Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: A paper published on Arxiv last week reports on a project to redetermine the "orbits of long period comets... We recently attempted to check, whether the assumption of a parabolic orbit for hundreds of comets discovered after 1950 is fully justified in all cases." The full work by Królikowska & Dybczynski remains in preparation (which is perfectly normal), but this intriguing result deserved early attention. During this research we found an interesting case of the comet C/2014 W10 PANSTARRS. (that's the 10th reported comet in fortnight W of year 2014, source : the PANSTARRS team) After discovery on 2014-11-25, fourteen observations were made over three days, giving a first-estimate orbit with an eccentricity of 0.6039453. So far, so boring — as the temporary designation suggests, these get found on most days. But that orbit is subject to uncertainty so some more measurements were made on 2014-12-22 from a different observatory. When all of the data is considered, it becomes impossible to clearly assign an orbit to this object (this is possible if, for example, there is a fragmentation of the object between observations), but many of the solutions which can be obtained have a hyperbolic orbit — that is, the object is extra-solar. If correct, this "post-covery" would double the size of the catalogue of interstellar objects known. Unfortunately, the quality of the original data remains poor — estimates of the orbital eccentricity vary between 1.22 and 1.65 — which is in contrast to the prompt recognition and intense observation campaign for 'Oumuamua. The report's main conclusion is that Our main purpose is to show that similar cases should be treated in future with greater care by more reliable preliminary orbit determination and alerting observers about the importance of the object to initiate more follow-up observations. Which is exactly what happened with 'Oumuamua.

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UNP says it will mount legal challenge against the dissolution of parliament by President Maithripala Sirisena.

The 'swing state' will hold a machine recount of votes in its neck-and-neck races amid allegations of fraud.

A union of equals or Russian occupation? A personal journey exploring how decades of Soviet rule have shaped Georgia.

Political crisis deepens as President Maithripala Sirisena dissolves parliament and calls for snap elections.

"A Russian security researcher has published details about a zero-day vulnerability affecting VirtualBox, an Oracle software application for running virtual machines," reports ZDNet. According to a text file uploaded on GitHub, Saint Petersburg-based researcher Sergey Zelenyuk has found a chain of bugs that can allow malicious code to escape the VirtualBox virtual machine (the guest OS) and execute on the underlying (host) operating system. Once out of the VirtualBox VM, the malicious code runs in the OS' limited userspace (kernel ring 3), but Zelenyuk said that attackers can use many of the already known privilege escalation bugs to gain kernel-level access (ring 0). "The exploit is 100% reliable," Zelenyuk said. "It means it either works always or never because of mismatched binaries or other, more subtle reasons I didn't account." The Russian researcher says the zero-day affects all current VirtualBox releases, works regardless of the host or guest operating system the user is running, and is reliable against the default configuration of newly created VMs. Besides a detailed write-up of the entire exploit chain, Zelenyuk has also published video proof, showing the zero-day in action against an Ubuntu VM running inside VirtualBox on an Ubuntu host OS. Long-time Slashdot reader Artem Tashkinov warns that the exploit utilizes "bugs in the data link layer of the default E1000 network interface adapter which makes this vulnerability critical for everyone who uses virtualization to run untrusted code." According to ZDNet, the same security researcher "found and reported a similar issue in mid-2017, which Oracle took over 15 months to fix." "This lengthy and drawn-out patching process appears to have angered Zelenyuk, who instead of reporting this bug to Oracle, has decided to publish details online without notifying the vendor."

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Protesters express opposition to Italy's government, call for withdrawal of bill making it easier to expel migrants.

AmiMoJo writes: Apple's new-generation Macs come with a new so-called Apple T2 security chip that's supposed to provide a secure enclave co-processor responsible for powering a series of security features, including Touch ID. At the same time, this security chip enables the secure boot feature on Apple's computers, and by the looks of things, it's also responsible for a series of new restrictions that Linux users aren't going to like. The issue seems to be that Apple has included security certificates for its own and Microsoft's operating systems (to allow running Windows via Bootcamp), but not for the certificate that was provided for systems such as Linux. Disabling Secure Boot can overcome this, but also disables access to the machine's internal storage, making installation of Linux impossible.

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French and US leaders hold 'very constructive' meeting, official says, after a spat over remarks on EU security.

