Free Republic

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson warned that he will hold off on many of his company's capital investment plans if uncertainty persists over how the US government will regulate the Internet. "It's prudent to pause," he said at an investor conference Wednesday. "We want to make sure we have line of sight on this process and where these rules could land, and then re-evaluate." The comments come two days after President Obama threw his support behind the idea that broadband services providers should be regulated under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which would treat Internet service providers more like utilities...

Silk Road 2.0 and 400 other sites believed to be selling illegal items including drugs and weapons have been shut down. The sites operated on the Tor network - a part of the internet unreachable via traditional search engines. The joint operation between 16 European countries and the US saw 17 arrests, including Blake Benthall who is said to be behind Silk Road 2.0. Experts believe the shutdown represents a breakthrough for fighting cybercrime. Six Britons were also arrested, including a 20-year-old man from Liverpool, a 19-year-old man from New Waltham, a 30 year-old-man from Cleethorpes and a man and...

For most of the iPhone's lifespan, it's been effectively immune to malware. There were theoretical attacks and viruses targeting jailbroken phones, but thanks to the tight controls of the App Store, finding iOS malware in the wild has been nearly impossible. If you didn't jailbreak your phone and you weren’t targeted by the NSA, you simply didn't have to worry about catching a virus. Yesterday, that changed. A security firm called Palo Alto Networks discovered a malware program they’re calling Wirelurker, which sneaks into computers through unauthorized Chinese apps, then attacks iOS devices when they connect over USB. It’s an...

Owners can check by manufacturer. Here is the list of vehicles released Wednesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Note: The list below corrects the list that accompanied NHTSA's Oct. 20 advisory, which incorrectly included certain vehicles. The numbers cited for potentially affected vehicles below are subject to change and adjustment because there may be cases of vehicles being counted more than once. Owners should check their VIN periodically as manufacturers continue to add VINs to the database. Once owner recall notices are available, owners can retrieve a copy from SaferCar.gov, or will receive one by U.S. mail and...

The new hybrid device might not need humans at all. In college, it wasn’t rare to hear a verbal battle regarding artificial intelligence erupt between my friends studying neuroscience and my friends studying computer science. One rather outrageous fellow would mention the possibility of a computer takeover, and off they went. The neuroscience-savvy would awe at the potential of such hybrid technology as the CS majors argued we have nothing to fear, as computers will always need a programmer to tell them what to do. Today’s news brings us to the Neural Turing Machine, a computer that will combine the...

HP has just revealed a lot more information about the 3D printing technology it teased dramatically a few months ago. It's called "Multi Jet Fusion," and the company thinks it can "change entire industries." The original goal was to make 3D printers build objects at higher resolution and much, much faster, speeds. Based on the demos we saw today, that claim looks feasible. Essentially, the 3D printer builds parts similar to how an inkjet printer produces documents -- the "ink" is applied to a material coating, then heated and fused to build up layers (see below). That's substantially different to...

Tech companies like Apple and Google want to make the data customers carry on their smartphones and computers more secure, safe from the prying eyes of spies and identity thieves alike. But law-enforcement officials--from the FBI to local police--see those same devices as treasure troves of evidence.... "I'd be surprised if more than a handful of members would support the idea of backdooring Americans' personal property," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and vocal privacy advocate, said.... And a House Democratic aide said that staffers have been in touch with the FBI on the issue but that Congress is unlikely...

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FBI Director James Comey gave a strong speech today (Oct. 16) explaining why law enforcement should have access to data on encrypted smartphones. But he failed to cite any examples in which such law-enforcement access could have made the difference between life and death.... The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994 mandates that telecommunications companies must give police the ability to listen in on telephone conversations. CALEA covers landlines and cellular carriers, and was expanded in 2004 to cover Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers and broadband Internet service providers. For the past few years, the FBI...

