An anonymous reader writes: The Russian Ministry of Finance has announced an amendment to the country's criminal code which will impose prison sentences of up to seven years for the issuing of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. A government source speaking to Interfax (Russian) said that the maximum prison sentence for individuals found issuing cryptocurrencies would be 2-4 years, and/or up to three years' worth of salary or income, whilst managers of dispensing institutions could face seven years in prison, up to four years of income equivalent in fines, and a lifetime ban from similar posts. Russia announced the ban on Bitcoin or other 'money surrogates' in February of 2014, asserting that cryptocurrencies facilitate money-laundering and other criminal activity.

An anonymous reader writes: For the last 17 years, the American not-for-profit MITRE Corporation has been editing and maintaining the list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). According to a number of researchers, MITRE has lately been doing a lousy job when it comes to assigning these numbers, forcing researchers to do without them or to delay public disclosure of vulnerabilities indefinitely. The problem is getting worse by the day, and the situation has spurred Kurt Seifried, a "Red Hat Product Security Cloud guy" and a CVE Editorial Board member, to create a complementary system for numbering vulnerabilities.

mmoorebz writes: Talligent, a provider of cost- and capacity-management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds, announced its 2016 State of OpenStack Report yesterday. In the report, it identified some concerns IT professionals have with OpenStack, its use cases, and some barriers professionals are facing. John Meadows, vice president of business development at Talligent, said that businesses should have confidence in the path OpenStack is taking. "Companies considering adopting OpenStack should understand that there are still challenges with regards to complexity and deployment," said Meadows. "A successful OpenStack deployment will include some mix of technical expertise, operational tools, and the support of a solid OpenStack partner." Additionally, the shift to an on-demand cloud for IT service delivery requires a new approach to tracking, managing and comparing IT resources, said Meadows. Management tools should be designed to support automation, and deliver real-time insight for OpenStack adoption.

An anonymous reader writes: After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that it will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa, a cross-platform photo viewer and organizer with basic editing capabilities. In the official announcement, Google has set March 15 as the end of support for the desktop client, with changes to the accompanying web-album hosting service set to roll out later in the spring. On Opensource.com, Jason Baker rounded up 9 open source and Linux-compatible alternatives to the popular photo sharing service.

An anonymous reader writes: The Bank of England is working with researchers at University College London to design a Bitcoin clone of its own that can be centrally controlled. It was recently found that the UK's central bank had reached out to university researchers to help it create a cryptographically secure digital currency. The resulting system has now been revealed, and is named RSCoin. The system employs cryptography to obviate counterfeiting and tampering. Unlike other mechanisms, the digital ledger used by the new cryptocurrency is handled exclusively by a central body and will only be made accessible to users in possession of a specific encryption key. Its developers explained that an RSCoin ledger could be published publicly by a central bank, and added that the system's design would also allow a central bank to make transactions entirely, or partially, anonymous.

shutdown -p now writes: Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license. That's not the first time this week (or this year) that Microsoft's open source efforts have been front-page news; with its new role in the Eclipse Foundation, too, the company's angling toward being one of the largest open source companies around, even if that's a small part of its business model. Update: 03/09 19:03 GMT by T : Speaking of which: reader Salgak1 writes with his first submission, linking the Register's report that Microsoft has released a Debian-based Linux distro, called SONIC. "It is optimized for network switching, and apparently is a localized version of the "Azure Cloud Switch" released into the Azure cloud hosting system. Question is, is it just another Microsoft "Embrace, Extend. Extinguish" strategy in action?"

An anonymous reader writes: In the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, traditionally a test-bed for nationwide infrastructure and technology schemes, 200,000 vehicles have been experimentally hooked into a real-time traffic-monitoring system based on RFID and roadside monitoring stations. China's state-owned Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASC) claims that such intense monitoring will be necessary for the driverless cars of the future, and to foil license-plate forgeries. On Monday the general manager of Chinese auto manufacturer Great Wall Motor suggested that a monitoring scheme of such scope could also be used to introduce a wide range of usage-based levies, and to easily ensure that less efficient cars could be charged more for fuel at gas stations.

