Broken Machine Politics
Risky E-Vote System to
Expand
The U.S. government has elected to proceed with the
deployment of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting
Experiment (SERVE) system for use in the November presidential
election, despite a research panel's report that the system is
too vulnerable to tampering or intrusion. SERVE, ...
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Small Robotic Devices Fly
Like Birds
Sunil K. Agrawal of the University of Delaware is designing
and building flying robots inspired by the hummingbird and the
hawkmoth, whose potential applications range from military
surveillance to industrial maintenance to enhanced law
enforcement and search and rescue operations. Agrawal says ...
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Memory: Beyond Flash and
DRAM
Despite not catching as many headlines as computer
processors, memory chips are set for a renaissance as demand
for faster, cheaper, and denser memory increases rapidly. The
market for traditional flash and DRAM memory are set to grow
by about 40 percent this year, according to IC Insights, but
...
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Linux's 'Center of
Gravity'
Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) CEO Stuart Cohen
declares that his organization's goal "is to become the center
of gravity for the Linux industry," and a focal point for IT
vendors, the development community, and users. He says the
expansion of OSDL to include corporate customers was ...
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Timers to Shrink
Microchips, Cell Phones
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
researchers have invented microscopic electronic clocks that
could replace larger, more expensive timers in microchips,
leading to significant reductions in price as well as size.
NIST physicist William Rippard speculates that such an ...
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Fort
N.O.C.'s
VeriSign operates the "A" root server somewhere in Virginia
at the end of a small highway, in one of many nondescript
mini-office parks in the Washington, D.C. area; invited
visitors to the site cannot see any markings or other signs
that would indicate the role of the four-story building, but
...
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Online Reference to Reach
Milestone
The posting of the 200,000th article for the Wikipedia
online encyclopedia in the coming days or weeks will be a
turning point in the life of the project, which is supported
by a grass-roots volunteer community whose population expands
daily. Nearly anyone can contribute or edit material on ...
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Spam Law Generates
Confusion
Email marketers at the Jan. 22 Spam and the Law Conference
raised the issue that provisions of the Can-Spam Act, in
effect since the first of the month, remain vague,
underscoring their worries about potential vulnerability to
lawsuits by ISPs and government agencies. Institute for ...
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IST Labs Project Images of
the Future
The purpose of Penn State University's Information and
Sciences and Technology (IST) Building is to host research in
a variety of fields with the overall goal of preparing
students for high-tech careers--or more specifically, "to
build leaders in problem solving with technology," ...
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Quantum Dice
Debut
Government researchers and scientists at MIT have created a
system to introduce limited randomness in quantum operations.
Random numbers are essential for core computing tasks such as
creating chance and variation in games and simulations,
encryption, and taking accurate samples of large ...
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Disabled to Get Greater
Access to Linux
The Free Standards Group says it has established a task
force to develop accessibility standards for Linux. Scott
McNeil, executive director of the Free Standards Group, says a
standard version will make it easier for Linux developers to
develop software and hardware for disabled people; Linux ...
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Perfecting
Protection
A team of researchers at the University of Texas at
Arlington are studying new ways to help protect the nation
from terrorist attacks. The researchers are involved in a
five-year project, the Pervasively Secure Infrastructure, that
is being funded by a $1.6 million grant from the ...
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Workstation Clustering:
Strength in Numbers
Advanced nuclear weapons design, genetic disease markers,
and the search for alien life-forms are just some of the
projects being undertaken with the help of supercomputers
composed of thousands of commercially available workstation
processors lashed together in a massively parallel ...
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Coming to Grips With
Grids
Though enterprise IT executives are intrigued by the
possibilities of grid computing, widescale mainstream adoption
may be several years away because of lingering doubts about
the technology's maturity, its lack of solid financial value,
and the disparate terminologies vendors employ to describe ...
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Dawn of a New
PC
PCs are poised to experience a major cosmetic change in the
next few years, but whether enterprises will appreciate it is
a subject of debate. Though many CIOs would like to avail
themselves of the advanced capabilities promised by
forthcoming technologies, budget constraints will dictate that
...
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The Smart-Dust
Revolution
The current definition of progress as squeezing more
computing power into the same space will be overtaken by an
emerging information revolution heralded by billions of tiny,
intelligent sensors that can self-organize into scalable,
fault-tolerant networks, and whose limited brain power is ...
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If He's So Smart...Steve
Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
Apple has had a long history of developing technological
milestones but getting cheated out of the lion's share of the
profits by competitors. Over the past 23 years, Apple has
slipped from the No. 1 vendor in the PC industry to No. 9, and
recorded only $6.2 billion in revenues for the ...
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Broken Machine
Politics
The promise of direct recording electronic (DRE) devices to
simplify the voting process, lower costs, make ballots
accessible to all, eliminate overvoting, and avoid the debacle
of the last presidential election has been tempered by
revelations that electronic voting systems suffer from ...
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Inc.