Free Republic

A Mastodon server that focuses on left-leaning political activists, recently had an unencrypted copy of its database confiscated by the FBI.Source: Pixabay The recent news that a copy of Kolektiva.social’s database was confiscated by the FBI as the result of a raid at the home of one of the organization’s administrators, should serve as a cautionary tale for activists taking advantage of Mastodon’s federated nature to form online communities. Specifically, you should should do some research into the security in place at an activist-focused server, as well as the servers privacy policies.Actually, the same advice would hold even if you...

Conservative public interest advocacy group Defending the Republic (DTR) has obtained almost 15,000 pages of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data, claiming the data show an “utter lack of thoroughness” of the trials and calls the vaccine’s safety into “serious doubt.”As a result of successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the group recently announced it had obtained—and is releasing—nearly 15,000 pages of documents relating to testing and adverse events associated with “Spikevax,” Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.Since 2022, the group has been involved in litigation against the FDA relating to the production of...

Health-care giant says an unknown party made patient information available on an online forumHCA Healthcare HCA - which operates about 180 hospitals and other health-care facilities, said some patient information, including names, emails and phone numbers, were leaked online. The company said an unknown and unauthorized party made the information available on an online forum. The information includes patients’ names, cities, ZIP codes, emails, phone numbers, service date and more. However, payment information, clinical information and other sensitive information such as social security numbers weren’t leaked. [Snip] The company has disabled user access to the affected storage location as a...

The vendor helps CalPERS identify member deaths and make sure that correct payments go to retirees and their beneficiaries.. The personal information of about 769,000 retired CalPERS members was exposed in a third-party data breach that was reported earlier this month. CalSTRS also said it was impacted by the breach and KCRA 3 is trying to learn how many of its members were impacted. CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, is the nation's largest public pension fund. It serves more than 2 million members in its retirement system and more than 1.5 million in its health program. CalSTRS, the...

This seems like an appropriate time for a story like this to pop up since it involves both smoke clouds and climate change. You probably heard how AOC was quick to blame the clouds of smoke wafting down from the Canadian wildfires last week on climate change. As you likely expected without even needing to check, that turns out to be nonsense. But the underlying facts that prove its nonsensical nature turn out to be well rooted in science. And researching this question turns up something even more interesting, which we’ll get to in a moment.You should check out the...

The federal government does not know the extent that regulations are reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite committing $200 billion towards the issue.Jerry DeMarco, commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, holds a press conference in Ottawa on April 20, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)An April 20 report released by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, indicates that Environment and Climate Change Canada does not attribute emission results to specific regulations.The federal department does not measure, or report on, the contributions of each regulation toward meeting the set target for 2030. An audit by the commissioner...

A top Florida State University professor whose research focused on race in the criminal justice system abruptly left his post in the wake of years-long allegations of academic fraud. A Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Eric Stewart has had six research studies retracted, blemishing FSU’s top-ranked criminology department. Stewart was first accused of falsifying data in 2019 by Professor Justin Pickett of the University of Albany, who co-authored a 2011 study with Stewart. The study tested if the public’s prejudicial views impacted their desire for harsher sentences for black and hispanic Americans. The published findings were that as...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of the House and Senate were informed Wednesday that hackers may have gained access to their sensitive personal data in a breach of a Washington, D.C., health insurance marketplace. Employees of the lawmakers and their families were also affected. DC Health Link confirmed that data on an unspecified number of customers was affected and said it was notifying them and working with law enforcement. Sample stolen data was posted on the site for a dozen apparent customers. It included Social Security numbers, addresses, names of employers, phone numbers, emails and addresses. In an email to all...

CNN used misleading data from the Gun Violence Archive to claim Monday “the U.S. has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023.” CNN noted, “America reached the grim number by the first week of March.” Both CNN and the Gun Violence Archive departed from the standard definition for mass shootings, which the Rand Corporation observed as being derived from the FBI’s 1980s definition of a “mass murderer” of an individual who “kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself).”

