Long-time Slashdot reader hondo77 notes that Larry Wall has given his approval to the re-naming of Perl 6. In the "Path to Raku" pull request, Larry Wall indicated his approval, leaving this comment: I am in favor of this change, because it reflects an ancient wisdom: "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." "Perl 6 will become Raku, assuming the four people who haven't yet approved the pull request give their okay," reports the Register, adding that Perl 5 will then become simply Perl. Dozens of comments on that pull request have now already been marked as "outdated," and while a few contributors have made a point of abstaining from the approval process, reviewer Alex Daniel notes that "this pull request will be merged on October 14th if nobody in the list rejects it or requests more changes."

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Gunmen entered a mosque in northern Salmossi village and opened fire as worshippers were at prayer, say media reports.

Thousands of people carrying coffins and paper skeletons, march in central London to draw attention to climate crisis.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: At Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked 2019 in August and the Surface hardware event last week, Microsoft talked about Windows 10's Your Phone app getting a new "Calls" feature. Today, the company is letting Windows Insiders start testing an early preview of Android calling on Windows 10. Having given up on Windows Phone, Microsoft has increasingly poured more resources into Android as its mobile platform of choice. The company offers plenty of Android apps and features, including some that it can't match on Apple's more restricted iOS platform. Last week, Microsoft even unveiled the dual-screen Surface Neo Android phone, coming in holiday 2020. Your Phone is part of Microsoft's "Continue on PC" functionality, which lets you send a task from your Android or iOS device to Windows 10. The app's main purpose is to let you access your phone's content -- like text messages, photos, and notifications -- right on your PC. The feature first arrived with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in October 2017, and Microsoft has been broadening it ever since. Calling support means you no longer have to grab your Android phone to answer a call when you're at your computer. You can interact with the call using your PC's speakers, microphone, and screen.

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Announcement comes as indigenous leaders agreed to direct talks with Lenin Moreno, while chaos raged on Quito's streets.

New header graphic, autumn in the mountains. Previous was a scene from King Kong.

Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii. An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters. "This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]." Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results. Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files. The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out." Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.

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Semyon Kislin, friend of Trump's personal lawyer, tried to obtain millions of dollars stolen from the Ukrainian state.

"A user got his revenge on the ransomware gang who encrypted his files by hacking their server and releasing the decryption keys for all victims," writes ZDNet. ccnafr shared their report: One of the gang's victims was Tobias Frömel, a German software developer. Frömel was one of the victims who paid the ransom demand so he could regain access to his files. However, after paying the ransom, Frömel also analyzed the ransomware, gained insight into how Muhstik operated, and then retrieved the crooks' database from their server. "I know it was not legal from me," the researcher wrote in a text file he published online on Pastebin earlier Monday, containing 2,858 decryption keys. "I'm not the bad guy here," Frömel added. Besides releasing the decryption keys, the German developer also published a decrypter that all Muhstik victims can use to unlock their files. The decrypter is available on MEGA [VirusTotal scan], and usage instructions are avaiable on the Bleeping Computer forum. In the meantime, Frömel has been busy notifying Muhstik victims on Twitter about the decrypter's availability, advising users against paying the ransom.

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Political newcomers Kais Saied and Nabil Karoui offer vision of employment, education and improved infrastructure.

Here's the Yovanovich statement, not behind a paywall, free to download.

Turkish forces take control of Ras al-Ain, defence ministry says in claim rebutted by Kurdish forces.

Prime minister forms new commissions to investigate deaths of more than 100 people in recent anti-government protests.

"27 GNU project maintainers and developers have signed on to a joint statement asking for Richard Stallman to be removed from his leadership role at GNU," writes Slashdot reader twocows. The statement argues that "Stallman's behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: The empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to." The Register reports: The GNU maintainer memo follows a statement issued by the Free Software Foundation on Sunday. The FSF said that because Stallman founded the GNU Project and the FSF, and until recently had led both, the relationship between the two organizations remains in flux. "Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU, the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future," the FSF said. Matt Lee, a free and open-source software developer and one of the 18 [now 27] signatories of the joint statement, said that the two organizations have been intertwined for so long -- the FSF provides GNU with financial, technical, and promotional assistance -- that their relationship is confusing. "For example, the GNU GPL is published by the FSF, not GNU," Lee said. "Key infrastructure that GNU relies on is owned by the FSF, and used by GNU and non-GNU projects alike." ZDNet reports: Stallman's only comment on this situation so far has been: "As head of the GNU Project, I will be working with the FSF on how to structure the GNU Project's relationship with the FSF in the future." LWN.net notes that the next day Stallman issued an additional statement: As Chief GNUisance, I'd like to reassure the community that there won't be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies. I would like to make incremental changes in how some decisions are made, because I won't be here forever and we need to ready others to make GNU Project decisions when I can no longer do so. But these won't lead to unbounded or radical changes. But the Register notes that Stallman's personal web site has also changed the first headline across the top of its page. It used to promote the Free Software Foundation's giving guide, saying "If you participate in the commercial ritual of end-of-the-year presents, please avoid the digital products that would mistreat the people you give them to." It nows says: I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project. I do not intend to stop any time soon.

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"Activision Blizzard Inc., facing the threat of a boycott, reduced the punishment it meted out to a tournament player who voiced support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy demonstrators," reports Bloomberg: The company's Blizzard Entertainment division originally barred the player from events for a year and stripped him of some $10,000 in prize money. But it said at the end of the week that it would cut the ban to six months and pay his winnings. The reversal followed an uproar from customers and even U.S. lawmakers, who felt Blizzard was kowtowing to China by punishing the player. Some analysts worried the boycott might take a toll on a company that has already suffered recent upheaval... [C]ustomers and some Blizzard workers felt the reaction was too extreme. In the furor that ensued, several employees staged a protest at its offices in Irvine. They covered up a plaque that read "Every Voice Matters" and held up umbrellas -- a symbol of the Hong Kong protesters. "In hindsight, our process wasn't adequate, and we reacted too quickly," J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment, said in the statement. Still, he added that "if this had been the opposing viewpoint delivered in the same divisive and deliberate way, we would have felt and acted the same." Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares another update from Ars Technica: Additionally, the two Chinese broadcasters who interviewed (and possibly egged on) blitzchung during his shout of "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" had been fired; they too have had their punishment changed to a six-month suspension from their jobs as official Hearthstone esports "casters."

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