Free Republic

With an increasing number of households buying into virtual assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, it’s important to keep in mind that these devices are designed to listen. This includes recording and learning the tone of your voice and improving voice recognition and features for the virtual assistant. It’s supposed to be a feature and not a bug, but it’s landed Amazon’s Echo speakers in hot water after they spontaneously erupted in laughter. Amazon claimed the affected Echo speakers were triggered by false positive commands. If you’re an Alexa user, it’s possible to delete all of your recorded queries....

In what has now become a tiresome routine, European Union "Competition Commissioner" Margrethe Vestager has once again slapped an American company with a massive fine for the heinous crime of out-competing EU companies. The EU complains about U.S. tariffs, but this move to punish Google with a $5 billion antitrust fine is straight up protectionism. "Stop this behavior," Vestager told the firm. What behavior is that? Giving consumers ever-more options for their tablets, phones and computers at a lower price? The fine, after all, is for "abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system." The argument is that by...

Online activists angry with President Trump's policies have manipulated Google Images search results, causing images of Trump's face to appear as the top search results for the term "idiot." The Guardian first reported the campaign Thursday, which appeared to begin on Reddit after an initial campaign aimed to get the hit Green Day song "American Idiot" to the top of the British music charts during Trump's visit to the U.K. last week. Several posts on Reddit with tens of thousands of upvotes (bots?) could be found promoting the news stories or the general campaign to manipulate the search results. Google...

Europe is very good at regulating.  Less so at creating.  That's why Europe has fined Google five billion dollars for allegedly monopolistic behavior related to Google's Android operating system on phones and tablet devices while failing to produce continental alternatives of its own. European authorities fined Google a record $5.1 billion on Wednesday for abusing its power in the mobile phone market and ordered the company to alter its practices, in one of the most aggressive regulatory actions against American technology giants and one that may force lasting changes to smartphones. The European Union's antitrust fine of 4.34 billion euros was almost double...

All there is is the headline.

Americans deserve the facts, objectively reported. They know media bias is pervasive. A recent Morning Consult poll found that only a quarter of voters now trust the media to tell them the truth, a record low. The media savages President Donald Trump and portrays his administration in the worst possible light. Over 90 percent of his network news coverage has been negative, higher than any other president. The muting of conservative voices by social media also has intensified. Social media companies have repeatedly censored, removed, or “shadow banned” conservative journalists, news organizations, and media outlets that do not share their...

The European Union hit Google with a record antitrust fine for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system. It ordered Google to put an end to illegal conduct within 90 days, or else face additional charges of up to 5 percent of Alphabet's average daily worldwide turnover. The ruling comes little over a year after the EU fined the company $2.7 billion for favoring its shopping service over competitors. European Union regulators have slapped Alphabet-owned Google with a record 4.34 billion euro ($5 billion) antitrust fine for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system, which is...

WASHINGTON — The email landed in John Podesta’s crowded inbox around March 19, 2016, during the height of the presidential primaries, and it appeared to be a standard security request from Google for Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman to change his password. Doing so ultimately led to a political firestorm that is still raging. The email was actually from Aleksey Lukashev, a senior lieutenant in Russian military intelligence, using the account “john356gh” to mask his purpose, U.S. officials say. The email contained an embedded link that secretly opened Podesta’s account to a hacking team at 20 Komsomolskiy Prospekt, near Moscow’s Red...

Top public policy officials from Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet's YouTube division are set to testify before Congress on Tuesday to determine whether the companies were politically motivated in filtering content on their platforms. GOP Congressmembers have taken aim at the social media giants for what they have charged are politically biased practices in the content each site chooses to remove. The companies have denied such claims. The companies will send their top public policy officials to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, including Facebook’s head of global policy, Monika Bickert; YouTube’s head of global public policy and government relations Juniper...

It was four months and eight days until the 2018 midterm elections, and Anna Eskamani had not spent a penny to promote her political campaign online. Ms. Eskamani, 27, is running to represent Florida’s 47th District in the State Legislature. Like many state-level candidates, she writes her own fund-raising emails and manages her own social media accounts. And with her busy schedule on the campaign trail, advertising online is an afterthought. “My budget is zero for it right now,” Ms. Eskamani said. “It just hasn’t been necessary.” One recent morning, Ms. Eskamani attended an hourlong phone conference with volunteers from...

