I don't understand, it seems like researchers have to pay to enter and then are only given the funding if successful, that's not exactly funding R&D, more of a contest. It seems really strange that Russia would be offering this kind of bounty in effort to improve the program's security, don't they know how many activists and dissidents use it. Is the sole reason to aid their own spies?
I really wish the US government would offer bounties for their sites and systems. Right now if people try to exploit a US government system, even if they have the intention to properly disclose the vulnerability they face prosecution.
It is definitely R&D to find a vulnerability in TOR or lack thereof, it's just that BBC as usual is arbitrarily choosing what to report and what to stay silent about.
Here they explicitly state that it's a tender for 'Выполнение научно-исследовательской работы, шифр «ТОР (Флот)»' (Research and Development works, code "TOR (Navy)")
Then it's a closed tender (stated in the same document), meaning that they come up with a list of organisations they invite to participate in this tender. No organization they did not invite can participate.
So you see this is nothing like a bounty.
>it seems like researchers have to pay to enter
I wager they are required by law to demand some sum of money, maybe this sum is determined as a function of a tender value; I don't believe there is some additional meaning to asking people to pay 5500 usd to participate in a closed tender.
They definitely thought it was an Ukrainian military transport plane. I don't see how the distinction between enemy military transport plane and enemy fighter/bomber is of any importance here.
Version about rebels taking passenger plane for AN-26 seems plausible, considering that rebels themselves seemed to believe it in the first minutes after the event (I am judging by the reaction of their mouthpieces on Russian internet which I happened to see with my own eyes).
Anyway that's not the point, the point is that even if (people may still doubt) the rebels downed the plane, at worst they thought of it as of an Ukrainian military plane, ie they had no intention to kill noncombatants, it was definitely not an 'act of terrorism' as Ukrainian govt wants to paint it.
I am talking about Boris Rozhin's livejournal ('colonelcassad'). That's about as close as it gets to rebels' mouthpiece, being probably the most popular social media outlet with separatist viewpoint (not to be confused with Russian govt's viewpoint). Of course he is not an official figure of any kind, but if anyone can be trusted to be able to tell legit sources from 'hotheads in their mommies' basements', that's him.
It's a journalist from Crimea, Nobody you should consider to be fully informed with what rebels do. I can imagine he's now a kind of a war reporter, but in wars there are a lot of rumors. Nothing can be more probable than that somebody actually saw the crash and produced the rumor that that's an achievement of the rebels and the journalist repeated it.
Oh, it's simple. Separatists were posting how happy they were about bringing down the Ukrainian military plane. In some hours it turned out it was MH17, the messages were deleted then. (I've seen the post myself, not a screenshot).
How can you know if separatist on the internet are real rebel commanders or just some hotheads in their mommies' basements or (gasp) other intelligence agencies? How do you know that nobody took over their digital identities? We're on HN we all know how easy it is.
I assume I know that since that account has a rich history of timely reports, quite a few with unique media content. The account is being continued to be filled with the same inside information which indicates it is unlikely to be hacked.
>make it only accessible in North America and Western Europe
What for? Sure I understand that it is good for coders in North America and Western Europe because it protects them from the competition, but why should the consumers care?
Although there is a negative stereotype about South Asian coders, I don't see a reason why a coder from outside of the developed word should be inherently low-skilled. My impression is that the main body of coders from South America and Eastern Europe, at least those who can speak English, are just as good as the main body of North American or Western European coders. Then there are a lot of really good people from South Asia, it's unfair and senseless to exclude them from this market. I am pretty sure any sane person would have problems with this kind of racial profiling even if there was no other way to establish whether or not given person is fit for the industry, which is not even the case.
Well, exclude regional profiling and basically you have invented toptal.
