Month: May 2016

Sean Gallagher

The Stiletto crouches pierside at National Harbor. Forty feet wide and 80 feet long, the Stiletto is nearly three times the size of a World War II PT boat yet less than a third of the weight. Its pentamaran design makes it capable of handling (and plowing through) pretty much anything short of a gale—though turning head-on into the waves can be brutal.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—At this week's Navy League Sea-Air-Space exposition (an annual seapower conference and trade show for the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard) Ars got a chance to board and tour a craft called the Stiletto. The Stilleto is prototype boat built for the Navy in 2006 that has become the military's on-call floating laboratory for rapid research and development of new sensors, weapons systems, and communications. With a carbon fiber hull, the Stiletto is light enough (45 tons, unloaded) to be craned onto a cargo ship for transport—but it can also carry 20 tons of cargo and tear through most sea states at high speeds.

Now operating from Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek near Norfolk, Virginia, the Stiletto was originally intended to be part of a new Navy combat concept—groups of small, highly networked boats carrying sensors and weapons and working as a group to take on enemies in coastal, river, and shallow ocean waters. Built with special operations in mind, the Stiletto has a stealthy profile and a unique pentamaran hull that essentially acts as a surface effect hull at high speeds, allowing the craft to rise out of the water and reach speeds of 60 knots (69 miles an hour, or 110 kilometers per hour).

After being used in several exercises in the mid-2000s, the Stiletto was deployed to the Caribbean for counter-narcotics operations in 2008 with a joint Navy-Coast Guard team. Since then, it has served as a "maritime demonstration craft" operated by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock, Combatant Craft Division. But it is funded directly by the Department of Defense's Office of Research, Test, Development and Evaluation (RDT&E). (Full disclosure: my last tour of service in the Navy was with "special boats," so the Stiletto is my 1990 self's technological dream.)

(credit: Eric Constantineau)

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and other like-minded senators have come out forcefully against the pending change to federal judicial rules that would expand judges’ ability to authorize remote access hacking of criminal suspects’ devices.

On Thursday, Wyden submitted a bill that aims to stop the proposed amendments to Rule 41 dead in its tracks. The entire bill is one sentence long: “The proposed amendments to rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which are set forth in the order entered by the Supreme Court of the United States on April 28, 2016, shall not take effect.”

For now, the bill is co-sponsored by two other Democrats, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). A companion bill is expected in the House of Representatives.

I dunno, looks like a game to me...

The creator of a game about a Palestinian child struggling to survive with her family in the 2014 Gaza strip says the title has been rejected from the games section of the iOS App Store because, as he puts it, "it has a political statement."

Liyla and the Shadows of War is currently listed on Google Play as an Adventure game, and it includes "challenging decision, events and puzzles awaiting for you [sic]" according to its online press kit. But Palestinian creator Rasheed Abueideh tweeted a rejection message in which Apple said the game was "not appropriate in the games category" and that it would be "more appropriate to categorize your app in News or Reference for example."

The rejection didn't go into detail about where Apple draws the line between "Games" and "News," but Apple's App Store Review guidelines have laid out the company's thinking since 2010: "We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app." Those same guidelines also lay out a vague "I'll know it when I see it" standard for when content goes "over the line" in ways not specifically prohibited by the guidelines (Apple has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars).

Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Alphabet CEO Larry Page testified in federal court this morning, saying that he never considered getting permission to use Java APIs, because they were "free and open."

The CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, spoke in a soft staccato and was hard to understand at times. (Page suffers from a condition that affects his vocal chords.) But Page spoke to the jury for about a half-hour, answering a lightning-fast round of accusatory questions from Oracle attorney Peter Bicks.

Page's testimony comes in the final hours of the Oracle v. Google trial. The lawsuit began when Oracle sued Google in 2010 over its use of 37 Java APIs, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now, unless a jury finds that Google's use of APIs was "fair use," Oracle may seek up to $9 billion in damages.