Free Republic

Two baby-faced Florida teens allegedly lured a 14-year-old girl into the woods before they fatally shot her and set her remains on fire over an online dispute. Danika Troy was last seen by her mother Nov. 30​ and reported missing as a runaway the next day around 7 a.m., Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson told reporters at a press conference Thursday. “Unbeknownst to the mother, Danika was murdered the previous night,” Johnson said. ​Danika’s body was found in a wooded area ​in Pace, Fl​a. — 17 miles north of Pensacola near the southern coast of the ​state’s panhandle —...

Over a decade ago, Google showed off a pair of smart spectacles called Google Glass, sparking a major ethical debate over wearables being used to covertly film people without their permission. At the time, the outrage was enshrined by the derogatory neologism “glasshole,” meaning a Google Glass wearer who was accused of having little regard for the privacy of those around them. A seeming eternity later, Meta has attempted to revive the idea with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. While it’s arguably a significant technological leap over Google’s early forays, the debate has seemingly remained the same. Case in point, as...

The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act Vice President JD Vance took to X to slam the EU for its actions, which he described as “garbage” The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act (DSA).The hefty fine, announced by Bloomberg, is the first to be issued under the 2023 law, with EU lawmakers promising...

SummaryA new book by Paul Holden, building on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, documents that the “Stop Funding Fake News” (SFFN) campaign — which led to widespread advertiser boycotts and deplatforming of outlets including ZeroHedge, The Federalist, Breitbart, The Canary and others during 2019–2021 — was not a grassroots activist effort as publicly claimed, but a centrally directed political operation run out of the same South London office as Labour Together, the think tank that backed Keir Starmer’s leadership bid.Key findings:SFFN was conceived and resourced by Morgan McSweeney (now Starmer’s chief of staff and formerly sole director...

In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his social media empire was officially rebranding itself as “Meta” as part of a sweeping company-wide doubling down on virtual reality tech.The head-scratching pivot has been nothing short of a disaster ever since, from blocky “Horizon Worlds” online environments filled with screeching children to never-ending rounds of layoffs and exorbitant losses.All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the...

Authorities describe the 764 network as a ‘disgusting group of criminals’ targeting children as young as 8.FBI Director Kash Patel said arrests for the infamous online exploitation ring, the “764” network, are up almost 500 percent over last year. In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek, Patel said his agency made a “huge push” to protect children against the “predators” associated with the network. This group has proven to be dangerous for minors and other vulnerable groups who are targeted and threatened through forums and gaming platforms. The FBI announced on Feb. 20 that it has prioritized...

Your life is my background noiseThey say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it. We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment. We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened,...

Hashtag-do-whatever-I-tell-youCato Networks says it has discovered a new attack, dubbed "HashJack," that hides malicious prompts after the "#" in legitimate URLs, tricking AI browser assistants into executing them while dodging traditional network and server-side defenses. Prompt injection occurs when something causes text that the user didn't write to become commands for an AI bot. Direct prompt injection happens when unwanted text gets entered at the point of prompt input, while indirect injection happens when content, such as a web page or PDF that the bot has been asked to summarize, contains hidden commands that AI then follows as if...

Location, location, location. That’s what matters now on X, because Elon Musk has just rolled out a hugely important new feature, and it’s confirming what some of us have suspected was the case for some time now. It turns out that many of the openly racist and anti-Semitic accounts on X that claim to be America First but are actually giving MAGA a bad name — well, they’re not true America First at all. In fact, they’re largely coming from Muslim countries. And now we have the proof. A week ago, Fox News personality Katie Pavlich, a friend of mine,...

This is why we have trust issues.If you’ve spent any time watching Catfish on MTV, you’re probably familiar with the risks of online dating. People posing as someone they’re not is something all singles need to watch out for as they swipe on apps. But apparently there’s a chance you might not be catfished by another person at all—you might be getting scammed by a restaurant. A trend is emerging where restaurants are posing as eligible singles on dating apps to lure users to dine at their establishment. The scam has been dubbed “food digging,” derived from the term “gold...

