Author: kenmay

Finally Calculated: All the Legal Positions In a 19×19 Game of Go

Reader John Tromp points to an explanation posted at GitHub of a computational challenge Tromp coordinated that makes a nice companion to the recent discovery of a 22 million-digit Mersenne prime. A distributed effort using pooled computers from two centers at Princeton, and more contributed from the HP Helion cloud, after “many hiccups and a few catastrophes” calculated the number of legal positions in a 19×19 game of Go. Simple as Go board layout is, the permutations allowed by the rules are anything but simple to calculate: “For running an L19 job, a beefy server with 15TB of fast scratch diskspace, 8 to 16 cores, and 192GB of RAM, is recommended. Expect a few months of running time.” More: Large numbers have a way of popping up in the game of Go. Few people believe that a tiny 2×2 Go board allows for more than a few hundred games. Yet 2×2 games number not in the hundreds, nor in the thousands, nor even in the millions. They number in the hundreds of billions! 386356909593 to be precise. Things only get crazier as you go up in boardsize. A lower bound of 10^10^48 on the number of 19×19 games, as proved in our paper, was recently improved to a googolplex. (For anyone who wants to double check his work, Tromp has posted as open source the software used.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Finally Calculated: All the Legal Positions In a 19×19 Game of Go

El Salvador Recommends All Women Refrain From Getting Pregnant Until 2018

On Thursday, the El Salvadorean government recommended that all women in the entire country refrain from getting pregnant for the next two years. The extreme recommendation was made in an attempt to prevent children from being born with brain damage due to the Zika virus. Read more…

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El Salvador Recommends All Women Refrain From Getting Pregnant Until 2018

Civil Construction Wipes Out Internet Connectivity Across Africa

An anonymous reader writes: Submarine cable operator Seacom has announced that civil construction activity was the cause of widespread outages which left large parts of Africa without internet connectivity yesterday. According to the firm, its Northern Trans-Egypt cable was damaged between Cairo and Alexandria, and the Southern Trans-Egypt route was also disrupted outside of Cairo. Adding to the interruption, Seacom’s backup route, the West Africa Cable System (WACS), was also down at the same time, leaving most African countries without connectivity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Civil Construction Wipes Out Internet Connectivity Across Africa

Symantec Disavows Business Partner Caught Running a Tech Support Scam

An anonymous reader writes: Malwarebytes has caught one of Symantec’s resellers running a tech support scam that was scaring users into thinking they were infected with malware and then graciously offering to sell Symantec’s security software at inflated rates. Malwarebytes played along with their scam and found out the company behind it was Silurian Tech Support, located somewhere in North India (surprised?).Symantec told El Reg that it terminated the reseller’s contract and will work with law enforcement to defend its brand and intellectual property. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Symantec Disavows Business Partner Caught Running a Tech Support Scam

After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

(credit: Andrew ) In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a “network investigative technique,” was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015. In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others. Motherboard’s Joseph Cox wrote on Twitter on Friday that he was able to find a document describing this infiltration as something called “Operation Pacifier” by using creative “Google-fu.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

(credit: AMX) A company that supplies audio-visual and building control equipment to the US Army, the White House, and other security-conscious organizations built a deliberately concealed backdoor into dozens of its products that could possibly be used to hack or spy on users, security researchers said. Members of Australia-based security firm SEC Consult said they discovered the backdoor after analyzing the AMX NX-1200 , a programmable device used to control AV and building systems. The researchers first became suspicious after encountering a function called “setUpSubtleUserAccount” that added an highly privileged account with a hard-coded password to the list of users authorized to log in. Unlike most other accounts, this one had the ability to capture data packets flowing between the device and the network it’s connected to. “Someone with knowledge of the backdoor could completely reconfigure and take over the device and due to the highest privileges also start sniffing attacks within the network segment,” SEC Consult researcher Johannes Greil told Ars. “We did not see any personal data on the device itself, besides other user accounts which could be cracked for further attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

7 Autonomous Vehicle Ideas That Need to Happen Now

Last week, President Obama announced plans to earmark a whopping $4 billion for autonomous vehicle research . These funds will be dispersed to pilot programs all over the country during the next decade—but where and how the money is spent will determine just how big a step forward Obama’s plan really is. Read more…

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7 Autonomous Vehicle Ideas That Need to Happen Now

iTunes-Remote Controls iTunes Directly from the Command Line

Mac: It’s no secret that a lot of people really don’t like iTunes, but that doesn’t mean that most of us have bothered to actually replace it. If you really just want a simple way to play some songs from your iTunes library, iTunes-Remote is a command line tool that’s simple to use. Read more…

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iTunes-Remote Controls iTunes Directly from the Command Line

Let’s Hope Valve’s Vive VR Is as Great as Its Setup Instructions

Unlike most of my colleagues, I haven’t had the chance to try HTC and Valve’s Vive Pre virtual reality headset. I hear it’s good , but it could be another overhyped disappointment like The Phantom Menace . Read more…

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Let’s Hope Valve’s Vive VR Is as Great as Its Setup Instructions