Free Republic

A bipartisan group of six senators — including Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the Gang of Eight member mulling a run for president — released the first bipartisan immigration bill of the new Congress, in the form of legislation to expand high-tech visas and green cards for immigrants. “Our bill is a commonsense, bipartisan approach to help ensure that those who have come here to be educated in high-tech fields are able to stay with their families and contribute to the economy and our society,” said Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), who headed up the effort. “I’m...

The MagSafe2 port, from left, two Thunderbolt ports, a USB 3 port and headphone port (top), SDXC Cardslot, HDMI port, and USB 3 port (bottom), on Apple's MacBook Pro. Similar mage from Apple Inc. substituted for original Getty Image on article site. According to a recent security presentation, attackers could infect Macintosh computers with a special kind of malware using the computer's Thunderbolt port. The attack, dubbed Thunderstrike, was showcased by security researcher Trammell Hudson at the Chaos Communications Congress in Germany. Hudson is well known in the security community, particularly for his work reverse-engineering various devices and systems....

The glasses can do everything its military-grade specs can do—display high-definition video, record video, lay visuals over the real world—but will be 30 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter, and they’ll look a little less awkward. ODG’s augmented reality glasses come packed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor; Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a global navigation satellite system; and sensors for figuring out where you’re looking. The glasses can do pretty much anything a tablet can do. Watching a movie on the glasses is something akin to watching a high-def movie on a 65-inch TV from across the room. The glasses also...

One of my New Years resolutions is to not stay signed into Google mail or Google anything// Does this help with the tracking google does? I use track me not on Firefox and Chrome. I am using Bing and Google for searches Thanks

Researchers at Check Point have discovered a serious security vulnerability affecting at least 12 million leading-brand home and SME routers that appears to have gone unnoticed for over a decade. Dubbed the ’Misfortune Cookie’ flaw, the firm plans to give a detailed account of the issue at a forthcoming security conference but in the meantime it’s important to stress that no real-world attacks using it have yet been detected. That said, an attacker exploiting the flaw would be able to monitor all data travelling through a gateway such as files, emails and logins and have the power to infect connected...

Alert: Fraudulent Entities Posing as iolo Please be aware that iolo Customer Care Agents do not initiate outbound phone calls based on alerts or errors from the product. If someone claiming to be from “iolo” or “System Mechanic” contacts you regarding alerts or messages from the product do not provide any information and contact iolo to verify. Learn More 

A major problem with the H-1B debate is the absence of displaced IT workers in news media accounts. Much of the reporting is one-sided -- and there's a reason for this. An IT worker who is fired because he or she has been replaced by a foreign, visa-holding employee of an offshore outsourcing firm will sign a severance agreement. This severance agreement will likely include a non-disparagement clause that will make the fired worker extremely cautious about what they say on Facebook, let alone to the media. On-the-record interviews with displaced workers are difficult to get. While a restrictive severance...

Intel CEO Brain Krzanich has announced, in an email sent to employees on Monday, new company plans to merge its loss-making mobile chip unit with its profitable PC business early next year, writes the Wall Street Journal. "The market continues to evolve rapidly, and we must change even faster to stay ahead," Krzanich asserted in the email. It is well known that Intel has struggled to gain a foothold in mobile computing, but even worse for the business its tablet and smartphone chip-making division has lost billions in the recent months. Intel's mobile communication group posted a $1 billion operating...

The bus drivers who cart Facebook employees to and from Silicon Valley voted on Wednesday to unionize, a move expected to kick off wider efforts to organize the men and women at other companies responsible for getting the tech industry to work. Drivers for Loop Transportation, a company contracted by Facebook, voted 43-28 to form a union, with 11 drivers who did not cast ballots. The drivers voted at secret ballot stations set up in the small, 10-bed trailer at a San Carlos Loop bus lot used as a rest area by dozens of Facebook drivers.