StewBeans writes: Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive. A recruiter for Bay Area and Seattle tech companies said in a recent New York Times article about the cloud computing skill gap. "Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day. Compensation has doubled in five years." Beyond steep salary and benefits packages, the resources to train new IT talent is wasted if they jump ship for the next best offer. That's why some IT executives are focusing talent management inward and investing in their current employees who are loyal and eager to learn, adapt, and grow with their company. Curt Carver, CIO for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that this approach led him to do away with the 10-year IT org chart and remain more agile as technology needs change. He argues that 18-month org charts and constant training are the new reality for IT, providing this example: "If you go back a couple of years ago, we were heavily involved in the storage business. Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud. I don't need a lot of people doing storage. In fact, I may only need one. Everybody else, I'm willing to retrain you, but you're going to be doing mobile, or you're going to be doing business intelligence, or you're going to be helping our organizations do gap analysis."

Mark Wilson writes: The new Microsoft has place an increased importance on the cloud, and with other companies following suit, reliance on server solutions has increased. Today the company announces that it is bringing SQL Server to Linux. Both cloud and on-premises versions will be available, and the news has been welcomed by the likes of Red Hat and Canonical. Although the Linux port of SQL Server is not due to make an appearance until the middle of next year, a private preview version is being available to testers starting today. While the full launch of SQL Server for Linux is not due until the middle of 2017, SQL Server 2016 is expected to launch later this year.

An anonymous reader writes: MIT has launched a new scheme whereby participating users can voluntarily share data on their website viewing habits, via the use of a Google Chrome extension and by signing up to an MIT website. The scheme, called Eyebrowse, began development in 2010 and has been in closed beta for the last 18 months. Cornell information science professor Mor Naaman says of the project: "Data has traditionally been used by anyone from corporations to the government...but the goal of this system is to make the data more useful for the individuals themselves, to give them more control, and to make it more useful to communities."

An anonymous reader writes: Non-profit public interest group Public Knowledge has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission regarding Comcast's Stream TV service. The complaint says that Comcast excludes Stream TV traffic from its own data cap, which is both a violation of its merger agreement and counter to the FCC's Open Internet rules. Stream TV is a $15 per month offering for Xfinity internet customers. It includes local channels, some basic cable, HBO, and the use of a cloud DVR. Most content is streamed over the home network. Public Knowledge's senior staff attorney, John Bergmayer says, "Comcast's actions could result in fewer online video choices for viewers nationwide, while increasing its dominance as a video gatekeeper. If its behavior persists, prices will go up, the number of choices will go down, creators will have a harder time reaching an audience, and viewers will have a harder time accessing diverse and independent programming."

mikejuk writes: Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance, this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Project Link is a 'user agent' for the smart home, that helps the end user set preferences for device interaction, and automates those connections for the user in a secure environment. Next, Project Sensor Web will be a pilot project for crowdsourcing a pm2.5 sensor network. Project Smart Home is focused on bridging the gap in IoT smart home providers between completely boxed solutions like Apple HomeKit, and completely DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Finally, Project Vaani is a voice interface for IoT access, which Mozilla credits as the 'most natural way to interact with connected devices.' With Firefox losing market share and projects like Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Shumway, and Persona closing down, perhaps Mozilla should try and find its way back to core concerns. All four of the projects need significant AI expertise and a powerful cloud computing resource neither of which Mozilla is likely to be able to afford.

1sockchuck writes: As the Open Compute Project turns five, it is growing beyond its roots in hyperscale data centers. The path to a larger market ran through a Rackspace data center in northern Virginia, where the open source servers and racks- which were originally developed at Facebook — were adapted for use in a commercial data center with traditional power distribution. Rackspace, which is using Open Compute servers to power its managed cloud platform, worked closely with OCP vendors like Quanta, Wistron, Delta and Cloudline (HPE/FoxConn) to develop racks and servers that could be productized so other companies can use open hardware in colocation environments. The Open Compute Project will discuss its progress next week at its annual summit in San Jose.