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed that people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to a legal filing that was released on Friday. The social media giant was alleged to have initiated the study, dubbed Project Mercury, in late 2019 as a way to help it “explore the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions,” according to the legal brief, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing contains newly unredacted information pertaining to Meta. The newly released legal brief is...

SpaceX Starlink finally has real competition 🚀 and your internet bill may never look the same. Amazon’s new LEO network is directly challenging SpaceX, and in this video I break down what actually matters: speed, reliability, coverage, latency, and how this fight could put real money back in your pocket. You’ll see how Starlink’s upgraded low-orbit system stacks up against Amazon Leo’s fresh constellation, what this means for rural users and families, when prices could drop, and why major ISPs are quietly panicking. If you want to know how the future of satellite internet affects your wallet, performance, and options,...

US states including Wisconsin (AB105/SB130) and Michigan are pushing to ban VPNs as part of age verification laws that compromise digital privacy for everyone. This video explains why these bills are technically impossible to implement, threaten journalists and abuse survivors who rely on VPNs, and mirror censorship tactics. America's First VPN Ban: What Comes Next? | 11:34 Techlore | 278K subscribers | 162,920 views | November 18, 2025

Apparently, some twenty-five per cent of the Internet was inaccessible for much of the day - including (depending where you were) significant parts of the Steyn empire. Get used to it. A few years hence, "surfing the net" is going to be like switching on your kitchen light in Baghdad outside the Green Zone. This will be because China and other hostile powers will enjoy messing with us just to probe our strengths and weaknesses. But it will also be because the west's own governments will appreciate the advantages of a more conditional Internet. Let us say that, oh, multiple...

A major outage affecting Cloudflare’s Global Network has led to widespread internet disruptions, impacting popular platforms like Elon Musk’s X, ChatGPT,and even Downdetector, the first place people look to understand internet outages. Cloudflare, the world’s leading web infrastructure and security company, confirmed that it was experiencing a significant issue with its Global Network in the early hours of Tuesday morning, causing widespread outages across the internet. The problem has affected various services, including social media platform X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the outage monitoring site Downdetector among many other sites and apps experiencing problems. Even some news sites, including Axios, appear...

"Judge Perkins: You got some pants on, officer? Officer Jackson: Sir, they're in the - no, sir. Judge Perkins: Um, Officer Jackson, um, okay." ' Detroit police say they are looking into a situation where an officer appeared during a court hearing on Zoom wearing no pants. In the video, the officer, who identified himself as Matthew Jackson, appeared during the Zoom hearing on Oct. 27 in 36th District Court. Jackson was wearing his Detroit Police Department uniform shirt, but did not have pants on.

A misconfiguration at Microsoft Azure caused massive, widespread outages today starting around noon ET. https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status for details. https://downdetector.com/ was on fire. It's getting better.

Influencer Emman Atienza opened up about taking a social media break before her death at age 19. On Oct. 23, several of Atienza's family members first shared the news of the content creator’s death, writing, “It’s with deep sadness that we share the unexpected passing of our daughter and sister, Emman.” The internet personality — who had over 900,000 followers on TikTok and 240,000 on Instagram — died by suicide at her home in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner confirmed to PEOPLE.

Reddit decided to ban all user-to-user sales and/or trades of firearms parts or accessories. The sale or trade of firearms was already banned on Reddit. This rule took effect on October 9th, 2025. The announcement also bans the subreddit r/RetroARMarket completely.No one on Reddit will be allowed to facilitate user-to-user transactions involving firearms parts and enhancements. Even specific instructions, such as those for 3D printing files to create such items, are prohibited.According to Wikipedia, Reddit was the seventh most visited website on the planet as of February 2025. Over 50% of the traffic comes from the United States, about 7...

On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we've seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN. The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced. VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often...