The two countries say they will continue military cooperation in support of Assad "until total defeat of terrorists".

"Scala is one of the JVM languages that manages to maintain a hip and professional vibe at the same time," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino -- building up to a big question: One reason for this probably being that Scala was built by people who knew what they were doing. It has been around for a few years now in a mature form and I got curious about it a few years back. My question to the Slashdot community: Is getting into Scala worthwhile from a practical/industry standpoint or is it better to just stick with Java? Have you done larger, continuous multi-year, multi-man and mission-critical applications in Scala and what are your experiences? The original submission asks two related questions. First, "Do you have to be a CS/math genius to make sense of Scala and use it correctly?" But more importantly, "Is Scala there to stay wherever it is deployed and used in real-world scenarios, or are there pitfalls and cracks showing up that would deter you from using Scala once again?" So share your experiences and answers in the comments. Would you recommend moving from Java to Scala?

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Talk of a political solution in war-torn Syria has resurfaced at the same time as the US missile strikes.

Police used tear gas against demonstrators as anti-government protests continue in Caracas.

"Hackers accessed the data of up to 100,000 people through a tool that helps students get financial aid," writes CNN. An anonymous reader quotes their report: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday that a breach had been discovered in the fall. In September, he said, his agency discovered that fraudsters could use someone's personal data to fill out a financial aid application, and the "Data Retrieval Tool" would populate the application with tax information. That information could be used to file false tax returns. The commissioner said fewer than 8,000 of these returns were processed, and refunds were issued totaling $30 million... In October, the IRS told the Department of Education that the system could be abused by criminals, but because up to 15 million people use the system for convenience, they kept it available. However, in February, the agency witnessed a pattern of fraudulent activity, and it shut down the automated tool in March. Now financial aid seekers will have to manually enter their parents' reported income from previous tax years -- at least until a new version of the tool comes online next October. In the meantime, the IRS is alerting 100,000 users who started an application but didn't finish it, warning them that their tax information may have been compromised.

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From a report on Motherboard: On Saturday, The Shadow Brokers, a hacker or group of hackers that has previously dumped NSA hacking tools, released more alleged exploits. The group published a password for an encrypted cache of files they distributed last year. "Be considering this our form of protest," the group wrote in a rambling, politically loaded rant published on Medium. Back in August, The Shadow Brokers released a number of exploits stolen from the NSA. Many of these affected hardware firewalls, from companies such as Cisco and Juniper. At the time, the group also dumped another cache allegedly containing more hacking tools, and said they would release the corresponding password to the winner of a bitcoin auction. That fund-raising effort was ultimately unsuccessful, and The Shadow Brokers claimed they were calling the whole thing off in January. But now, anyone can unlock the auction data dump. (Motherboard confirmed that the password did indeed decrypt the original auction file). In a series of tweets, Edward Snowden said, "NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons; hackers leaked it. 1) https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP 2) For those who have never heard of the hacker group behind today's leak of NSA's cyberweapons, last year's story." He adds, "quick review of the ShadowBrokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library, but there's still so much here that NSA should be able to instantly identify where this set came from and how they lost it. If they can't, it's a scandal."

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Little child of great parent Mojo::Log.

Little child of great parent Mojo::Log.

Application to display supported Calendar.

Application to display supported Calendar.

"Linux and open-source software have had to contend with intellectual property legal challenges for years," writes ZDNet. "Now, Google has started a new effort to bring peace to potential Android IP sore points: PAX... a royalty-free, community-patent cross-license." PAX is starting with nine members: Google, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, HTC, Foxconn Technology Group, Coolpad, BQ, HMD Global, and Allview. These companies own more than 230,000 global patents. PAX's purpose is to create a "community-driven [patent] clearinghouse, developed together with our Android partners, [that] ensures that innovation and consumer choice -- not patent threats -- will continue to be key drivers of our Android ecosystem. PAX is free to join and open to anyone." Slashdot reader Andy Updegroved writes: The question is why? The announcement and the related website are extremely brief, and although everyone is invited to get a copy of the cross license, Google reserves the right to decide first whether your motives are pure and you can keep a secret. And so far, the only members of the "PAX Community" listed are existing Google business partners. Is Google aware of some new patent tempest brewing just over the horizon, about to burst into public view? And will any other company names and logos be added to the PAX Community Web page? We'll just have to stay tuned to find out. Andy Updegrove tells ZDNet it does involve "formal cross-licenses between participants, and therefore enforceable rights, but not an infrastructure to do more (at least insofar as one can tell from the initial announcement)."

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Turkish president urges supporters at massive rally to vote in April 16 referendum on expanding presidential powers.

Turkish president urges supporters at massive rally to vote in April 16 referendum on expanding presidential powers.