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Chinese tech giant Baidu has announced a new autonomous vehicle platform called Project Apollo, which aims to help speed up the development of self-driving cars. "Baidu says the platform encompasses both hardware and software, providing partners with the tech and open-source code needed to help their own vehicles perceive obstacles, plan their routes, and otherwise move around our world," reports The Verge. From the report: Baidu says it will first open up Project Apollo for cars operating in restricted environments in July, before offering it to vehicles driving in simple urban road conditions later this year. That's ahead of a gradual rollout of self-driving features that should see cars operating fully autonomously on highways and regular roads by 2020. The release comes as Baidu moves to position itself at the forefront of the autonomous vehicle industry. The Chinese company has aimed for the ambitious goal of getting a self-driving car to market by 2018, and is challenging rivals such as Google on its home turf, building a team of engineers based in Silicon Valley and scoring relevant permits so it can test vehicles in California.

Kelly Jackson Higgins, reporting for Dark Reading: A new study reveals that none of the top 10 U.S. university computer science and engineering program degrees requires students take a cybersecurity course. There's the cybersecurity skills gap, but a new study shows there's also a major cybersecurity education gap -- in the top U.S. undergraduate computer science and engineering programs. An analysis of the top 121 US university computer science and engineering programs by CloudPassage found that none of the top 10 requires students take a cybersecurity class for their degree in computer science, and three of the top 10 don't offer any cybersecurity courses at all. The alarming study also reveals that only one (University of Alabama) out of the 121 schools required three or more cybersecurity classes to graduate. "With more than 200,000 open cybersecurity jobs in 2015 in the U.S. alone and the number of threat surfaces exponentially increasing, there's a growing skills gap between the bad actors and the good guys," Robert Thomas, CEO of CloudPassage, told SCMagazine.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Mesosphere, creator of the world's first data center operating system, has confirmed significant strategic investment from Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Mesosphere, built on the open-source Apache Mesos project, closed $73.5 million in a Series C funding round. With HPE and Microsoft leading the round, the startups total funding to date tallies at almost $126 million. The operating system is currently used at mega-scale by customers including Verizon, Netflix and Twitter. It also underpins Microsoft's Azure Container solutions.

An anonymous reader writes: The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project managed by The Linux Foundation, is developing a new free Badge Program, seeking input from the open source community on the criteria to be used to determine security, quality and stability of open source software. The first draft of the criteria is available on GitHub and is spearheaded by David A. Wheeler, an open source and security research expert who works for the Institute for Defense Analyses and is also coordinating the CII's Census Project, and Dan Kohn, a senior adviser on the CII.

HughPickens.com writes Nathaniel Popper writes at the NYT that the Citizens Bank of Weir, Kansas, or CBW, has been taken apart and rebuilt, from its fiber optic cables up, so it can offer services not available at even the nation's largest bank. In the United States the primary option that consumers have to transfer money is still the ACH payment. Requests for ACH transfers are collected by banks and submitted in batches, once a day, and the banks receiving the transfers also process the payments once a day, leading to long waits. ACH technology was created in the 1970s and has not changed significantly since. The clunky system, which takes at least a day to deliver money, has become so deeply embedded in the banking industry that it has been hard to replace. CBW went to work on the problem by using the debit card networks that power ATM cash dispensers. Ramamurthi's team engineered a system so that a business could collect a customer's debit card number and use it to make an instant payment directly into the customer's account — or into the account of a customer of almost any other bank in the country. The key to CBW's system is real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring — software that can judge the risk involved in any transaction in real time by looking at 20 to 40 factors, including a customers' transaction history and I.P., address where the transaction originated. It was this system that Elizabeth McQuerry, the former Fed official, praised as the "biggest idea" at a recent bank conference. "Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form — a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi. "We'll now be one of the first banks in the world to offer customers a reliable, compliant, safe and secure way to instantly send and receive money internationally."

cagraham writes "In a pretty major executive shakeup, BlackBerry's Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and Chief Operating Officer have all left the company. It's unclear whether the changes were brought about by new interim-CEO John Chen in order to facilitate company change, or represent an abandon-ship style exit after BlackBerry's failed bid to go private. The company announced that the CFO position would be filled by current SVP James Yersch, but gave no word on the other vacancies."