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

Microsoft Exec: Windows 9 to be Free for Windows 8 Users Microsoft has scheduled a special invite-only event for Tuesday, September 30, 2014, where it is widely expected to introduce the next version of its popular desktop operating system (codenamed “Threshold” but popularly referred to as Windows 9)... According to Indonesian news portal Detik, existing Windows 8 users will be able to upgrade to Microsoft’s next operating system absolutely free of cost. And how exactly do they know this, you ask? Well, Microsoft Indonesia president Andreas Diantoro said so in Jakarta Thursday... ...

Apple’s OS X is vulnerable to the Shellshock bug, but it’s not that easy for attackers to take advantage of it, according to Intego, which specializes in security software for the operating system. Shellshock is the nickname for a flaw in the Bourne Again Shell, or Bash, which is a command-line shell processor widely present in Unix and Linux systems. The flaw in Bash, which has been present for two decades, could allow an attacker to take complete control of a computer. Apple, which plans to patch the flaw, said most users are fine unless they’ve tweaked advanced Unix settings....

Facebook will create thousands of drones the size of jumbo jets which will fly 17 miles above the Earth to provide wireless internet access to the four billion people currently unable to get online.

Medicine deliveries to a pharmacy on a North Sea island will be made by a drone, Deutsche Post announced on Wednesday, in the first project of its kind. It is the first time that an unmanned drone will be used for a practical business purpose in Europe, the company claims. Inhabitants and visitors on the island of Juist, which has a population of fewer than 2,000, will be able to order medicines from the Seehund Pharmacy and have them delivered from the mainland by the drone. …

Full title: Judicial Watch Uncovers HHS Documents Detailing “High Risk” Security Problems with Obamacare Internet Site Less than one month before Healthcare.gov rollout, top Obama administration official highlights risks of malicious code being uploaded into the system through Excel macros; other “high risk” findings (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 94 pages of documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealing that in the days leading up to the rollout of Obamacare, top Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials knew of massive security risks with Healthcare.gov and chose to roll out the...

By Richard Davies @daviesnow Sep 9, 2014 9:03am Home Depot (HD) Hack Could Be Biggest Card Breach Ever Morning Money Memo: The huge hacking attack against Home Depot’s payment systems could turn out to be the biggest breach of any retailer’s data so far. The company confirmed the data break-in but did not say how many credit and data cards are affected. The total could be as much as 60 million, according to several experts. That would be far more than the total number of cardholders impacted by the breach at Target stores. There is no evidence that any debit...

LONDON: Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the God particle or Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe. The 72-year-old cosmologist said Higgs boson could become unstable at very high energy levels, which would lead to a "catastrophic vacuum decay" causing space and time to collapse and that there would not be any warning to the danger, the Daily Express reported. Speaking in the preface to a new book called Starmus, the Cambridge-educated scientist said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become mega-stable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). However, Hawking did also...

A secure cell phone maker has uncovered more than a dozen cell phone towers around the U.S. that no one seems to know who owns them and no one is sure how they get installed. The towers were uncovered by ESD America, which built the CryptoPhone 500, a highly modified Galaxy S III secured phone with end-to-end encryption and firewall protection of its baseband chip, plus its own custom Android distribution with many vulnerabilities the ESD team found and removed.

Aerospace and defense contractor Northrop Grumman recently unveiled its concept for the Pentagon’s new space plane, the XS-1 — an unmanned drone-shuttle capable of carrying small and medium-sized satellites into orbit cheaply and autonomously. “It would be a spacecraft that most resembles what people see in the movies,” former Air Force Space Command Officer Brian Weeden told War is Boring about the concept craft, which is being headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Northrop is competing with Boeing and Masten Space Systems for the contract to build the final product. “If we could pull it off, it...

Donations to key lawmakers wine-and-dined by its lobbyists earn commercial spaceflight company millions in subsidies Shortly before a private spaceflight company’s test rocket exploded over southern Texas last weekend, state lawmakers announced millions in subsidies to get the company to continue launching rockets in the Lone Star State. Space Exploration Technologies, commonly known as SpaceX, will receive more than $15 million in public financing to build a launch pad in Cameron County, near the Mexican border. The subsidies came after SpaceX’s founder, billionaire tech mogul and pop technologist Elon Musk, made campaign contributions to key state lawmakers and hired lobbyists...