SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida this afternoon and, while the rocket successfully delivered the Koreasat-5A to its designated orbit, it managed to catch fire after landing on one of SpaceX’s autonomous barges. The Verge reports: That rocket’s mission [was] to send a satellite known as Koreasat-5A into space, where it will hang above Earth for 15 years while providing communications bandwidth for Korea and Southern Asia. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered Koreasat-5A to its designated orbit, marking the the company’s 16th successful mission of the year — twice the number of successful missions in 2016. Shortly after liftoff, the first stage of the rocket returned to Earth and landed (flamboyantly) in the Atlantic Ocean on one of SpaceX’s autonomous barges. (The fires eventually went out.) It was the 13th successful landing of a Falcon 9 rocket this year, the 15th in a row, and the 19th overall.

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Source: Slashdot – SpaceX Lands the 13th Falcon 9 Rocket of the Year In Flames

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: More than 99 percent of voter fraud identified by a GOP-backed program is false, a study by Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft researchers found. Now Indiana is using the faulty program to de-register voters without warning. In July, Indiana rolled out a new law allowing county officials to purge voter registrations on the spot, based on information from a dubious database aimed at preventing voter fraud. That database, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, identifies people in different states who share the same name and birthdate. Crosscheck has long been criticized as using vague criteria that disproportionately target people of color. Now Indiana voters who share a name and birthdate with another American can have their registrations removed without warning — a system ripe for abuse, a new lawsuit claims. Crosscheck’s premise is simple. The program aims to crack down on people “double voting” in multiple states, by listing people who share a first name, last name, and birthdate.

Indiana has used Crosscheck for years. But until July, the state had a series of checks on the program. If Crosscheck found that an Indiana resident’s name and birthdate matched that of a person in another state, Indiana law used to require officials to ask that person to confirm their address, or wait until that person went two general election cycles without voting, before the person’s name was purged from Indiana voter rolls. Under the state’s new law, officials can scrub a voter from the rolls immediately. That’s a problem for Indiana residents, particularly people of color, a Friday lawsuit from Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union argues.

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Source: Slashdot – Indiana Is Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99 Percent Inaccurate, Lawsuit Alleges