Can you imagine a bunch of rude skanky schmucks with with big guns showing up at the Michigan state capitol, and they're allowed to menace everyone, and no cops show up with tear gas, no vigilantes protect property. Now imagine if they were black instead of white.

By now we should all know when the Repubs say anything it's meaningless. So... When Susan Collins says oh my this should be done by a new president, then she'll disagree when McC goes ahead, and she'll vote to confirm, saying how disappointed she is.

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads... Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu.... As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Earlier this week, scientists announced the discovery of phosphine on Venus, a potential signature of life. Now, in an amazing coincidence, a European and Japanese spacecraft is about to fly past the planet — and could confirm the discovery," writes Forbes. Slashdot reader Iwastheone shares their report: BepiColombo, launched in 2018, is on its way to enter orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System. But to achieve that it plans to use two flybys of Venus to slow itself down, one on October 15, 2020, and another on August 10, 2021. The teams running the spacecraft already had plans to observe Venus during the flyby. But now, based on this detection of phosphine from telescopes on Earth, they are now planning to use both of these flybys to look for phosphine using an instrument on the spacecraft... As this first flyby is only weeks away, however, the observation campaign of the spacecraft is already set in stone, making the chance of a discovery slim. More promising is the second flyby next year, which will not only give the team more time to prepare, but also approach just 550 kilometers from Venus... If a detection can be made, it would provide independent verification of the presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. And for future missions planning to visit the planet, which alongside Rocket Lab's mission includes potential spacecraft from NASA, India, Russia, and Europe, that could be vital information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws. The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects. This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project. CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Popular Mechanics reports: A U.S. Air Force aircraft electronically impersonated a Malaysian plane while flying over the South China Sea this week. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft flew off China's Hainan island on Tuesday, coming within 55 miles of the Chinese mainland. The caper was outed on Twitter by a think tank operated by the Chinese government, which provided enough details for independent verification. The plane's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Mode-S number, a 24-bit identifier assigned to all aircraft and broadcast by onboard transponder, was AE01CE. The Mode S system provides big-picture situational awareness and improves aviation safety. At some point, the plane's Mode-S number suddenly changed, from AE01CE to 750548. That's the ICAO number for an unknown Malaysian aircraft... The RC-135W Rivet Joint is a converted Boeing 707 jetliner designed to collect electronic intelligence for later analysis... It's not clear why the RC-135W flew where it did. The flight probably coincided with Chinese military exercises, likely air or naval, or even a missile test. It's also worth pointing out that China's nuclear ballistic missile submarine force is based at Yulin on Hainan Island. It's also not clear why the RC-135W engaged in the deception. Steffan Watkins, a Canadian open source intelligence researcher, tells Popular Mechanics. "If the reconnaissance is happening outside sovereign airspace, there is no pressing need to engage in that sort of deception. It's perfectly legal, and done in plain sight off the coast of Russia, Syria, and Crimea all the time — literally, every day there are RC-135s off the coast of Russia, with their transponders on, and broadcasting exactly who they are. I can't explain the difference with China. Why the difference in emissions posture and obfuscation....?" The announcement is likely a warning to the Pentagon that the Chinese military sees through the deception, and that it's watching the watchers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn," writes BBS history blogger Josh Renaud. "You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: 'Thou seest rippling waters...'" He's describing the beginning of a 27-year-old game that he'd been searching for since 2013. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 why the game is so special — and so rare: Thieves' Guild is a BBS door game for the Atari ST that came out in 1993. [A "door" connected the software running the dial-up Bulletin Board system to an external application.] What made Thieves' Guild unique was its graphical front-end client, which features dozens of eye-popping pixel art vignettes, along with simple animated sprites, sampled speech, and sound effects. As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering. The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms." The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It just hit me that a lot of things are piling up on us. Like overdue bills we received the final notices years ago, we didn't pay up and now they've all come due at the same time.

Here's the list.

• Authoritarianism. When Senate didn't remove Trump after impeachment that was the end of the American system of checks and balances.
• Pandemic. We dismantled the govt units we set up to deal with it. We taught the world how to deal with this crisis, but we ourselves lost our way.
• Climate. Fires in California and Australia, hurricanes worse every year.
• Economy. Small business and individuals in deep trouble.
• Education and health care. How can they survive pandemic?

If Trump is in power after the election, then you can add another.

• Looting of US complete.