A new app, which allows users to conveniently report voter fraud, will be available for iOS and Android on November 1. The app, called VoteStand, is being launched by True the Vote, an anti-voter fraud group that was one of the groups unconstitutionally targeted by the Obama IRS. According to the VoteStand website, “the app uses a high level encryption, inside the app allowing information to get to the right people to make reporting voter fraud easily.”

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...

Marriott International has agreed to pay a $600,000 penalty for jamming guests' mobile WiFi hotspots at a hotel and conference facility in Nashville, Tenn.In a consent decree filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Marriott acknowledged that "one or more of its employees used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent consumers from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks."At the same time, the FCC says, the hotel was charging consumers, small businesses, and exhibitors from $250 to $1,000 per device to access Marriott's WiFi network."Consumers who purchase cellular data plans should...

Inspired perhaps by Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, scientists have recently developed several ways—some simple and some involving new technologies—to hide objects from view. The latest effort, developed at the University of Rochester, not only overcomes some of the limitations of previous devices, but it uses inexpensive, readily available materials in a novel configuration. "There've been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn't there, often using high-tech or exotic materials," said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester....

Last week, Breitbart News revealed a secret video game journalist mailing list used by a clique of influential writers, editors, and bloggers, some of whom attempted to bully their colleagues with it in an attempt to shape the news agenda for political purposes. We can today reveal the complete list of journalists, some 150 key industry figures, on the list. Outlets with representation span the entire video games journalism universe and include Polygon, Ars Technica, Wired, Eurogamer, Destructoid, Kotaku, Joystiq, TechRadar, and many other well-known brands in games publishing. But they also include freelancers and staffers for publications as solidly...

Apple unveiled its first smartwatch on Tuesday. The move was hotly anticipated, as Apple enters a competitive and rapidly expanding market. The new watches will be available starting in early 2015, starting at $349. Here's everything else you need to know about the new Apple Watch. 1) It's sleek There's a reason Apple invited fashion bloggers to the event today. The Apple Watch is clearly more than just a wrist computer that does nifty high-tech things; it's meant to be pretty. CEO Tim Cook told the audience Tuesday that Apple thought hard about the watch's look, not just its capabilities....

(Phys.org) —By using voltage-generated stress to switch between two magnetic states, researchers have designed a new non-volatile memory with extremely high energy efficiency—about two orders of magnitude higher than that of the previous most efficient non-volatile memories. The engineers, Ayan K. Biswas, Professor Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, and Professor Jayasimha Atulasimha at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, have published their paper on the proposed non-volatile memory in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. "We are excited that we have been able to come up with the idea of a strain-switched memory element capable of 180° switching using a simple geometric...

CNBC's Susan Li reports China is building its own operating system to compete with companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft... (short vid at link)

Seagate has hit a new storage milestone with its recently unveiled 8TB hard drive disk, the first of its kind to start shipping. The company calls this an "important step forward", saying its new offering meets the increasing data-heavy demands of our modern cloud-centric world. The new 8TB offering is a 3.5-inch drive, and the maker is hawking it at cloud providers and others revolving around bulk data storage. Said IDC's John Rydning, "Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content." He points towards the 8TB drive as a solution for addressing...

Drones -- unmanned flying machines -- will soon fill our skies. They conjure up fears, especially among some of my fellow libertarians, of spying and death from above. These fears aren't groundless. President Bush approved the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists overseas, and President Obama vastly increased their use. Drones have killed thousands of people in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, countries against which we have not declared war. Drones keep getting more sophisticated. The Air Force is now developing what it calls MAVs, Micro Air Vehicles, tiny drones that can quietly search for an individual terrorist...

This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil” Per FR posting rules, ars technica can not be posted, so a link to the article referring to USB thumbdrives hacking computers is listed instead. Ignore the "source url", it just points back to the FR website. Article here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/this-thumbdrive-hacks-computers-badusb-exploit-makes-devices-turn-evil/