Trump Fires Election Security Director Who Corrected Voter Fraud Disinformation

phalse phace shares a report from NPR: Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security director who had spearheaded a campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud, has been fired, President Trump tweeted on Tuesday. Trump, in two misleading tweets about the security of the U.S. election, said Krebs’ termination was “effective immediately.” The CISA campaign, led by Krebs, was originally intended…

UK Agency Demands Company Stop Using Name Which Includes an HTML Closing Tag

A British software engineer came up with “a fun playful name” for his consulting business. He’d named it: “”> Unfortunately, this did not amuse the official registrar of companies in the United Kingdom (known as Companies House). The Guardian reports that the U.K. agency “has forced the company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security…

Why You Can’t Rely on Election Forecasts

Zeynep Tufekci, writing at The New York Times: There’s a strong case for ignoring the predictions. Why do we have models? Why can’t we just consider polling averages? Well, presidents are not elected by a national vote total but by the electoral votes of each state, so national polls do not give us the information we need. As two of the…

Russian Hackers Targeted California, Indiana Democratic Parties In Repeat of 2016 Attacks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The attempted intrusions, many of which were…

What To Do With Fall Leaves | 11 Smart Ways

Are you wondering what to do with fall leaves? Be glad as they are like free loads of treasure strewn all over your yard. Here are some things you can do with these organic gold. RELATED:  17 Fall Decorations To Dress Up Your Home For The Season 11 Clever Tips on What to Do With Fall…Continue Reading
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The cycle of close and far Martian oppositions

Like so much in the sky, very close approaches of Mars happen in cycles. Become a Mars guru, here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/close-and-far-martian-oppositions…

Satellite data helps climbers ascend Mt. Everest

Data from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite help climbers negotiate a treacherous glacier on the route to Mt. Everest’s summit. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/mt-everest-climbers-use-satellite-data-khumbu-icefall-copernicus-sentinel-2…

The launch and landing of China’s reusable spacecraft

Although few details are known, and no images have been released, the Chinese did apparently launch a reusable spacecraft on September 4, 2020. It appears to have deployed a satellite to orbit and then returned to Earth safely 2 days later. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/china-reusable-spacecraft-mission-sept-2020…

‘If Everyone Hates Object-Oriented Programming, Why Is It Still So Widely Spread?’

Object-oriented programming “has been wildly successful. But was the success just a coincidence?” asks Stack Overflow’s blog: Asking why so many widely-used languages are OOP might be mixing up cause and effect. Richard Feldman argues in his talk that it might just be coincidence. C++ was developed in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup, initially as a set of extensions to…

Repeating fast radio burst woke up again on schedule. Now what?

FRB 121102 is one of the few known repeating fast radio bursts, and astronomers are trying to use this new period of activity to understand it better. Some predict the current active phase should end sometime between August 31 and September 9. Will it? Source: https://earthsky.org/space/repeating-fast-radio-burst-frb-121102-wakes-up-chime…