Free Republic

The world’s first “smart gun” hit the market Thursday, complete with a life-saving fingerprint unlocking system that prevents “unauthorized” people such as kids and criminals from firing it. The cutting-edge 9mm handgun locks out everybody except the owner and users specifically approved by the owner — technology that could improve gun safety in America, according to reps from the gun-making firm Biofire. “Right now it seems like the entire country is always processing a new tragedy involving children and guns,” the Colorado-based firm’s CEO Kai Kloepfer told The Post. “We are offering a real solution, at a time when solutions...

In what appears to be a major breakthrough for law enforcement, and a possible privacy problem for Apple customers, a major U.S. government contractor claims to have found a way to unlock pretty much every iPhone on the market. Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department...

As of Saturday, your options for owning an unlocked phone become far more limited. You can ask your carrier to unlock it—and good luck with that—or you can pay a premium to manufacturers like Apple or Google for a new unlocked phone. You just can’t unlock your phone yourself—at least, not legally. That decision was made not by voters, the courts, or even Congress. It was made by one man, 83-year-old Congressional Librarian James Hadley Billington, who is responsible for interpreting the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Billington decided last October that unlocking your phone yourself is...