A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for "incitement of insurrection." The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president's party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors for an unprecedented second time. Reconvening under the threat of continued violence and the protection of thousands of National Guard troops, the House was determined to hold Mr. Trump to account just one week before he was to leave office. At issue was his role in encouraging a mob that attacked the Capitol one week ago while Congress met to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory, forcing lawmakers to flee for their lives in a deadly rampage. The House put forward and was on the brink of adopting a single article of impeachment, charging Mr. Trump with "inciting violence against the government of the United States" and requesting his immediate removal from office and disqualification from ever holding one again. [...] The vote, which was still underway, set the stage for the second Senate trial of Mr. Trump in a year, though senators appeared unlikely to convene to sit in judgment before Jan. 20, when Mr. Biden will take the oath of office. The last proceeding, over Mr. Trump's attempts to pressure Ukraine to smear Mr. Biden, was a partisan affair. [...] This time, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, was said to support the effort as a means of purging his party of Mr. Trump, setting up a political and constitutional showdown that could shape the course of American politics when the nation remains dangerously divided. [McConnell said he would not agree to use emergency powers to bring the Senate back into session for a trial before Jan. 19.] The House's vote was historic. Only two other presidents have been impeached; none has been impeached twice, by such a large bipartisan margin, or so close to leaving office.

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British spacecraft could travel to Mars in half the time it now takes by using nuclear propulsion engines built by Rolls-Royce under a new deal with the UK Space Agency. From a report: The aerospace company hopes nuclear-powered engines could help astronauts make it to Mars in three to four months, twice as fast as the most powerful chemical engines, and unlock deeper space exploration in the decades to come. The partnership between Rolls-Royce and the UK Space Agency will bring together planetary scientists to explore how nuclear energy could be used to "revolutionise space travel," according to the government. Dr Graham Turnock, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said using nuclear power in space was "a gamechanging concept that could unlock future deep-space missions that take us to Mars and beyond."

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New submitter shoor writes: Seeed Studios -- the makers of the Odyssey mini-PC -- have teamed up with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux. The new BeagleV (pronounced "Beagle Five") system features a dual-core, 1GHz RISC-V CPU made by StarFive -- one of a network of RISC-V startups created by better-known RISC-V vendor SiFive. The CPU is based on two of SiFive's U74 Standard Cores -- and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it features a MMU and all the other trimmings necessary to run full-fledged modern operating systems such as Linux distributions. StarFive's VIC7100 processor design is aimed at edge AI tasks as well as general-purpose computing. In addition to the two RISC-V CPU cores, it features a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine-vision applications, a Neural Network Engine, and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator) engine.

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Ubisoft said it will develop a new Star Wars game, indicating a longtime exclusivity agreement for Electronic Arts on the Walt Disney franchise will come to an end. From a report: The new Star Wars title is set to be the first not published by EA since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. The news sent shares of the two game companies diverging Wednesday. Ubisoft climbed more than 7%, and EA fell as much 3.2%. The agreement with EA is scheduled to expire in 2023. In an emailed statement, EA said: "We're proud of our long-standing collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, which will continue for years to come." Lucasfilm said in a blog post Wednesday morning that it had "a number of projects underway" with EA. Ubisoft said only that its game will be set in an open-world environment and will developed by the company's Massive Entertainment team in Sweden, best known for a series of shooting games called Tom Clancy's The Division. The group is also working on a game based on James Cameron's "Avatar" movies.

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Airbnb said Wednesday it is canceling existing reservations and blocking new ones in the Washington, D.C., area during inauguration week as federal officials remain on alert for potential violence. Axios reports: Airbnb says the move is in response to requests from local, state and federal officials asking people not to travel to D.C. for President-elect Biden's inauguration. Guests whose reservations are canceled will receive refunds and Airbnb says it will reimburse hosts' lost earnings. "We are aware of reports emerging yesterday afternoon regarding armed militias and known hate groups that are attempting to travel and disrupt the Inauguration," the company said in its announcement. Airbnb also said it has banned from its platform numerous individuals it has learned that are "either associated with known hate groups or otherwise involved in the criminal activity at the Capitol Building."

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Why banking interfaces suck. Confusion makes them money with overdraft fees, etc. Hadn't thought of that.

Apple on Wednesday said it was putting $60 million into a fresh round of projects aimed at challenging systemic racism, including its first foray into venture capital funding to back entrepreneurs of color. From a report: Apple said it would invest $10 million in a fund with Harlem Capital, a New York-based early-stage venture firm, with the goal of helping fund 1,000 companies over 20 years. Apple will invest $25 million in Siebert Williams Shank's Clear Vision Impact Fund, which provides financing to small- and mid-sized businesses, with an emphasis on minority-owned firms. Apple will become a limited partner in funds at both.

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Dropbox is cutting its global workforce by about 11%, the company said in an 8K filing released Wednesday. From a report: The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day. "The steps we're taking today are painful, but necessary," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in an employee memo Wednesday. Dropbox committed to preserve job security through 2020, but Houston said that looking ahead to this year "it's clear that we need to make changes in order to create a healthy and thriving business for the future." The company said the job cuts will help it focus on its top priorities for the year, which include evolving the core Dropbox experience, investing in new products and driving operational excellence.

