“Crew Dragon’s hatch is closed, securing @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug in the spacecraft ahead of liftoff,” SpaceX tweeted an hour ago.

Livestreaming of the launch has already begun, with liftoff scheduled in about 41 minutes.
GeekWire reports:

If liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurs today at 3:22 p.m. ET (12:22 p.m. PT), it’ll be a feat that America hasn’t been able to perform since NASA retired its space shuttles, nearly nine years ago. “We are going to launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared during a launch-eve briefing at the space center’s countdown clock.

But even Bridenstine acknowledged that’s not a sure bet for today. “Weather challenges remain with a 50% chance of cancellation,” he tweeted this morning. A drenching rainstorm swept over Florida’s Space Coast overnight, but the skies cleared up this morning… The launch can be scrubbed at any time, all the way down to the last second, if the weather doesn’t cooperate or if a technical glitch arises. If the gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon doesn’t lift off today, Sunday is an option. The chances of acceptable weather are expected to improve to 60%. The weather outlook is even better for a June 2 backup opportunity…

Hurley and Behnken, who are both experienced shuttle astronauts, are scheduled to rendezvous with the space station on Sunday and move in alongside its current occupants, NASA’s Chris Cassidy and Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin. NASA hasn’t yet decided how long the Dragon riders will spend in orbit. Their stay could be as short as six weeks, or as long as 16 weeks, depending on how the test mission proceeds. For the return trip, Hurley and Behnken will strap themselves back inside the Dragon and descend to an Atlantic splashdown.
This whole flight serves as an initial demonstration of the Crew Dragon’s capabilities with an actual crew aboard. If the mission is successful, yet another Crew Dragon will carry four different astronauts to the space station weeks after Hurley and Behnken return.
Reuters reporter Joey Roulette also spotted NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman by the side of the road as his fellow astronauts drove by. He was holding a sign that said “Take me with you.”
And GeekWire notes that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine sees this event as historic. “I really think, when we look into the future, we’re going to see these models of doing business with public-private partnerships apply not just to low Earth orbit… but we’re taking this model to the moon and even on to Mars.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Watch Live: SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts to ISS

Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google’s IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time.
But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%.

Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – IPv6 Adoption Hits 32%. Will Stats Show How Many Returned to the Office?

An anonymous reader quotes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a “failed hacking attempt” of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party. But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reveal that there was no such hacking attempt.

The evidence from the closed investigation indicates that Kemp’s office mistook planned security tests and a warning about potential election security holes for malicious hacking.

Kemp then wrongly accused his political opponents just before Election Day — a high-profile salvo that drew national media attention in one of the most closely watched races of 2018… The internet activity that Kemp’s staff described as hacking attempts were actually scans by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that the secretary of state’s office had agreed to, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Kemp’s chief information officer signed off on the DHS scans three months beforehand.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reports that the Democratic party’s only role was apparently forwarding an email about vulnerabilities to two cybersecurity professors at Georgia Tech, who then alerted authorities:

Richard Wright, a Georgia Tech graduate and Democratic voter who works for a software company…found that he could look up other voters’ information by modifying the web address on the site, a flaw confirmed by ProPublica and Georgia Public Broadcasting before it was fixed….An election security vendor for the state, Fortalice Solutions, later concluded, however, that there was no evidence that voter information had been accessed, manipulated or changed by bad actors…
While publicly denying Wright’s claims about vulnerabilities, behind the scenes, Kemp’s staff was working to correct them…. The secretary of state’s firewall hadn’t been set up to block access to the locations identified by Wright, according to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent’s report. Election officials then “set up safeguards to restrict access to the vulnerable areas” on the last two days before the 2018 general election… This type of weakness, called broken access control, is one of the 10 most critical web application security risks, according to the Open Web Application Security Project, an organization that works to improve software security.

In 2016 Kemp also accused the Department of Homeland Security of trying to breach his office’s firewall. But a later investigation revealed the activity Kemp cited “was the result of normal and automatic computer message exchanges,” apparently caused by someone cutting and pasting data into a Microsoft Excel document.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 2018 ‘Hacking Attempt’ Claimed By Georgia Was A Security Test They’d Requested Themselves