Free Republic

Facebook censors.... It’s not just conservative US websites that are being targeted and banned. The Voice of Europe, a European website against unlimited migration and Islamic radicalism, was banned and censored recently by Facebook.No conservative thought will be allowed.

The discovery was made by New York cybersecurity expert Kelly ShortridgeShe noticed the browser tool was scanning files in a folder on her Windows PCMs Shortridge shared her worries that it was gathering data on social media Google's head of security for Chrome responded that this is not the caseGoogle users are sharing their shock at discovering Chrome's built-in anti-virus tool is scanning private files on their computers.Chrome Cleanup Tool, a browser component added in 2014 to scan and remove malicious or resource heavy software, is behind the outcry.

LANGLEY, British Columbia (Reuters) - Layers of squirming black soldier fly larvae fill large aluminum bins stacked 10-high in a warehouse outside of Vancouver. They are feeding on stale bread, rotting mangoes, overripe cantaloupe and squishy zucchini. [snip] Enterra Feed, one of an emerging crop of insect growers, will process the bugs into protein-rich food for fish, poultry - even pets. After being fattened up, the fly larvae will be roasted, dried and bagged or pressed to extract oils, then milled into a brown powder that smells like roasted peanuts.

Microsoft may be moving to discontinue several first-party apps installed in Windows 10 that aren’t a major priority. Unnamed sources indicate that the company is now shifting internal developers away from the likes of Windows 10’s Stocks and Weather apps to focus on Microsoft Edge. Microsoft is also grabbing employees that previously worked on now-canceled Redstone 5 enhancements to provide them with positions on the Edge browser team. The news arrives after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella distributed an email to employees in March that outlined a restructuring within the company. Rajesh Jha now leads a new engineering team focused on...

Chipmaker AMD has released new microcode updates to mitigate the Spectre variant 2 side-channel attack, which Microsoft has supported with a Windows 10 patch for AMD systems. AMD's latest microcode update coincided with Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday fixes and comes just weeks after Intel wrapped up its Spectre 2 mitigations for all CPU families released over the past nine years. AMD's chief mitigation for its chips on Windows affected by variant 2 CPU indirect branch target injections is called 'indirect branch prediction barrier' (IBPB), which is only intended for cases when software switches from one user context to a context...

HAS the recent Facebook data scandal got you a little paranoid about sharing information on the internet? asks Jody Chudley, financial analyst for The Daily Edge, in Addison Wiggin's Daily Reckoning. I don't blame you. After all, Facebook has access to some of your most personal information. I'm talking about every message you've ever sent or been sent, every contact in your phone and even access to your computer's camera and microphones. Now would you like to get a lot more paranoid? Okay. Let me introduce you to a company called In-Q-Tel. This is a venture capital firm funded by...

Microsoft is releasing the source code for its original Windows File Manager from nearly 28 years ago. Originally released for Windows 3.0, the File Manager was a replacement for managing files through MS-DOS, and allowed Windows users to copy, move, delete, and search for files. While it’s a relic from the past, you can still compile the source code Microsoft has released and run the app on Windows 10 today.

Last week, Moor Insights & Strategy analysts Anshel Sag, Chris Wilder, Karl Freund and I attended NVIDIA GTC 2018, what I consider the industry leader’s premier GPU developer conference. If you’re unfamiliar with GTC, I wrote a preview here. As per usual with these events, the main keynote, given by CEO Jensen Huang, was the time to catch the biggest announcements coming out of the conference. More importantly, the event was also an opportunity to meet with NVIDIA developers, customers, press and senior leaders.

[Link skips 17 minutes of dead air and filler.] A few interesting points: The most vulnerable group of voters who are most easily swayed by Google's manipulation of search results are ... (drum roll) ... Moderate Republicans. There is considerable collusion between the federal government and big tech. The feds are, in effect, outsourcing surveillance to the private sector to get around the Fourth Amendment: "These companies are acting as proxy investigators; but there are no limits on them." Look up the definition of "Breitbart" on Google, and you get a Wikipedia hit piece. They're more powerful than the government...

