Development teams often set up tracking systems such as Bugzilla to collect software bugs found by users. The developers can then fix some of these bugs and commit the corresponding code changes into version control systems such as svn or git.

Unfortunately, the links between bug reports and code changes are missing for many software projects because the bug tracking and version control systems are often maintained separately. Proposed linking solutions, such as ReLink, still face several issues, including their reliability with ground-truth datasets and the extent of their measurements.

In a paper presented at the 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2013), researchers from XXXX present a benchmark they developed for evaluating bug linking solutions. The benchmark includes a dataset of about 12,000 bug links from 10 programs. The authors present results of applying the benchmark to ReLink to assess its strengths and limitations.

“Empirical Evaluation of Bug Linking” and other papers from CSMR 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has taken  legal action to stop the Dwolla online payment service from processing bitcoin virtual-currency transactions. Dwolla can now no longer send funds to Mt. Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. Some Bitcoin exchanges let users buy bitcoins with money transferred via Dwolla and then sell bitcoins with the proceeds transferred to them via Dwolla. In a warrant, DHS accused Mt. Gox of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. In its investigation, DHS said, it used an undercover informant who bought bitcoins using Dwolla and subsequently had them converted to dollars. In a statement posted on its Google+ account, Mt. Gox said “we have not been provided with a copy of the court order and/or warrant, and do not know its scope and/or the reasons for its issuance. Mt. Gox is investigating and will provide further reports when additional information becomes known.” (CNET)(Ars Technica)(The New York Post)(Mt. Gox)
 

The much-discussed idea that supercomputing performance could soon reach exaflops (1018 floating point operations per second) levels will not be possible before the end of the decade, according to Horst Simon, the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s deputy director. A combination of technical challenges are proving an obstacle, including the total power needed by such a system, increased chip power efficiency, and the cost of data movement and memory. “I also think calling the system exa-anything is a bad idea. It’s become a bad brand, associated with buying big machines for a few national labs,” he told HPCWire. “It also sets the community up for a perceived failure if we don’t get to exaflops.” And measuring the system’s performance once it is built also poses a challenge, he adds, estimating an exascale system will need five to six days to run the LINPACK benchmark. A reasonable goal toward exascale computing, Simon said, would be constructing an exascale system that could rank first in the TOP500 supercomputing-performance list by 2020. He says there are projects working in that direction, including the US Department of Energy’s FastForward. Simon says the US needs exascale computing resources to maintain a competitive advantage in manufacturing as well as for national security. (SlashDot)(HPCWire)(Scientific Computing)(“No Exaflops for You,” Horst Simon)
 

A new entrant into the Chinese labor pool is sending ripples into the nation’s economy and labor pool. Companies are increasingly using robots for simple jobs such as peeling noodles from dough lumps and placing them into boiling water in many of China’s noodle shops. A cook doing that job earns about 40,000 yuan per year (about $6,400 per year). The noodle-making robot costs 10,000 yuan (about $1,600) and its price is continuing to drop. Inventor Cui Runquan said he has sold the robots to about 3,000 restaurants since 2010. China is on pace to become the world’s largest market for robotics. Recently, the China Machinery Industry Federation launched the Robot Industry Alliance, a nonprofit group focused on robotics research and development. In addition to noodle-making, newer industrial robots are expected to tackle tasks such as welding, painting, ironing, and packaging. Experts say robots will threaten Chinese jobs based on how quickly they are adopted compared to how fast the domestic labor force shrinks. China’s labor force declined in 2012 and could continue to do so as its population ages. (SlashDot)(Singularity Hub)(ZDNet)(MIT Technology Review)(Xinhua News Agency)
 

New security research from Microsoft shows that Java attacks have increased sharply since the third quarter of 2011 making Java by far the biggest malware target. “The recently released Microsoft Security Intelligence Report said this is the case because Java is widely used across multiple platforms and has many possible vulnerabilities. The study said that attackers are focused on older, patched vulnerabilities in Java in order to take advantage of those systems that have not applied the fixes and are also trying to take advantage of vulnerabilities across multiple Java versions. The report (www.microsoft.com/security/sir/default.aspx) studied attacks between July 2012 and December 2012. (SlashDot)(ThreatPost)(Microsoft Security Intelligence Report)
 

