Free Republic

"Google’s leadership in removing the majority of these ads is a victory for truth in advertising." Responding to outside pressure from "pro-choice" group NARAL, the search engine Google has decided to ban pregnancy centers offering alternatives to abortion from bidding on the keyword “abortion clinics” reports LifeSiteNews.

The government bureaucrats who regulate and inspect our food for a living may be less than competent at scrutinizing their own meals. The national Food Safety Summit was attended by 1,300 food safety officials, including agents of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control as well as a number of large businesses. Officials hired the Baltimore Convention Center and its food service provider, Centerplate, to host and cater the event. “A couple of our folks indicated that they had experienced symptoms associated with food poisoning after the summit,” said FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam.

The $300 million payout from tech giants like Google and Apple to settle a lawsuit brought by employees makes it clear that Silicon Valley is out for profit, not to change the world. Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe—reached a settlement today in a contentious $3 billion anti-trust suit brought by workers who accused the tech giants of secretly colluding to not recruit each other’s employees. The workers won, but not much, receiving only a rumored $300 million, a small fraction of the billions the companies might have been forced to pay had they been found guilty in...

The key weapon in their arsenal of obedience is technology and the mega-corporations that control the flow of information disseminated to the hypnotized mindless masses. The United States has devolved into a society where a few powerful unelected unaccountable men, controlling the levers of government, education, finance, and media are able to formulate the opinions, tastes, beliefs, and fears of the masses through the effective and subtle use of technology. They have tenaciously and unflinchingly fashioned a technology addiction among the masses in order to keep them distracted, entertained and uninterested in thinking, gaining knowledge, or comprehending their roles and...

Is your smartphone running low on battery for seemingly no reason? Are things taking longer to render or load? Your gadget could be secretly mining bitcoins, thanks to a piece of mobile malware in Google Play that quietly uses an Android phone’s processing power, while hiding behind innocuous-seeming wallpaper apps. Lookout Software uncovered the bug, dubbed “BadLepricon,” after which Google removed five applications that were incorporating it. The apps had between 100 to 500 installs each at the time of removal. “And yes, that is how the malware authors spelled ‘leprechaun,’” wrote Lookout researcher Meghan Kelly, in a blog detailing...

Something odd happened last Friday and it has been bugging me for a few days now. I needed to pick something up at an address in town. Wife called me (cell phone to cell phone) and read me the address. A few minutes later I happened to be on the computer and went to Google Maps (using Chrome). I started to type the address in, just the first two digits of the four digit street number and up came the list of suggestions...with that exact address as the first one!? WTF? Seriously, there must be a hundred addresses in town...

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end: GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations. I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people....

Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities have pored over 1,800 US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great surprises there, then. But the government is not the only American power whose motivations need to be rigourously examined. Some 2,400 miles away from Washington, in Silicon Valley, Google is aggressively gaining power with little to keep it in check. It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that...

(CNN) -- The "kill switch," a system for remotely disabling smartphones and wiping their data, will become standard in 2015, according to a pledge backed by most of the mobile world's major players. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industry's largest trade group. All smartphones manufactured for sale in the United States after July 2015 must have the technology, according to the program from CTIA-The Wireless Association. Advocates say the feature would deter thieves from...

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

Google has acquired drone maker Titan Aerospace, the Wall Street Journal reports. Titan is a New Mexico-based company that makes high-flying solar powered drones. There's no word on the price Google paid, but Facebook had been in talks to acquire the company earlier this year for a reported $60 million. Presumably, Google paid more than that to keep it away from Facebook.

Google has added Pompeii to its Street View application, allowing internet users to take a 360-degree virtual tour of the ancient Roman city. Italy's culture ministry says it hopes the move will boost tourism to the site, state news agency Ansa reports. Among the ruins visible on the search engine's free mapping service are the town's statues, temples and theatres. The city was buried in ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 and was not discovered until the 18th Century. The volcanic debris preserved many of the city's buildings, frescos, silverware, mosaics and other artefacts. "Giving people a chance to...

Google has updated its terms of service to reflect that it analyzes user content including emails to provide users tailored advertising, customized search results and other features. The Internet giant’s scanning of users’ email has been controversial with privacy groups describing it as an intrusion into user privacy. Competitor Microsoft claims in its “Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail” campaign that its Outlook.com email service is superior to Gmail as unlike Google it does not go through email looking for keywords to target users with paid advertisements. In a case in California over Google’s interception of email, District Judge Lucy H....

Democrats embrace adding photos to Social Security cards By Juliet Eilperin and Karen Tumulty, Published: April 10 As Republicans push for new voting restrictions around the country, a handful of Democrats have coalesced around an impromptu idea: placing a photo on Social Security cards. Former U.N. ambassador and civil rights activist Andrew Young — who chairs a nonpartisan voting rights group called Why Tuesday? — buttonholed President Obama and two of his predecessors in Texas this week in an effort to win their support for the concept. Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter endorsed the idea, while the White...

Google wants public high school students, especially girls, to discover the magic of coding. Each eligible female student who completes our computer programming lesson will earn DonorsChoose.org credits for your classroom. [ ... ] You’ll receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code for every female student who completes the course. When 4 or more female students complete it, we’ll email you an additional $500 gift code

Last Thursday, Mozilla, the company that’s home to the web browser Firefox, forced the resignation of CEO Brendan Eich. What, precisely, had Eich done wrong? Back in 2008, Eich had donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 effort backing traditional marriage in California. Dating website OKCupid posted a ban on Firefox traffic, issuing a message to Firefox users instead: “Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.” That ban reportedly prompted the action at Mozilla.Of course, it was the people pushing for Eich’s ouster who were...

The recent ousting of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich highlights not just the huge cultural divide on the gay marriage debate, but our nation's dangerous misunderstanding of the term "tolerance." Tolerance is an absolute necessity in any free society. As defined by Merriam-Webster, tolerance is the willingness to accept feelings, habits, or beliefs that are different from your own. As we live in a society of more than 300 million diverse individuals, this is an essential nature to ensure domestic tranquility. The entire concept of liberty depends on each and every one of us accept that there are beliefs, attitudes and...

Hello. I am member of Mozilla's development team and these postings here lately force me now to react. Let me first clarify one thing. I do that because someone has finally to speak out some things... Things which should clearly brought out to the public.... First, the incident about our short time CEO Eich..... many of us do NOT agree with what has happened. There has been a massive amount of pressure inside and outside of Mozilla which brought him to resign from his post. About the ads in the new tab page... Our reasoning for this is to make...

So I'm watching this whole "Firefox" uninstall effort going on, with some amusement. Y'all should understand that Google and Firefox have ways of winning even if you uninstall Firefox. I'll cover that in the body of my thread below

It is the talk of the Valley. A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry — Apple and Google among them — over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies. The employees filed a class-action suit, contending that the illegal hiring practices cost employees $9 billion in lost wages. Now the companies are locked in mediation sessions, hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks. The question being whispered all over town now is how much will...