Glass takes one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times! Gold is the only metal that doesn't rust, even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of years. when a person dies hearing is the last sense to go. The first sense lost is sight. Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end. The tooth is the only part of the human body that cannot heal itself. If you stop getting thirsty, you need to drink more water. When...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida may soon fine some financial institutions that identify gun store purchases under a pending proposal ahead of the upcoming legislative session. The proposal — known as the “Florida Arms and Ammo Act” — seeks to thwart the emerging corporate practice of identifying and potentially flagging an individual’s financial data after a purchase at a gun retailer. Proponents, including Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, describe the proposal as a “first in the nation.” The effort comes as some credit card companies track and categorize gun store sales amid growing concerns of violence and mass shootings. “We are all...

<p>But there was nothing minor about the rally that took hold in the seconds before the better-than-expected inflation number hit the Labor Department’s website.</p><p>Stock futures suddenly spiked more than 1%. Trading in Treasury futures surged, pushing benchmark yields lower by about 4 basis points. Those are major moves in such a short period of time — bigger than full-session swings on some days. And they should get scrutinized by regulators, long-time market observers say, even if a leak is only one of several possible explanations for why traders suddenly started buying right before the report was published.</p>

The former employee posted a video on social media sharing how the tech giant allegedly 'scams' its customers.. CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA: A former Apple employee claims the company is allowing an iOS bug to fill customers' iPhone memory so they can update their software. The former employee posted a video on TikTok sharing how the tech giant allegedly "scams" its customers. In the video, he says that it's "not your fault" when iPhone storage runs low. ... The person, who goes by @nabeel_co, says there is a "long-standing" bug in iOS that prevents cache files and temporary files from being deleted...

For many Republicans, the final midterm election results were surprising— especially in the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Based on polling, it looked likely that Kari Lake, Adam Laxalt, and Mehmet Oz would win their contests. I believe that there are only three likely explanations for the unexpected results: late campaign surges, polling error, or aggressive ballot-harvesting.A late surge?Some Republicans are falling for an illogical narrative put forth by Democrats and the mainstream media. It goes like this: Although Republican candidates were higher in the polls, at the last minute people voted for Democrats because:they feared the end of...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ‘correct’ data they don’t like, and ‘fail to archive the evidence’ — they are frauds in the eyes of many. Former top NOAA scientist, Dr. John Bates, led the agency’s climate data records program for ten years. Since his time at the agency, however, Bates has spoken of data tampering and serious malfeasance; specifically, he accuses NOAA of publishing a flawed report which supposedly disproved the pause observed in global warming between 1998 to 2012. Bates charges that study’s lead author, NOAA official Tom Karl, with using unverified data sets, ignoring mandatory agency...

The founder and CEO of an elections technology company targeted by election deniers was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of stealing poll worker data. Eugene Yu, 51, of Konnech Corporation, was arrested in Meridian Township in Michigan on Tuesday and held on suspicion of theft of personal identifying information, Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón said in a statement. The district attorney's office is seeking his extradition to California. Computer hard drives and other "digital evidence" were seized by investigators from the LA County district attorney's office. Yu's company, Konnech, is based in East Lansing, Michigan. It distributes PollChief software...

Eugene Yu, the CEO of the software firm Konnech, has been arrested in connection to the storage of data on servers in China. "Yu, 51, was arrested early Tuesday just outside of Lansing, Mich., after prosecutors alleged he improperly stored the information on servers in China, according to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón. Yu, who is the chief executive officer of a company named Konnech, is expected to be extradited to Los Angeles in the coming days, Gascón said," according to the LA Times. "Konnech allegedly violated its contract by storing critical information that the workers provided on...

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced today that an executive with a Michigan-based company responsible for the software used in managing Los Angeles County election poll workers has been arrested as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information of those workers.

As they say, life moves fast.On Monday, the New York Times published a story about a “small group of election deniers” who pushed a “conspiracy theory” that “a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”On Tuesday, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that Eugene Yu, Konnech’s CEO, had been arrested in Michigan “as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information of [LA County election] workers” and that...

On Sep. 20, using data covering 9 million people, Swedish researchers published a paper showing mRNA jabs may increase the risk of Omicron infection after three months. That finding received attention. But an even more intriguing nugget in the paper has so far gone unnoticed. Based on one statistical analysis vaccinated people had a HIGHER risk of death or hospitalization from Covid roughly a year after receiving their second dose. The charts — b and d below — show that vaccine protection against death and hospitalization begins to decline slowly after about five months and then plunges about nine months....