A roll cloud is not thought to be able to morph into a tornado. Unlike a similar shelf cloud, a...

MUST WATCH - This Changes Everything You Know About The United States of America message strange truth world news current events april 2023 today this week this month motivation The nanotechnology and the biotechnology filters down from the hydrosphere into the water supply and the food chain. And now every American, all 318 million Americans are infected. See, nano cells are real small. A thousand times smaller than these dust particulates. You inhale it, they go to work replicating, spreading like a virus, multiplying in exponentials. In six months time I could have a hundred million people converted. Ditch diggers,...

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) this week announced members of Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, continuing in his vow to investigate the origins of the Chinese coronavirus. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) is chairing the committee, which will also feature high profile Republican House members, including Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Other members of the subcommittee include: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) Rep. Mariannette Miller Meeks (R-IA) Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) Rep. John Joyce (R-PA) Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) Wenstrup, an army veteran and physician, is no stranger to the topic of investigating the...

Captured on somebody's phone camera. Rooster crows in background.

Photos of a strange, worm-like cloud taken over Alaska's Lazy Mountain prompted an investigation by Alaska State Troopers amid fears it could be a plane crash, a UFO or top secret Russian weapon. Pictures posted to Facebook of the incident show a massive cloud plume on Thursday. The photos sparked debate online as people questioned whether it could be a meteor, a crashed UFO or satellite, an eruption, and even a Russian weapon connected to the conflict in Ukraine. The cloud garnered so much attention that Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center began investigating for a possible...

In the Washington D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., carjackings have made the news lately. Thieves steal cars at Virginia gas stations and race across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac and into Maryland to relative safety. The Department of Justice doesn’t seem to be doing anything about enforcing the federal laws prohibiting transport of stolen goods across the Virginia-Maryland state line. If the carjacker was named James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, things would be very different. The saga of James O’Keefe’s quite possibly completely legal acquisition of Ashley Biden’s diary, and the resulting DOJ secret seizure of his emails...

Kronos, a human resources giant, says it suffered a ransomware attack that may keep its systems offline for weeks and will likely impact how its customers issue paychecks and track hours worked. Many large employers are scrambling to set up temporary systems to keep workers paid, including writing paper checks for potentially thousands of employees. The companies affected by the Kronos ransomware hack are now working on finding backup plans to ensure their employees get paid, which includes issuing paper checks, according to a report by NPR. Many of Kronos’ customers include municipal governments, university systems and large corporations. Dozens...

Some Ring customers said that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out about the outage on social media. Many rely on a phone app to enter their homes, rather than a code that can also be used, with those that had forgotten the latter stuck outside their own homes as Ring doorbells went down. A source told DailyMail.com that the cause of the outbreak was a power failure in Virginia and not a malicious hacking. The nearly eight-hour outage also disrupted the company's shipping operations on Tuesday, threatening to create lasting logjams during the...

In the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, introduced the idea of the Panopticon, a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. Each cell is flooded with light, which creates an environment in which prisoners are under constant watch. Even if no guard is on duty, a prisoner will always feel as if they are being watched. Bentham described it as “[a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” The Panopticon is the optimal prison; it enables an unprecedented...

Microsoft says the same Russia-backed hackers responsible for the 2020 SolarWinds breach continue to attack the global technology supply chain and have been relentlessly targeting cloud service companies and others since summer. The group, which Microsoft calls Nobelium, has employed a new strategy to piggyback on the direct access that cloud service resellers have to their customers' IT systems, hoping to "more easily impersonate an organization's trusted technology partner to gain access to their downstream customers." Resellers act as intermediaries between software and hardware makers and product users. "Fortunately, we have discovered this campaign during its early stages, and we...

The National Security Agency has awarded a secret cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon Web Services, Nextgov has learned. The contract is already being challenged. Tech giant Microsoft filed a bid protest on July 21 with the Government Accountability Office two weeks after being notified by the NSA that it had selected AWS for the contract. The contract’s code name is “WildandStormy,” according to protest filings, and it represents the second multibillion-dollar cloud contract the U.S. intelligence community—made up of 17 agencies, including the NSA—has awarded in the past year. In November, the CIA awarded its...

There is a lot of attention being paid to continuously updating servers to patch security vulnerabilities on Linux servers running in data centers – a basic step underpinning technology infrastructure in every industry. Yet, staff resources to deal with maintaining servers are not sufficient to meet the workload, said 55% of respondents in a worldwide survey by CloudLinux. Dealing with insufficient staff resources with automationThe survey finds 76% are deploying automated patching procedures and that live patching to fix vulnerabilities is commonly used (47%) to avoid downtime that is normally associated with patching. This is not surprising given the volume...

Video at link.

In 2018, a camera on board the Mars Express mission caught sight of a strangely long and wispy cloud, billowing across the surface of the red planet. From a distance, the 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) trail of fog almost resembled a plume of smoke, and it seemed to be emerging from the top of a long-dead volcano. Looking back at archived images, researchers soon realized this had been happening for a while. Every few years in spring or summer, this curious cloud would return, before disappearing once again. The fleeting plume was caught on camera in 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018, and again...

A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors. The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at OVHcloud, destroyed one of four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said. There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering. Europe’s largest cloud services provider told clients...

While many sumo tournaments across Japan have been forced to throw in the towel amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, a sumo federation in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture has organised a unique video contest to showcase the hard work of young sumo wrestlers who have continued to hone their skills in an era of social-distancing — a term not typically associated with the full-contact sport. Dubbed the National Sumo Kata Competition, the contest will be conducted out of the ring and in the digital arena. Hopefuls have been asked to submit home videos of their performances in three categories to be judged...

I've been in the technology industry for over twenty years and I've seen fads come and go. When I got started in 2000 I oversaw the migration of data from old tape drives to modern 1GB hard drives. Then at my job I oversaw the end of the mainframe and the ascendancy of the PC and server as the new form of decentralized network infrastructure. From 2001 through to around 2010 the internet and internet access were present in the government agency I work for but most people were prohibited from using it. And if they did their access was...