Some of these mainly apply to the US, although the country is so central to the world economy and culture, it's hard to imagine the lines don't get crossed elsewhere, eventually. We're being dragged down the same hole as Russia and China, for example. How can Germany, France, etc avoid it. The UK is in the toilet with us.

Navalny poisoning is a warning to American politicians.

"Russia has announced an intention to independently explore Venus a day after scientists said there was a gas that could be present in the planet's clouds due to single-cell microbes," reports Euronews: The head of Russia's space corporation Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, told reporters that they would initiate a national project as "we believe that Venus is a Russian planet," according to the TASS news agency. In a statement, Roscosmos noted that the first missions to explore Venus were carried out by the Soviet Union. "The enormous gap between the Soviet Union and its competitors in the investigation of Venus contributed to the fact that the United States called Venus a Soviet planet," Roscosmos said. The Russians claim to have extensive material that suggests that some objects on the Venusian surface have changed places or could be alive, although these are hypotheses that have yet to be confirmed. The national project would be in addition to the "Venera-D" project that the Russians are working on with the US' National Aeronautics and Space Administration... Roscosmos said they would study the soil and atmosphere of the planet as well as the "evolutionary processes of Venus, which allegedly suffered a climatic catastrophe associated with the greenhouse effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Microsoft has finally published a support document detailing its workaround for the August 2020 Patch Tuesday update for Windows 10 version 2004 that caused blue screens of deaths (BSODs) on newer Lenovo ThinkPads and broke Windows Hello biometric login... It's the same as Lenovo's earlier workaround but comes with a stern security warning from Microsoft. Microsoft also explains how Lenovo Vantage violates Microsoft's security controls in Windows. Users might bypass the BSOD screen, but they are endangering their computers by implementing the workaround, according to Microsoft. The workaround also affects some of Microsoft's latest security features for Windows 10, such as Hypervisor Code Integrity for shielding the OS from malicious drivers, as well as Windows Defender Credential Guard. "This workaround may make a computer or a network more vulnerable to attack by malicious users or by malicious software such as viruses. We do not recommend this workaround but are providing this information so that you can implement this workaround at your own discretion. Use this workaround at your own risk," Microsoft states.... The good news for affected ThinkPad users is that Microsoft and Lenovo are working together on a fix. However, Microsoft hasn't said when that will be available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CBS News reports: Six people allegedly conspired to bribe Amazon employees and contractors in order to gain a competitive advantage on the retailer's marketplace, federal prosecutors announced Friday. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, those charged posed as consultants and worked with third-party sellers whose products had previously been removed from Amazon Marketplace get the items back on the platform. The six then paid a total of more than $100,000 in bribes to least 10 Amazon employees in exchange for their restoring the banned products or services, the indictment alleges. The products included household goods, consumer electronics and dietary supplements, prosecutors said. "The ultimate victim from this criminal conduct is the buying public, who get inferior or even dangerous goods that should have been removed from the marketplace," U.S. Attorney Brian Moran said in a statement. "As the world moves increasingly to online commerce, we must ensure that the marketplace is not corrupted with unfair advantages obtained by bribes and kickbacks...." The six accused face up to five years in prison for commercial bribery and up to 20 years for wire fraud. One of the six actually worked for Amazon at the beginning of the scheme, according to the article, which notes that their tactics included temporarily suspending the accounts of competitors. One FBI agent in Seattle tells CBS, "What's equally concerning is that, not only did they attempt to increase sales of their own products, but they sought to damage and discredit their competitors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why the Lincoln Project is in a bind. As Repubs, they want to own the Court for the indefinite future, and here's their chance. Now the work they're doing to elect Biden is against to their own interests. It's time for them to decide whether they really think we're going authoritarian, i.e. if the Supreme Court still matters if DJT wins. This may be nothing more than an election issue, only of symbolic value, if Trump has no intention of listening to the Court in the future, assuming he wins. The Lincolns seemed to be damned if they damned if they don't in this situation.

New header image, the Supreme Court last night, people gathered there to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died yesterday.

Braintrust query: I am running the OPML Editor, which is a distribution of Frontier, on a Mac running MacOS 10.13.6. Works fine. I'm afraid to update this computer, because I don't know what Apple is going to do to it. I use Frontier to write my JavaScript code, and also to keep around as an archive for about 20 years of work, that's still unmatched elsewhere. I don't want to lose my ability to run Frontier. Anyway I had a thought. Why not run Frontier inside VMWare, using 10.13.6, and then I could run it on any Mac. I think this would work and I could stop worrying about Apple breaking my work environment.