The Code Warrior
Worm Slowing, But Still
Dangerous
The MyDoom email virus may be losing speed, but experts
warn that its effects will linger. MyDoom, which has wrested
the dubious honor of most virulent email virus away from
Sobig.F, installs backdoors in victim computers that could
allow hackers to hijack the infected machines and use ...
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Virginia Tech Migrates G5
Supercomputer to Apple Xserves
Virginia Tech has announced that its G5 Mac-based
supercomputing cluster, which ranked third in terms of speed
last fall, will immediately begin its migration from Power Mac
G5 desktops to Apple's Xserve G5 1U servers; this switch
should be completed within four months. Virginia Tech's Lynn
...
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Rover Engineers Hope They
Found Problem
The rover Spirit could return to its mission on Mars within
a week if NASA engineers have isolated the cause of its recent
malfunction, and they think that they have by successfully
replicating the computer crashes the rover has been suffering
from. Mission managers suspect that the crashes were ...
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H-1B Visas Going
Fast
As of Oct. 1, 2003, the annual cap of H-1B visas fell from
195,000 to 65,000, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services recently reported on its Web site that some 43,500
visas had either been approved or were in the pipeline for
approval in the first quarter of fiscal year 2004. The ...
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SGI Sheds More Light on
Multi-Paradigm Computing
Silicon Graphics (SGI) CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh detailed Project
Ultraviolet, an initiative first unveiled at the
Supercomputing 2003 trade show in November as a plan to devise
a new class of "multi-paradigm" supercomputers by meshing the
best constituents of vector, scalar, and other computing ...
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The Machine That
Invents
Imagination Engines CEO Stephen Thaler's experiments with
neural networks revealed that disrupting their connections
with noise caused the networks to generate new ideas. These
trials were the beginnings of Thaler's Device for the
Autonomous Generation of Useful Information, a.k.a. the
Creativity ...
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Biggest Web Problem Isn't
About Privacy, It's Sloppy Security
Web security leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by
embarrassing incidents at companies such as the online
restaurant reservation service OpenTable.com; Web designers
need constant reminding of the security issues they should be
aware of as they create Web sites, a situation that MIT ...
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That Gibberish in Your
In-Box May Be Good News
Researchers at the recent 2004 Spam Conference laid out
highly technical solutions to eliminating spam and gave little
attention to legal remedies such as lawsuits and enforcing the
Can Spam Act. Filtering technology, in particular, is taking
its toll on spammers, forcing them to send ...
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Most Flexible Electronic
Paper Yet Revealed
Philips researchers have created the most flexible
electronic display to date by printing organic electronics on
a 25-micron-thick polyimide substrate, and MIT researcher Joe
Jacobson calls this breakthrough "an important milestone and
another step closer towards 'real' electronic ...
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Time to Redial: VOIP
(Voice Over Internet Protocol) Makes a
Comeback
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is making a
comeback after going through a buzz phase a few years ago; at
that time, many people tried out free phone services, but few
thought to replace their traditional phone sets with the
unreliable and poor quality of VoIP on 56K modems. With the
...
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For Brazil Voters,
Machines Rule
For the longest time, it was easy to rig Brazilian
elections because they relied on a strictly paper-based voting
process. Now, even as electronic voting systems draw fire in
the United States for being insecure and unreliable, Brazil's
populace is praising e-voting, which was introduced in ...
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Data Storage Worlds
Uniting
In an effort to reduce costs and simplify file-sharing,
companies are attempting to merge the best elements of
network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN)
technologies. Perhaps one of the most evident trends in this
wider convergence are NAS gateways, which connect SANs with
...
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Iridescent Software
Illuminates Research Data
The job of sifting through journals and scientific
literature to unearth information relevant to studies could
become less burdensome--and expensive--for researchers with
the help of Iridescent, a software program developed by
bioinformatics scientists at the University of Texas Southwest
...
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The Mac Turns
20
Remembering Apple's launch of the Macintosh is like
rehashing the early history of PC innovations: Many of the
people who helped launch the Macintosh gathered at the
Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and were
asked what Apple and the rest of the PC industry have learned
from ...
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Grids Moving Beyond
Science
Mainstream organizations are starting to embrace grid
computing--which has been for the most part confined to
academic and scientific pursuits--to make their IT resources
more efficient and to squeeze more performance out of business
applications. This adoption is in an early phase: Only 4 ...
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The Tyranny of
Copyright
Copyright holders are asking for tougher copyright laws to
ostensibly curb piracy of intellectual property encouraged by
the spread of the Internet, but a growing protest
movement--the so-called "Copy Left"--contends that such an
approach is anathema to democratic freedoms and is strangling
...
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Know Thy
Neighbor
Virtually all networks appear to share the "six degrees of
separation" architecture outlined by Harvard's Stanley
Milgram, but the sometimes striking dissimilarities between
laboratory models and real-world networks reveal insights
critical to the development of practical network science ...
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The Code
Warrior
F-Secure security specialist Mikko Hypponen characterizes
2003 as the worst year in virus history, and singles out the
month of August as the nadir. August 2003 marked the emergence
of Blaster, self-replicating malware that served as both a
virus and a worm, and that only needed to be linked to the ...
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Inc.