Free Republic

Using photos of young women and Hebrew slang, the Palestinian militant group Hamas chatted up dozens of Israeli soldiers online, gaining control of their phone cameras and microphones, the military said on Wednesday. An officer, who briefed reporters on the alleged scam, said the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip uncovered no major military secrets in the intelligence-gathering operation. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum declined to comment. Mainly using Facebook, Hamas used fake online identities and photos of young women, apparently found on the Internet, to lure soldiers in, the officer said. "Just a second, I'll send you a photo,...

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...

Superficially at least, there may be a rich irony to Justin Pemberton’s intriguing interactive documentary I Spy With My 5 Eyes. The Canadian-New Zealand coproduction is a chilling cautionary tale about the changing nature of surveillance, making a convincing case that our daily actions are leaving glaring digital footprints that government spy agencies can easily access. I Spy With My 5 Eyes is also interactive — visitors are encouraged to share their views on this controversial topic. So, in essence, aren’t people being asked to go online and share their views about the dangers of sharing too much online?

<p>1. has functions which are easy to see/find and invoke 2. allows easier upload of pictures 3. that allows email notification of replies to comments 4. that allows editing after a comment is posted 5. that has text editing features so one doesn't need to know HTML code in order to add emphasis. 6. that has a Search function for previous posts 7. that is easier to navigate to the specialty forums such as "Gods, Graves, Glyphs", which, had it not been mentioned in a random post, I never would have found here on FR.</p>

Fake News claims “Russian Hack” of Election Tillerson for State, Friedman for Israel Ambassador The Democrats and their allies – ahem McCain and Graham – are desperately trying to discredit President Elect Trump before inauguration. After failed protests and a failed recount (in which Trump picked up votes), some elements within the badly politicized CIA are claiming “Russian hacking” was partially responsible for the historic Trump victory. But evidence points conclusively to an inside leak and nothing to do with Russia… Meanwhile, Trump met with the “Titans” of the American tech sector. Noticeably absent was Twitter’s “Jack,” who is notorious...

We are at the dawn of a new era in finance. For the first time, we have the cognitive, analytic and data-driven technological tools that will allow financial firms to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of customers and legal requirements. These tools will also strengthen firms' operations in service of financial stability and their shareholders. Finance is, of course, necessary for economic life in any society. From the first known civilizations that used clay tokens in places such as Mesopotamia's city of Uruk, to today's globalized economic environment where virtual currencies, like bitcoin, are emerging, finance is at...

A whole new way to fight antibiotic resistance.Scientists have discovered that Tasmanian devil milk contains an arsenal of antimicrobial compounds that can kill some of the most deadly bacterial and fungal infections known to science - including golden staph. Tasmanian devils were found to produce six different types of these antimicrobial compounds - humans produce just one - and scientists were able to successfully synthesise them in the lab to test their effectiveness against a number of drug-resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens. When tested against 25 different bacterial and six fungal strains, the six varieties of antimicrobial compounds were found...

Solely based on media coverage, you'd think that all of Silicon Valley and the tech world at large was undoubtedly behind Clinton in this critical election. But as has been reported in muted fashion by a few outlets, there is such a thing as the "silent majority" which is going to surprise many this election. I'm confident that polls are having a hard time capturing the factor that quantifies this part of the electorate which isn't being vocal about its Election Day preferences, but will deliver a decisive blow come Tues Nov 8. Those in the tech industry publicly supporting...

Google and Microsoft are butting heads over the disclosure of vulnerabilities. On Monday, Google revealed a critical flaw in Windows after it gave Microsoft a ten-day window to warn the public about it.Google posted about the zero-day vulnerability on its security blog, saying Microsoft had yet to publish a fix or issue an advisory about the software flaw."This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited," Google said. It lets hackers exploit a bug in the Windows kernel, via a win32k.sys system call, to bypass the security sandbox.The search giant originally told Microsoft about the problem...