(Reuters) - Four senior U.S. House Republicans sent letters on Monday to the chief executives of Apple Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc asking questions about location data and mobile phone privacy practices and the handling of customer data. The chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden, along with three other senior Republicans on the panel, wrote the companies “to probe the companies’ representation of third-party access to consumer data, and the collection and use of audio recording data as well as location information via iPhone and Android devices.” Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for...

Do you see my children even as the resistance builds against My Body and Bride, ( ( ((Truly My blood has already claimed victory)) ) ) for as you recognize the lies of the enemy and "declare" victory by My blood it is then My Holy Fire overtakes the enemies encampments and I turn their swords on the enemies of My Heart . So be at peace at you declare victory for I AM your Melchizedek and even now I bring to you the Bread and New Wine for The Battle is mine and not yours. Rejoice for it sends...

MOSCOW —  The Russian Internet company Yandex said Thursday that its public search engine has been turning up dozens of Google documents that appear meant for private use, suggesting there may have been a data breach. Yandex spokesman Ilya Grabovsky said that some Internet users contacted the company Wednesday to say that its public search engine was yielding what looked like personal Google files. Russian social media users started posting scores of such documents, including an internal memo from a Russian bank, press summaries and company business plans. Grabovsky said Yandex has alerted Google to the concerns. It was unclear...

Google has published a new blog post in response to a story from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that detailed how common it is for third-party app developers to be able to read and analyze the contents of a user’s Gmail message. While not offering any substantially new insights into the industry practice, now understood to be quite widespread, Google does outline measures a user and business organization using G Suite can do to protect their privacy and security. The company also reiterates its commitment to vetting those third-party apps and services that have access to sensitive Gmail data. “A...

This is a dilemma: the 4th of July, is on Wednesday, so which weekend is technically “4th of July weekend” this year?  I checked my State’s fireworks schedule to see if that would give me a clue but it looks like those communities that don’t actually shoot them off on the 4th are split between the weekend before and after. This leads me to conclude that Wednesday is the perfect day for the 4th as you can log a 9 day, two weekend holiday by spending only 4 days from your vacation bank. I haven’t worked (for compensation) for a...

"By writing black female protagonists into science fiction, and bringing her acute appraisal of real-world power structures to bear on the imaginary worlds she created, Butler became an early pillar of the subgenre and aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. (Kara Walker cites her as an inspiration; and, as Hilton Als has pointed out, Butler is the “dominant artistic force” in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade.”) In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Kellyanne Conway made a strong case for George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when she used the phrase “alternative facts” and sent the novel to...

No fewer than 60 organizations branded "hate groups" or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action. "We haven't filed anything against the SPLC, but I think a number of organizations have been considering filing lawsuits against the SPLC, because they have been doing to a lot of organizations exactly what they did...

Google made almost all its money from ads. It was a booming business — until it wasn’t. Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.The crumbling of Google’s cornerstone Search was Google’s only unambiguous win, as well as its primary source of revenue, so when Amazon rapidly surpassed Google as the top product search destination, Google’s foundations began to falter. As many noted at the time, the online advertising industry experienced a major shift from search to discovery in the mid-2010s.While Google protected its monopoly on the dying search advertising market, Facebook — Google’s biggest...

The court ruled in favour of Milorad "Michael" Trkulja in a judgment on Wednesday, supporting his claim that search engine results could indicate to an ordinary person he was "somehow associated with the Melbourne criminal underworld". Mr Trkulja, who was shot in the back in a Melbourne restaurant in 2004, successfully argued in the Victorian Supreme Court in 2012 that Google defamed him by publishing photos of him linked to hardened criminals of Melbourne's underworld. **** “It would be open to a jury to conclude that an ordinary reasonable person using the Google search engine would infer that the persons...

Tech giants Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter must not have received the memo, as all four companies have enlisted the SPLC to help determine what organizations are hate groups, as first pointed out by The Daily