Free Republic

Larry Johnson, writing at the Gateway Pundit, attacked “Absolute Proof” and former CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery. Joe Hoft, referring to Montgomery in another recent Gateway Pundit article, wrote “We don’t know who’s paying him.” Conversely, the question should be asked, who is paying Larry Johnson and The Gateway Pundit to put out disinformation about CIA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery and to bury the story about Barack Obama’s intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper who illegally commandeered THE HAMMER to spy on Donald Trump and millions of other innocent Americans. Dennis Montgomery’s one-time attorney Michael Flynn stated yesterday during an exclusive...

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...

The title pretty much says it. I need a recommendation for a good VPN to use to ensure my privacy on the internet. Specific requirements: 1. It can't conflict with the VPN I use for work. 2. It must be reasonably priced. 3. It must work on my Windows computer and iOS phones, iPad, and Apple TV.

How safe are we online? What about VPN's? Do they protect us as well as we've been led to believe? The video is 4:06 in length.

Dear John: A question: In the grand scheme of things, what is the point of having a password? Equifax gets hacked, Yahoo gets hacked. I don’t put my mother’s maiden name or my Social Security number on any of my password-protected accounts because those who do provide such information seem to get hacked. Passwords provide a false sense of security. Oh, and make sure your password includes letters, numbers and a certain number of digits, blah, blah, blah, so it is difficult to remember and difficult to compromise. Yeah, sure! M.K.

It just got a lot harder to evade browser fingerprinting: a bunch of boffins have worked out how to fingerprint the machine behind the browser, using only information provided by browser features.Like so many ideas, it's obvious once someone's thought of it: activities that aren't processed in the browser are treated the same whether the page is rendered in (say) Chrome, Firefox, IE or Edge. The group – Yinzhi Cao and Song Li of from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and Erik Wijmans Washington University in St. Louis – have worked out how to access various operating system and hardware-level features...

My computer has been running fine until now, malwarebytes runs each day as does Windows Defender. I turned my computer off today and came home, turned it on and I get a message that says: The stub received bad data...so far this is when I try to get into malwarebytes program and windows defender. NOt sure about other programs. All of my updates seem to have disappeared. What is a program I can use online to check for a virus? I am not computer savvy when it comes to computer problems. Thanks. Running Windows 10.

Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.The KPMG report also states that only half of those executives feel that they are adequately prepared to prevent future attacks. The attacks place sensitive patient data at risk of exposure, KPMG said.The 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey polled 223 CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and chief compliance officers at healthcare providers and health plans.Sixty-six percent of the IT executives at healthcare plans who were surveyed said they...

How your smartphone's battery life can be used to invade your privacy A group of researchers have demonstrated how to track users with nothing more than their remaining battery power, which could compromise privacy Alex Hern Tuesday 4 August 2015 08.18 BST A little-known feature of the HTML5 specification means that websites can find out how much battery power a visitor has left on their laptop or smartphone – and now, security researchers have warned that that information can be used to track browsers online. The battery status API is currently supported in the Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, and...

The maxim that “personnel is policy” transcends partisan affiliations and political labels. Every president, including President Barack Obama, has the authority to staff federal agencies with loyal political appointees.

As we learn more about the recent cyber-attacks on U.S. federal employee records by Chinese hackers, it is becoming increasingly clear that the problem is much worse than many previously thought. In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, officials within the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted on Tuesday to major lapses in basic cyber-security protocols that left government systems vulnerable to at least two attacks. Those attacks allowed hackers to breach sensitive personal data about nearly all employees of the federal government and millions of persons with security clearances, according to a report by the Associated...

The IRS sometimes uses old software without key security patches that leave its computer systems vulnerable and could endanger taxpayers’ private information, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday. GAO investigators raised the issue last year, identifying 69 weaknesses. The IRS said it had corrected two dozen of them, but the new audit found just 14 of them were actually fixed, leaving dozens of weaknesses still to be resolved. Part of the problem is that the IRS hasn’t even always followed its own guidelines for assessing risks and creating information security plans, the GAO said.

Before Hillary Clinton’s news conference yesterday, Jen Psaki, the spokesperson for the United States Department of State, stated that the White House could not immediately released the former Secretary of State’s emails because “it will take several months” to redact all the classified things she sent. Despite this, Ms. Clinton then stated in her press conference, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” Someone is not telling the truth. Either Ms. Psaki lied in order to prevent the immediate release of...

I’ve raised in prior posts (here and here) the issue of physical security of the clintonemail.com e-mal server, which is why were it was located and how it was set up matters. Last night, Mitch LaKind — who has experience setting up secure military e-mail servers — wrote me about the detailed issues surrounding Clinton’s approach. I’ll let him speak for himself (emphasis mine, though): As a former contractor to the Air Force, I personally managed the Microsoft Exchange servers that were installed at Thule Air Base. My experience with Microsoft Exchange goes back to 1997, when the earliest versions...

Technology companies are scrambling to fix a major security flaw that for more than a decade left users of Apple and Google devices vulnerable to hacking when they visited millions of supposedly secure Web sites, including Whitehouse.gov, NSA.gov and FBI.gov. The flaw resulted from a former U.S. government policy that once forbid the export of strong encryption and required that weaker “export-grade” products be shipped to customers in other countries, say the researchers who discovered the problem. These restrictions were lifted in the late 1990s, but the weaker encryption got baked into widely used software that proliferated around the world...

The Internet is lighting up with warnings about Superfish, an adware program that came preinstalled on many Lenovo laptops in the past six months. Like a lot of the bloatware that comes on new computers, Superfish exists to help push advertising, not to serve any real consumer need. That would be annoying enough, but Superfish seriously undermines the user's safety, according to many security experts. Superfish is a piece of third-party software that Lenovo installed to, as it says in its apology to consumers, “enhance the shopping experience.” That means it's meant to help advertisers target potential customers. But security...

Please seem my comments below Google Drive is offering its users 2GB of free storage for completing a simple security checkup. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete, but the offer only lasts until Feb. 17. Designed to make sure everything about your account is shipshape, the security checkup runs through a checklist of security features examining your account recovery information, recent activity, account permissions, and your 2-step verification settings. To access the security checkup, head on over to your Google account page. Next, click "Get Started" button to begin the checkup.

Microsoft is helping the estimated hundreds of millions of customers still running Windows XP, which it stopped supporting earlier this month, by providing an emergency update to fix a critical bug in its Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft Corp rushed to create the fix after learning of the bug in the operating system over the weekend when cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc warned that a sophisticated group of hackers had exploited the bug to launch attacks in a campaign dubbed "Operation Clandestine Fox. ...

It's not often that the US or UK governments weigh in on the browser wars, but a new Internet Explorer vulnerability that affects all major versions of the browser from the past decade has forced it to raise an alarm: Stop using IE. The zero-day exploit, the term given to a previously unknown, unpatched flaw, allows attackers to install malware on your computer without your permission. That malware could be used to steal personal data, track online behavior, or gain control of the computer. Security firm FireEye, which discovered the bug, said that the flaw is being used with a...

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