What constitutes attractiveness? Apparently, not liberalism. Liberal men find themselves in a strange predicament: they’re less enticing to even the die-hard feminists they’re constantly trying to please. Science has a say on the issue. A study published earlier this year by political scientist Rolfe Daus Peterson found that conservatives of both genders are generally more attractive than their liberal counterparts. As expected, the left-leaning researchers concluded the politics stem from the looks: attractive people feel good about themselves and, as a result, are less inclined to social programs that help the needy. Despite the talk by p**sy hat-wearing women calling...

Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned a lot about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and how Facebook uses your data. The revelations have pushed many users—including some brands and celebrities—to leave the social network altogether. Rather than simply deleting your profile or profile information, however, some are advising a slightly different tactic to protect your online identity: tainting that data. Developer and former systems administrator Kevin Matthew published a script that goes back through your Facebook posts and edits them with randomly generated characters. Based on his knowledge as a systems administrator, Matthew explains that “even by conservative assumptions, your data...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to testify before Congress about the company’s privacy practices in coming weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter. This person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Zuckerberg is aware there is intense pressure on him to testify, this person said. Zuckerberg said last week in a CNN interview that he’d be “happy” to testify, but didn’t commit to appear. Facebook is facing unprecedented scrutiny following reports that a data mining firm used ill-gotten data from tens of millions of its users to try to influence...

Facebook has been scraping years worth of Android call and text data, according to a report. A company representative told Ars Technica that the practice is "widely used," but users are able to opt-out. Android cellphone users have noticed that Facebook has saved a virtual trove of their personal call data that extends back years, according to a report in Ars Technica. Amid an outcry over the social network's handling of a controversy involving a third-party application's misuse of personal data, the publication reported that several Android users who pulled down archive data from Facebook found very detailed personal metadata....

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and six UK papers today to apologize Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter. The ad starts in bold letters, saying: “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.” The ad was published on Sunday, following Zuck’s first public acknowledgement of the issue on Facebook and a subsequent media tour earlier this week. Congress has also put Mark Zuckerberg on notice to potentially come speak with them, with Senator...

~~ Before you deactivate or delete Facebook, you might want to consider downloading a copy of your Facebook data, just to make sure everything you’ve been posting on Facebook all these years isn’t lost — there’s a “Download a copy of your Facebook data” option right below “Manage Account” in the “Settings” menu. The first thing you’ll want to do is download your data from Facebook. Also, you should consider deactivating or deleting Facebook on a computer rather than on mobile phone, so you can grab your data beforehand. But make sure you remove your Facebook apps from smartphones and...

The Turkish government is preparing to block VPN traffic within to country, an official from Information and Communication Technologies Authority said. Speaking in front of a parliamentary commission, informatics expert Leven Gonenc said that Virtual Private Networks (VPN) are a global problem and currently they are on the test phase of blocking VPN traffic within the country. According to Gonenc, Turkey took serious measures against the VPNs, and targets to move forward phase to phase. Gonenc pointed out the complexity of the issue and said, “There is a provision in the law (of communication) about alternative communication methods like VPN....

The data firm used by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, is taking its turn in the eyes of many as the villain responsible for the apocalyptic outcome of the presidential election of 2016. Others, of course, have included Russia and the Electoral College system, but progressives are especially distressed about this one. That a crude and brutish outfit like the Trump campaign could use their data-mining tools and politically allied platforms like Facebook against them adds extra sting to the wound of the loss.

The billowing compute and data demands that spurred the oil and gas industry to be the largest commercial users of high-performance computing are now propelling the competitive sector to deploy the latest AI technologies. Beyond the requirement for accurate and speedy seismic and reservoir simulation, oil and gas operations face torrents of sensor, geolocation, weather, drilling and seismic data. Just the sensor data alone from one off-shore rig can accrue to hundreds of terabytes of data annually, but most of this remains unanalyzed, dark data. Why? Because there just isn't enough compute capacity to crunch it all. A collaboration between...

Upon review of a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and consideration, as appropriate, of the factors set forth in the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended, the President has made relevant findings and issued the following Order: ORDER REGARDING THE PROPOSED TAKEOVER OF QUALCOMM INCORPORATED BY BROADCOM LIMITED By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 721 of the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (section 721), 50 U.S.C. 4565, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1....

The not-so-secret secret. The U.S. military's incredibly advanced triangular shaped aircraft with anti-gravity and cloaking technology.