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Jake Edge, writing at LWN: The problems with "vendoring" in packages -- bundling dependencies rather than getting them from other packages -- seems to crop up frequently these days. We looked at Debian's concerns about packaging Kubernetes and its myriad of Go dependencies back in October. A more recent discussion in that distribution's community looks at another famously dependency-heavy ecosystem: JavaScript libraries from the npm repository. Even C-based ecosystems are not immune to the problem, as we saw with iproute2 and libbpf back in November; the discussion of vendoring seems likely to recur over the coming years. Many application projects, particularly those written in languages like JavaScript, PHP, and Go, tend to have a rather large pile of dependencies. These projects typically simply download specific versions of the needed dependencies at build time. This works well for fast-moving projects using collections of fast-moving libraries and frameworks, but it works rather less well for traditional Linux distributions. So distribution projects have been trying to figure out how best to incorporate these types of applications. This time around, Raphael Hertzog raised the issue with regard to the Greenbone Security Assistant (gsa), which provides a web front-end to the OpenVAS vulnerability scanner (which is now known as Greenbone Vulnerability Management or gvm). "the version currently in Debian no longer works with the latest gvm so we have to update it to the latest upstream release... but the latest upstream release has significant changes, in particular it now relies on yarn or npm from the node ecosystem to download all the node modules that it needs (and there are many of them, and there's no way that we will package them individually). The Debian policy forbids download during the build so we can't run the upstream build system as is." Hertzog suggested three possible solutions: collecting all of the dependencies into the Debian source package (though there would be problems creating the copyright file), moving the package to the contrib repository and adding a post-install step to download the dependencies, or removing gsa from Debian entirely. He is working on updating gsa as part of his work on Kali Linux, which is a Debian derivative that is focused on penetration testing and security auditing. Kali Linux does not have the same restrictions on downloading during builds that Debian has, so the Kali gsa package can simply use the upstream build process. He would prefer to keep gsa in Debian, "but there's only so much busy-work that I'm willing to do to achieve this goal". He wondered if it made more sense for Debian to consider relaxing its requirements. But Jonas Smedegaard offered another possible approach: analyzing what packages are needed by gsa and then either using existing Debian packages for those dependencies or creating new ones for those that are not available. Hertzog was convinced that wouldn't be done, but Smedegaard said that the JavaScript team is already working on that process for multiple projects.

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So many people like to be stimulated by their own rage, they look for triggers. They may say they're tired of it, but if they really were, they could block the trolls.

Brian Acton is crossing paths again with Facebook. From a report: Over more than a decade of building and operating WhatsApp, the company's co-founder first competed against and then sold his instant messaging app to the social juggernaut. Only a few years ago he parted ways with the company that made him a billionaire in a bitter split over messaging and privacy. Now Acton says the ongoing outrage over what Facebook has done to the messaging service he helped build is driving people to his latest project -- Signal. Acton, who serves as the executive chairman of the privacy-conscious messaging app's holding company, told TechCrunch in an interview that the user base of Signal has "exploded" in recent weeks. "The smallest of events helped trigger the largest of outcomes," said Acton on a video call. "We're also excited that we are having conversations about online privacy and digital safety and people are turning to Signal as the answer to those questions." "It's a great opportunity for Signal to shine and to give people a choice and alternative. It was a slow burn for three years and then a huge explosion. Now the rocket is going," he said. The event Acton is referring to is the recent change in data-sharing policy disclosed by WhatsApp, an app that serves more than 2 billion users worldwide. Poll: Which Messaging App Do You Prefer To Use?

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An anonymous reader shares a report: While we might think of space as a vast sea of blackness, all we have to do is look up at night to see that it's punctuated by countless stars, galaxies and even a few planets visible to the naked eye. Scientists recently used data from NASA's New Horizons mission out beyond Pluto to measure just how dark the cosmic background really is. What they found has implications for what we thought we knew about the makeup of the entire universe. In short, space is so dark there can't be as many galaxies out there, adding their faint glow to the backdrop, as astronomers have previously estimated. "It's an important number to know -- how many galaxies are there?" Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement Tuesday. "We simply don't see the light from 2 trillion galaxies." That was the earlier estimate derived from Hubble Space Telescope observations, but a new study forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal and co-authored by Postman suggests the total number of galaxies in the universe is probably in the hundreds of billions rather than the trillions. Interestingly, this is closer to an even earlier figure guessing there were around 200 billion galaxies. That was based on Hubble data from the 1990s.

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What's wrong with the Repubs. Trump ordered an attack on them. They came pretty close to killing all of them. Maybe they're robots.

Visa will no longer be buying fintech upstart Plaid, as the companies on Tuesday announced the "mutual termination" of the $5.3 billion agreement that was signed one year ago and opposed by U.S. antitrust regulators. From a report: This is more about the rising value of fintech companies than it is about the U.S. Justice Department. It also turns Plaid into a very appealing target for growth equity investors, IPO bankers and SPAC sponsors. DOJ sued to block the deal in November, claiming it would eliminate Plaid's future ability to compete in the online debit market, thus giving Visa a monopoly. Visa said it would vigorously defend itself, in part because Plaid has no online debit products nor any in the pipeline. Visa also sought an expedited process to begin in the spring, whereas DOJ sought a December trial. The two sides met just before the holidays, but I'm told that DOJ would only agree to split the difference.

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Suppose for the sake of argument that the election was rigged, a conspiracy between state governments, including Republican state governments and journalism -- do you think their coverup could be so complete we'd never have hard proof off this conspiracy? Hard to imagine intelligent people believing that it could. And BTW, don't think they're not intelligent. There were a lot of very educated and successful people who attacked the Capitol last week. What's going on inside these people? Not asking a question of people who read this blog, just expressing bewilderment. At what point will their gullibility lose out to their experience and bullshit detection?