Russian Nuclear Scientists Arrested For 'Bitcoin Mining Plot' (bbc.com) 84
Russian security officers have arrested several scientists working at a top-secret Russian nuclear warhead facility for allegedly mining crypto-currencies, BBC reported Friday, citing local media. From the report: The suspects had tried to use one of Russia's most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins, media reports say. The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, is a restricted area.
The centre's press service said: "There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining." The supercomputer was not supposed to be connected to the internet -- to prevent intrusion -- and once the scientists attempted to do so, the nuclear centre's security department was alerted. They were handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian news service Mash says. "As far as we are aware, a criminal case has been launched against them," the press service told Interfax news agency.
Top Secret (Score:2)
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In Soviet Russia, bitcoin mines YOU!
Re:Top Secret (Score:5, Funny)
Also, in Soviet Russia, block chains you.
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FTFY.
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Also, in Soviet Russia coin beats you.
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All dissatisfaction with communism and government interference aside, maybe it's time for government to build large scale cryptocurrency miners in order to reduce the energy inefficiency while earning more revenues. Government is always looking for revenues. People are always looking for a way to reduce taxes. Government is already facing the problem of building the power plants for the mining. Might as well go all the way and mine.
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In Soviet Russia, mining algorithm includes SALT!
Cause you're in a Gulag salt mine.
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Good thing this facility was Top Secret. I would hate to hear about what goes on inside.
One wonders how secret it can be if there are Getty Images of it.
Re:Top Secret (Score:4, Funny)
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One wonders how secret it can be if there are Getty Images of it.
Taking a picture of a computer tells you nothing of what is in it. Neither does a picture of Fort Know tell you how much gold it does (or doesn't) contain.
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I'm not sure anyone knots.
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Your analogy fails miserable as most do.
TBH a picture of a computer DOES tell you a fair bit about it. Having an idea of the power/cooling/size alone coupled with the approx tech level can give you a good approximation of the computing power.
Now, it's Russia so it's probably just an Alienware box with fancy lights they imported illegally but let's give em a break. .000000001 BTC is still worth some rubles :)
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Good thing this facility was Top Secret. I would hate to hear about what goes on inside.
One wonders how secret it can be if there are Getty Images of it.
That photo was taken at a museum. Either that or Russian nuclear production facilities have some very interesting decorative choices. Of course, it could still be at the facility, just not a restricted access area.
Bomb photo [Re:Top Secret] (Score:2)
One wonders how secret it can be if there are Getty Images of it.
That photo was taken at a museum. Either that or Russian nuclear production facilities have some very interesting decorative choices. ....
CBS news says (https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/which-countries-have-nukes/3/ ):
"Here, a nuclear museum staffer cleans the first Soviet nuclear bomb, tested in 1949, just in front of the country's first thermonuclear bomb."
CREDIT: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images
Yep, image is of a museum.
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That photo was taken at a museum. Either that or Russian nuclear production facilities have some very interesting decorative choices. Of course, it could still be at the facility, just not a restricted access area.
It was taken at the facility... 60 years ago from the looks of it.
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Britain has some not so secret secret bases too... They even have sign posts pointing to them:
http://www.exec-comms.com/Pict... [exec-comms.com]
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Governments... (Score:1)
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In Russia secret cash generated by hard work in lab.
They wanted to mine? (Score:5, Funny)
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To the pit of misery!
The Russians! have infilrated Slashdot!!! (Score:2)
"They were handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian news service Mash says."
I knew it!!! MsMash is a Russian spy too!!!!
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It's short for "Microsoft Mash for Windows, 2018".
'Bitcoin Mining Plot' (Score:3)
Wouldn't such a plot be called a 'claim'?
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They were probably told to fund their own operation. My new ICO is called CoinBux!
They were going to call theirs GlowCoin
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Makes me wonder .... (Score:2)
What would the hash rate be of a supercomputer mining Bitcoin?
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that was probably what they were trying to find ... ...and of course, if it was good, probably leave it running for a few hours^H^H^H^Hdays^H^H^H^Hweeks^H^HOHHH.MY.WE.ARE.RICH^W^Cquit^Wabort^C^Ccccccc... (sh*t the police is here)
Hard to hide (Score:2)
Even if they'd got their operation up and running, neighboring towns would grow suspicious as all of their lights dimmed at the same time.
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I think the whole world would have noticed the sudden influx of coins from a single wallet.
Re:Blame the Russians... (Score:4, Funny)
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Imagine if all the supercomputers in the world focused on cures instead.
Install BOINC [berkeley.edu] and become part of the solution.
Oh well... (Score:2)
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Brain scientists and rocket surgeons would know better.
bitcoin is barely relevant here. (Score:1)
they were arrested for connecting a top secret supercomputer to the internet. that is going to get you in trouble whether you're mining bitcoin or sharing cat memes.
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I shudder to think what supercomputer-generated cat memes would consist of...
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I shudder to think what supercomputer-generated cat memes would consist of...
I can has teraflops?
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Because there's a difference between a classified system and classified information - it's much easier to control a system than information. Hillary put classified information on a non-classified internet-connected system. There's no way to actively prevent someone from doing that, you can only monitor for it and clean up after it. For example, Donald Trump could spill classified information to the Russians in a meeting and OH WAIT [wikipedia.org]
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Donald Trump could spill classified information to the Russians in a meeting and OH WAIT [wikipedia.org]
You do understand that Trump can legally do that because all classified information is classified on authority delegated by president. He literally has the ultimate say here. So, the President can declassify anything at any time for any reason and had said information to anyone, legally. All classified information is kept under Executive Order 13526 which was enacted by Obama in 2009.
Now you may not think it's a good idea to disclose specific information, but the President has the legal authority to discu
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Yes it's a fun little factoid that he didn't illegally reveal classified information in the process of revealing above-top-secret information to an adversarial power while bragging about obstructing justice. And he didn't use emails either! Email security is serious business.
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Desparate times, desparate measures (Score:2)
In more recent soviet days, as long as the scientists towed the party line they were treated pretty well, at least theoretically. Science was praised. Scientists were rewarded relatively well. Perhaps times have changed. This incident makes me wonder just how bad things are getting these days in Russia for scientists, economically. I would not be surprised if these guys were pretty poor off and decided to help themselves to some of the resources at their disposal. I'm just trying to understand what mig
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Easy to do without oversight (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting this anonymously, even though I'm pretty sure the statue of limitations is long past.
Many years ago I got a job for SGI on site at big customer. This was back when the Origin 2000 was the new hotness. This site had a whole O2k buildout (3 or 4 racks worth of compute cores, 32 R10k MIPS processors clocked at around 200Mhz all connected via these thick cable bundles into a hypercube topology IIRC) purely for benchmarking and compatibility testing. They were used only sporadically. This was also the time when the distributed.net RSA cracking challenge was running. So obviously I set up a process that would run distributed.net across all of the cores, but would also monitor for any access to the machine and shut the whole thing down, not so much because I was trying to hide it but because I didn't want to impact any tests other people wanted to run. I also made it so I had to start it manually after verifying that the machine was truly idle. The only problem was that the machine had LEDs that indicated CPU activity, and when the process was running they would be full up, but as soon as someone logged in to investigate they would be gone. Luckily nobody who worked there was the suspicious type.
After one long weekend I came back to discover that my aggregation machine (The O2k didn't talk directly to distributed.net servers, I ran a local server to cut down on the internet traffic) had suffered a drive failure and had been down for several days. I took the morning to get the aggregation server restarted and working. A couple of days later one of my friends mentioned that I was #3 for that day on the distributed.net statistics page. Oops.