Amazon has purchased  Liquavista, a Netherlands-based screen technology company. The company, which Samsung had owned, is best known for its electrowetting display technology, which uses colored oils over transparent electrodes atop a white substrate. The technology was originally developed at Philips Research in the Netherlands. Philips subsequently created Liquavista in 2006 to commercialize the technology; Samsung acquired the firm in late January 2011. The exact transaction price was not disclosed, but sources say it was less than $100 million. Industry-watchers expect the deal signals that Amazon plans to release a Kindle with a color display. (SlashDot)(The Digital Reader)(Forbes)(Reuters)(“Researchers Develop Paper Display,” Computer, April 2011 (Vol. 44, No. 4), pp. 18-21.)
 

Finding and expressing scalable parallelism is one of software development’s most difficult tasks. Intel’s Concurrent Collections (CnC) programming model aims to make this easier by specifying the semantically required dependencies between individual computation kernels. The CnC model has been shown conceptually to be deterministic and independent of the target platform, but it's lacked a concrete implementation to prove that its concepts could be exploited in practice.

At the 2013 21st Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2013), Intel researchers presented a paper describing a CnC implementation that exposes its benefits in a single model for shared and distributed memory. The paper includes experimental results to show the implementation’s competitive performance with existing parallel programming models.

“Concurrent Collections on Distributed Memory: Theory Put into Practice” and other papers from PDP 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

A sophisticated, global hacking network committed a series of thefts from ATMs in two dozen different countries -- including the United States, Japan, Russia, Romania, Egypt, Colombia, Britain, Sri Lanka, and Canada -- that netted the criminals $45 million. Officials arrested seven people in the US in connection with the thefts, which a dozen law-enforcement agencies worldwide have been investigating. Law-enforcement officials said the network’s leaders deployed operatives operating in cells in 27 countries, including this group in the US. According to authorities, the hackers infiltrated the databases of two Middle Eastern banks. They then reportedly eliminated withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards and created passwords for the accounts. They then allegedly loaded the stolen account information onto plastic cards—including even old hotel key cards or expired credit cards—with a magnetic stripe. The hackers then reportedly coordinated the use of these cards with the different cells or groups of “cashers” they set up to quickly withdraw funds from various ATMs. Those cells retrieving the cash took their cut, laundered the money, and sent it in the form of goods or cash to the network’s leaders. In the first operation, the hackers took $5 million. In the second operation, officials claim that within 10 hours, the hackers took $40 million in a series of 36,000 transactions. They made 40,500 withdrawals overall in the two different operations. Security experts say the problem is that many banks and merchants in the United States use cards with magnetic strips rather than those with chips that are difficult to duplicate. Investigators say the suspects from the US cell are US citizens originally from the Dominican Republic living in Yonkers, New York, and face charges of conspiracy and money laundering after allegedly stealing $2.8 million. (CNBC)(The Associated Press @ The Telegraph)(Reuters @ NBCNews)(The New York Times -- 1) (The New York Times -- 2)(The Los Angeles Times)

Defense Distributed, an open source, nonprofit firearms designer, has removed from its website blueprints for a gun that can be made with high-density plastic on an industrial 3D printer, after receiving pressure to do so from the US State Department. However, the plans reportedly have already been downloaded 100,000 times and are being hosted on other servers, including those belonging to The Pirate Bay file-sharing site. US officials indicate that publication of the blueprints so that they would be available internationally may have breached arms-control regulations regarding the shipping of weapons overseas. Defense Distributed claims it is in compliance with the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. (BBC)(CNET)
 

Microsoft released a fix for a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 for all Windows versions being actively exploited. Some hackers took advantage of the flaw to launch watering-hole attacks on US government employees. The vulnerability is reportedly related to how the browser processes page layout information. In these attacks, hackers use website flaws to implant malware, which infects subsequent visitors. The Microsoft patch is a temporary solution until the company develops a security update that more thoroughly addresses the problem. (ZDNet)(Dark Reading)(Computing Now NewsFeed – 2013 May 6)(Microsoft Security Advisory)