I’ve been creeped out by Facebook for a long time now. The following story takes it to another level. From Fusion: While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why. “I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone. The next week, things got weirder. Most of her...

Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought ‘why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades—and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits—so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball. She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.”

As people move through a space with a Wi-Fi signal, their bodies affect it, absorbing some waves and reflecting others in various directions. By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.

Florida AG Shuts Down Boynton Beach Tech Support Scam August 24, 2016 11:12 AM TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami) – A Boynton Beach tech support company which reportedly scammed its customers out of $25 million has been temporarily shut down again by court order, according to Florida’s Attorney General’s Office. The company Client Care Experts, formerly known as First Choice Tech Support, LLC, is owned by CEO Michael Seward and his partner Kevin McCormick. The state’s Attorney General’s Office said the operation was run out of a boiler room in Boynton Beach and employed more than 200 telemarketers at the location. The court...

There is no such thing as Pro-Trump free speech as Clinton corporate allies serve up a carefully curated view of the campaign My dad always told me that conservative candidates have to work twice as hard as their liberal opponents to win elections because they’re fighting two opponents: the Democratic Party and the media. The usual suspects from left-leaning major media outlets like The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and even entertainment networks are doing everything in their power to ensure a Clinton victory. Look no further than to Wolf Blitzer mincing around and drinking wine at the Democratic convention,...

OUR SILICON VALLEY ROBBER BARONS08.10.16 11:00 PM ET Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets. A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better....

Four years ago, Meg Whitman burned the midnight oil raising money for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, while Johnvey Hwang volunteered 100-hour weeks building apps for Barack Obama. But today they're on the same side. Eight years after left-leaning technology executives and workers first threw their enthusiastic support to Obama, a new alliance has formed to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance - Morning Consult https://morningconsult.com/2016/07/26/arab-american-groups-join-partner-tech-privacy-fight-surveillance/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRNeE16TmpNR0ZpT0daaSIsInQiOiJ1QXBqd28wWmlEbnpjWUVWRDNOaDZCU2tFMmJ6NXJ2MVJyRHZpcjhGWWxPcGJ1U1VyQXFCXC9PcUN6RmJ3emRKdkJJTWJSUmtBRGRTV09XNlI4QUZHU0xybWYxQ1I5QTRqQkJrZDAxbUEwVzg9In0%3D Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance Amir Nasr   |   July 26, 2016 Privacy advocates in the technology space have a new ally in Arab American groups to help with their fight to keep U.S. surveillance at bay. They are spurred on by anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republicans. In December, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of U.S. borders to Muslim immigrants. In March, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the country needed to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim...

You should be able to trust your wireless keyboard. And yet security researchers have been warning people to be suspicious of wireless computer accessories using sketchy radio protocols for years. Those warnings peaked five months ago, when hackers at the security firm Bastille found that millions of cheap keyboard and mouse dongles let hackers inject keystrokes onto your machine from hundreds of yards away. Now, in case you missed that message, the same researchers have extended their attack to millions more devices—and this time, they can not only inject keystrokes, but also read yours, too. On Tuesday Bastille’s research team...

he smartwatch market has hit its first bump, and it’s all Apple’s fault. Vendors shipped a total of 3.5 million smartwatches worldwide last quarter. This Q2 2016 figure is down 32 percent from the 5.1 million units shipped in Q2 2016, marking the first decline on record. .... As you can see above, Apple’s market share decreased 25 percentage points (from 72 percent to 47 percent) and it shipped less than half the smartwatches (1.6 million). But the company still holds almost half the market, with every other vendor shipping fewer than a million units.

A new federal court ruling could make sharing your passwords for subscription services -- covering everything from Netflix to HBO GO -- a federal crime punishable by prison time, according to a judge who opposed the decision. The ruling, issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, pertained to a trade-secrets case and found that certain instances of sharing passwords are prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - legislation predominantly concerned with hacking. The case involved David Nosal, a headhunter who left his former company Korn/Ferry and then used the password of an employee to...