Tag: jobs

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

Caltech Astronomers Say a Ninth Planet Lurks Beyond Pluto

sciencehabit writes: The solar system may have a new ninth planet. Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune — but as yet unseen — orbits the sun every 15, 000 years. During the solar system’s infancy 4.5 billion years ago, they say, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today. Here’s a link to the full academic paper published in The Astronomical Journal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Caltech Astronomers Say a Ninth Planet Lurks Beyond Pluto

Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD’s Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GPUs to tout an impressive 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but it’s also just the first iteration of the new memory technology. Samsung has just announced that it has begun mass production of HBM2. Samsung’s 4GB HBM2 package is built on a 20 nanometer process. Each package contains four 8-gigabit core dies built on top of a buffer die. Each 4GB HMB2 package is capable of delivering 256GB/sec of bandwidth, which is twice that of first generation HBM DRAM. In the example of NVIDIA’s next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package). Samsung is also reportedly readying 8GB HBM2 memory packages this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

New Linux Trojan Can Spy on Users by Taking Screenshots and Recording Audio

An anonymous reader writes: Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker, has detected a new threat against Linux users: the Linux.Ekoms.1 trojan. It includes functionality that allows it to take screenshots and record audio. While the screenshot activity is working just fine, Dr.Web says the trojan’s audio recording feature has not been turned on, despite being included in the malware’s source code. “All information transmitted between the server and Linux.Ekoms.1 is encrypted. The encryption is initially performed using the public key; and the decryption is executed by implementing the RSA_public_decrypt function to the received data. The Trojan exchanges data with the server using AbNetworkMessage.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Linux Trojan Can Spy on Users by Taking Screenshots and Recording Audio

Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched

msm1267 writes: A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, the company added. An attacker would require local access to exploit the vulnerability on a Linux server. A malicious mobile app would get the job done on an Android device. The vulnerability is a reference leak that lives in the keyring facility built into the various flavors of Linux. The keyring encrypts and stores login information, encryption keys and certificates, and makes them available to applications. Here’s Perception Point’s explanation of the problem. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched

LastPass Vulnerable To Extremely Simple Phishing Attack

An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Sean Cassidy has developed a fairly trivial attack on the LastPass password management service that allows attackers an easy method for collecting the victim’s master password. He developed a tool called LostPass that automates phishing attacks against LastPass, and even allows attackers to collect password vaults from the LastPass API. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LastPass Vulnerable To Extremely Simple Phishing Attack

Much more than Mario Kart: The history of kart racers

No video game genre divides and unifies us like the kart racer. For every Mario Kart there are a dozen by-the-numbers cash-ins, and even that hallowed series receives regular criticism as too derivative. But while we all breathe a collective sigh of disappointment with each kid-friendly license that predictably goes the generic kart-racing route, it’s hard not to get excited by that rare entry that feels fresh and new. A great kart racer is a joyous thing. It’s accessible yet deep, fun yet primed for oh-so-serious competition between friends, and full of colorful, wacky charm. It is a game for everyone. So in keeping with the spirit of the genre—and as the latest edition in our gaming genre history series that includes  city builders , graphic adventures , and simulation games —it’s time to ride through the ups and downs of kart racing. (Before we start, a quick note: I’ve omitted go-kart racing sims such as Open Kart and Michael Schumacher Racing World Kart because they are essentially conventional racing games and not what we normally think of as kart racers.) Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Much more than Mario Kart: The history of kart racers

"DDoS-For-Bitcoin" Blackmailers Arrested

An anonymous reader writes: The DDoSing outfit that spawned the trend of “DDoS-for-Bitcoin” has been arrested by Europol in Bosnia Herzegovina last month. DD4BC first appeared in September 2015, when Akamai blew the lid on their activities. Since then almost any script kiddie that can launch DDoS attacks has followed their business model by blackmailing companies for Bitcoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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"DDoS-For-Bitcoin" Blackmailers Arrested

Graphene Flakes Facilitate Neuromorphic Chips

An anonymous reader writes: One of the hot areas of semiconductor research right now is the creation of so-called neuromorphic chips — processors whose transistors are networked in such a way to imitate how neurons interact. “One way of building such transistors is to construct them of lasers that rely on an encoding approach called “spiking.” Depending on the input, the laser will either provide a brief spike in its output of photons or not respond at all. Instead of using the on or off state of the transistor to represent the 1s and 0s of digital data, these neural transistors rely on the time intervals between spikes.” Now, research published in Nature Scientific Reports has shown how to stabilize these laser spikes, so that they’re responsive at picosecond intervals. “The team achieved this by placing a tiny piece of graphene inside a semiconductor laser. The graphene acts as a ‘saturable absorber, ‘ soaking up photons and then emitting them in a quick burst. Graphene, it turns out, makes a good saturable absorber because it can take up and release a lot of photons extremely fast, and it works at any wavelength; so lasers emitting different colors could be used simultaneously, without interfering with each other—speeding processing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Graphene Flakes Facilitate Neuromorphic Chips

Trend Micro Flaw Could Have Allowed Attacker To Steal All Passwords

itwbennett writes: Trend Micro has released an automatic update fixing the problems in its antivirus product that Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy discovered could allow “anyone on the internet [to] steal all of your passwords completely silently, as well as execute arbitrary code with zero user interaction.” The password manager in Trend’s antivirus product is written in JavaScript and opens up multiple HTTP remote procedure call ports to handle API requests, Ormandy wrote. Ormandy says it took him 30 seconds to find one that would accept remote code. He also found an API that allowed him to access passwords stored in the manager. This is just the latest in a string of serious vulnerabilities that have been found in antivirus products in the last seven months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trend Micro Flaw Could Have Allowed Attacker To Steal All Passwords