Slashdot reader pgmrdlm quotes Science Daily: Timely diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is extremely important, as treatments and interventions are more effective early in the course of the disease. However, early diagnosis has proven to be challenging. Research has linked the disease process to changes in metabolism, as shown by glucose uptake in certain regions of the brain, but these changes can be difficult to recognize... Researchers trained [a] deep learning algorithm on a special imaging technology known as 18-F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET). In an FDG-PET scan, FDG, a radioactive glucose compound, is injected into the blood. PET scans can then measure the uptake of FDG in brain cells, an indicator of metabolic activity. The researchers had access to data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a major multi-site study focused on clinical trials to improve prevention and treatment of this disease. The ADNI dataset included more than 2,100 FDG-PET brain images from 1,002 patients. Researchers trained the deep learning algorithm on 90 percent of the dataset and then tested it on the remaining 10 percent of the dataset. Through deep learning, the algorithm was able to teach itself metabolic patterns that corresponded to Alzheimer's disease. Finally, the researchers tested the algorithm on an independent set of 40 imaging exams from 40 patients that it had never studied. The algorithm achieved 100 percent sensitivity at detecting the disease an average of more than six years prior to the final diagnosis. "We were very pleased with the algorithm's performance," Dr. Sohn said. "It was able to predict every single case that advanced to Alzheimer's disease

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Announcement comes amid warnings situation may worsen due to armed group attacks and community resistance.

"Think your vintage computer hardware is old?" writes long-time Slashdot reader corrosive_nf. "Ken Shirriff, Robert Garne, and their associates probably have you beat. "The IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959, and these guys are keeping one alive in a computer museum... [T]he volunteers have to go digging through historical archives and do some detective work to figure out solutions to pretty much anything!" Many things that we take for granted are done very differently in old computers. For instance, the IBM 1401 uses 6-bit characters, not bytes. It used decimal memory addressing, not binary. It's also interesting how much people could accomplish with limited resources, running a Fortran compiler on the 1401 with just 8K of memory. Finally, working on the 1401 has given them a deeper understanding of how computers really work. It's not a black box; you can see the individual transistors that are performing operations and each ferrite core that stores a bit. "It's a way of keeping history alive," says one of the volunteers at Silicon Valley's Computer History museum. "For museum visitors, seeing the IBM 1401 in operation gives them a feeling for what computers were like in the 1960s, the full experience of punching data onto cards and then seeing and hearing the system processing cards.... "So far, things are breaking slowly enough that we can keep up, so it's more of a challenge than an annoyance."

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Super important point: The 2018 election isn't over. At stake, governorships of Florida and Georgia. Senator from Florida. Stacey Abrams is leading the fight. She is so strong and determined. If she wins, we will win, hugely. Give her money now.

Juan Emilio Cheyre is the most senior figure to be held accountable for abuses committed under Pinochet.

"We recently published a number of updates to our licensing materials," the Free Software Foundation announced Thursday, adding that "While we generally post individual announcements for these types of important changes, there were so many in such a short span that we needed to combine them all in one place." We added the Commons Clause to our list of nonfree licenses. Not a stand-alone license in and of itself, it is meant to be added to an existing free license to prevent using the work commercially, rendering the work nonfree. It's particularly nasty given that the name, and the fact that it is attached to pre-existing free licenses, may make it seem as if the work is still free software. If a previously existing project that was under a free license adds the Commons Clause, users should work to fork that program and continue using it under the free license. If it isn't worth forking, users should simply avoid the package. We are glad to see that in the case of Redis modules using the Commons Clause, people are stepping up to maintain free versions. There's also a new addition to their GNU Licenses FAQ which explains what the GNU GPL says about translating code into another programming language. ("If the original program carries a free license, that license gives permission to translate it. How you can use and license the translated program is determined by that license. If the original program is licensed under certain versions of the GNU GPL, the translated program must be covered by the same versions of the GNU GPL...") And they've also clarified how to handle projects that combine code under multiple compatible licenses. The FSF has also updated a document commenting on various licenses, clarifying that the Fraunhofer FDK AAC free software license "is incompatible with any version of the GNU GPL. It has a special danger in the form of a term expressly stating it does not grant you any patent licenses, with an enticement to buy some. "Because of this, and because the license author is a known patent aggressor, we encourage you to be careful about using or redistributing any software under this license..."

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