New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hertz Is Pulling a Disney
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
Google has confirmed that it will no longer use Java application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle in future versions of Android, according to VentureBeat . Instead, it will switch to OpenJDK, an open-source version of Oracle’s own Java Development Kit. While you might ask, “Who actually cares?”, Google says the change will simplify app development by creating a common codebase for Java. It’s hard to imagine that such a huge change (8, 902 files are supposedly affected) isn’t related to Google’s ongoing legal dispute with Oracle, though. That dispute, depending on how it’s resolved, could adversely affect Android development and app coding in general. The epic dispute started when Oracle sued Google for copyright back in 2010, claiming that Google improperly used its Java APIs. Google argued that the APIs in question were essential for to software innovation, and therefore couldn’t be copyrighted. In 2012, a jury found that Google didn’t infringe Oracle’s copyright, but a Federal court mostly reversed the decision in 2014. The US Supreme court didn’t want to touch the case and sent it back to a lower court, where it currently sits. Users on Y Combinator’s Hacker News who first spotted the code have theorized that it may mean that Google and Oracle have settled the lawsuit out of court. However, Google told VentureBeat that the legal dispute is still ongoing, so it couldn’t comment on whether the code change is related. As for how this affects you or me, the new code should make it a touch simpler for Android N developers, possibly resulting in better apps and quicker updates. However, the court’s upcoming decision could have much wider ramifications. If they decide that API’s from the likes of Java can be copyrighted, it could turn the patent wars into even more of a cluster-you-know-what. Source: VentureBeat
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Google will strip Oracle’s Java code out of Android
An anonymous reader writes: Apple told a U.S. judge that accessing data stored on a locked iPhone would be “impossible” with devices using its latest operating system, but the company has the “technical ability” to help law enforcement unlock older phones. Apple’s position was laid out in a brief filed late Monday, after a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, New York, sought its input as he weighed a U.S. Justice Department request to force the company to help authorities access a seized iPhone during an investigation. In court papers, Apple said that for the 90 percent of its devices running iOS 8 or higher, granting the Justice Department’s request “would be impossible to perform” after it strengthened encryption methods. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple Tells US Judge It’s ‘Impossible’ To Break Through Locks On New iPhones
As well as promising the entire world in a FedEx box, Amazon also trades on the quality of its reviews. So it’s actually not that surprising that the company is taking 1, 114 unknown reviewers to court. Read more…
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Amazon is Suing 1,000 Fake Five-Star Reviewers
Frosty P writes: BMI claims Amici III in Linden, New York didn’t have a license when it played four tunes in its eatery one night last year, including the beloved “Bennie and the Jets” and “Brown Sugar, ” winning $24, 000 earlier this year, and over $8, 200 in attorney’s fees. Giovanni Lavorato, who has been in business for 25 years, says the disc DJ brought into the eatery paid a fee to play tunes. “It’s ridiculous for me to pay somebody also, ” he said. “This is not a nightclub. This is not a disco joint . . . How many times do they want to get paid for the stupid music?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Restaurateur Loses Copyright Suit To BMI
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. “A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems.” Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft To Support SSH In Windows and Contribute To OpenSSH
On April 23rd, 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a masterpiece of mundanity to YouTube, his newly launched video portal. Behold. Read more…
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The Gloriously Inane First YouTube Video Was Uploaded 10 Years Ago Today
ColdWetDog writes: You’ve always wanted one, of course. Zombies, the occasional alien infestation. The neighbor’s smelly roses. You just need to be prepared for things. You can get freeze dried food, AR15’s, enough ammo to start a small police action (at least here in the U.S. — YMMV), but it has been difficult to get a modern, portable flamethrower until now. CNET has a brief explanation on the XM42, which doubled its Indiegogo funding target in just a few days. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Commercial Flamethrower Successfully Crowdfunded
Penguinisto writes According to a scan by Qualys, Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail server, which has lately generated more than a little controversy in US political circles, has earned an “F” rating for security from the security vendor. Problems include SSL2 support, a weak signature, and only having support for older TLS protocols, among numerous other problems. Note that there are allegations that the email server was possibly already hacked in 2013. (Note: Mrs. Clinton plans on Giving a press conference to the public today on the issue.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Clinton’s Private Email System Gets a Security "F" Rating