Lucas123 writes: In its rush to gather information, the FBI blew its chance to retrieve data from the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists when it ordered his iCloud passcode to be reset shortly after the attacks. Now in its fervor to force Apple to create software that can break its own encryption algorithm, the FBI may be opening a security hole to federal agencies. Over the past four years, the federal government has largely shifted its use of mobile devices from Blackberry to iPhones. One major reason for that is -- you guessed it -- the strong native security. If Apple creates an iPhone skeleton key, it not only threatens the public's privacy, but the security of the federal government as well.

alphadogg writes: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, whose names have been linked since their seminal paper introduced the concepts of public key encryption and digital signatures some 40 years ago, have been named winners of the $1M A.M. Turing Award for 2015 (a.k.a., the 'Nobel Prize of Computing'). The work of Diffie, formerly chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has had a huge impact on the secure exchange of information across the Internet, the cloud and email.

MojoKid writes: With so much of the VR buzz revolving around Oculus, HTC and Google lately, it would be easy to forget that Sony has its own competitor coming, called PlayStation VR. And now, as new patents have revealed, the Japanese gaming giant could have a nifty trick up its sleeve, so to speak. It looks like Sony could developing what some could consider a spiritual successor to the Power Glove, that classic late 80s peripheral for the Nintendo Entertainment System. A diagram pulled from the recent patent filing shows this glove's implementation is straight-forward. However, Sony's glove is not going to be bulky like the Power Glove was. The documents also refer to hand flexor sensors that indicate a level of precision tracking at the fingertip level, as well as some sort of cloud network processing offload.

MojoKid writes: A Denver-based security startup called ProtectWise has a rather interesting twist on a security as a service platform that also incorporates an innovative threat detection and management user interface. The ProtectWise security platform runs on a cloud-based infrastructure that currently utilizes Amazon AWS for storage and processing. ProtectWise is an all software solution comprised of a "Cloud Network DVR" platform made-up of virtual cameras in the cloud that record all traffic on the network. The sensors (12MB install package) record all network traffic wherever they're installed and stream it up to the ProtectWise platform where it is securely stored and the threat analysis is performed. The sensors can be configured with profiles to capture just light metadata like netflow or headers (source, destination etc.) all the way to the full payload. You can then playback the traffic from the ProtectWise cloud analytics platform, going months back if needed, and analyze the data for threats. You can go back in time and see if, where and how you've been compromised retrospectively. There's also a ProtectWise HUD that visualizes and renders network threat location and progression, allowing you to make better use of all the data recorded. It has a 'KillBox' that visually shows attack event progression across the network area. The only question has to do with compliance for financial applications since it is cloud-based. Currently, ProtectWise has 100 or so deployments of its product in the market with customers like Netflix, Hulu, Expedia, Pandora and Universal Music.

An anonymous reader writes: Creating virtual assistants that can understand and anticipate human behavior and needs is one of the current lodestars of artificial intelligence research. Now, researchers at Stanford University have decided to approach the problem by using descriptions of everyday human activities found in online fiction, namely 600,000 stories from 500,000 writers at online writing community WattPad – input totalling 1.8 billion words – to inform a new knowledge base called Augur, designed to power vector machines in making predictions about what an individual user might be about to do, or want to do next. The scientists suggest that crowdsourcing or similar user-feedback systems would likely be necessary to amend some of the more dramatic associations that certain objects or situations might inspire. As the research notes, 'If fiction were truly representative of our lives, we might be constantly drawing swords and kissing in the rain.'

An anonymous reader writes: Tensions are rising between Tor Project administrators and CloudFlare, a CDN and DDoS mitigation service that's apparently making the life of Tor users a living hell. Tor administrators are saying that CloudFlare is making Tor users enter CAPTCHAs multiple times, tracking their Web sessions, and sharing data with other companies. Additionally, a study by some UK and US researchers found that are 1.3 million websites blocking access to Tor users, 3.67% being Alexa Top 1000 sites.

An anonymous reader writes: As a way to address the many challenges associated with supporting DevOps and adopting Continuous Delivery (CD), CloudBees has released a new Jenkins platform to help teams deliver software.The new platform provides other cloud-native capabilities, including Docker deployment and Mesos large-scale cluster management, which will allow enterprises to run and manage Jenkins across the enterprise on their own private cloud, or by using dedicated AWS resources.