Molecular Nanotech: Benefits
and Risks
Hey, Gang, Let's Make Our
Own Supercomputer
On April 3, University of San Francisco students will
gather in a gym to lash together about 1,000 computers into a
shared high-speed network that can handle the benchmark
program, a bunch of equations that can be parsed and computed
on numerous processors concurrently. The project will ...
[read more]
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Computer-Security Efforts
Intensify
An annual conference hosted by RSA Security will be held
this week, with email fraud, spam, and new ways to hinder such
practices through the authentication of company and user IDs
being major topics of discussion. Bolstering information has
increased in importance because corporations may ...
[read more]
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E-Voting Activists: Vote
Absentee
Activist organizations in Maryland and California are
raising the insecurity of electronic voting systems and their
lack of voter verifiable audit trails as reasons why voters
should use paper absentee ballots in their March primaries.
Computer scientists have uncovered evidence to ...
[read more]
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Software Standards Seen
Aiding Auto Complexity
Experts posit that making software and standardization more
essential to automotive development will help reverse the
decline of quality and reliability that accompanies the
growing complexity of electronics. Addressing the eighth
annual Euroforum, Thomas Scharnhorst of Volkswagen ...
[read more]
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The Shapes of Things to
Come
The advent of smaller, faster processors, new materials,
and ubiquitous wireless communications will usher in PC
redesigns, which MIT Media Lab's Neil Gerschenfeld says is all
about "breaking down the barrier between the bits and atoms."
The promise of miniaturization has led to the vision of ...
[read more]
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W3C Risks Patent Tussle in
Standard Push
The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) VoiceXML 2.0 standard
is going forward despite a patent advisory group's failure to
ensure against patent claims. The W3C adopted a controversial
policy about eight months ago meant to keep essential parts of
recommendations patent-free, but the ...
[read more]
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Spam: A Reality
Check
The CAN-SPAM act has not stymied the rising tide of spam
email, but it has influenced changes in the content and
targeting of spam messages: Spammers are using provisions in
the CAN-SPAM law to make their email look legitimate,
including unsubscribe links and postal mailing addresses, for
...
[read more]
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Phone Fibbing Is the Most
Common Method for Untruths
Communications researchers at Cornell University say
communications technology has an impact on lying. Jeff
Hancock, Cornell assistant professor of communication, and
graduate students Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Thompson Ritchie
plan to present their study, "Deception and Design: ...
[read more]
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Serious Linux Security
Holes Uncovered and Patched
ISec Security Research, a Polish nonprofit organization,
discovered a number of security vulnerabilities in the Linux
kernel on Feb. 18 and released an advisory. Linux kernel
developers verified the problems and fixed them with updates.
One flaw would have allowed a hacker to get full ...
[read more]
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Roadblocks Could Slow
RFID
Criticism of radio frequency identification (RFID)
technology has often centered on potential security and
privacy issues, but technology vendors and industry observers
believe that companies wishing to adopt RFID will run into
difficulty if their software infrastructures are ill-equipped
to ...
[read more]
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Before Wi-Fi Can Go
Mainstream
A number of hurdles must be cleared before high-speed Wi-Fi
communications can truly gain mass appeal among consumers and
corporations, such as installation and security issues,
differing authentication standards at Wi-Fi hotspots, and a
lack of all-inclusive roaming agreements. Seamless ...
[read more]
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Unplugged: Charles Simonyi
Creates Software Intentionally
Intentional Software founder Charles Simonyi attributes
most software problems to a gap between design intent and the
actual coding, and cross training subject matter experts and
programmers will not solve these problems. His solution is to
move programming further upstream while ...
[read more]
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Chips to Ease Microsoft's
Big Security Nightmare
Chip manufacturers are working on new microprocessors to
block the flaws that made Microsoft issue a critical security
alert recently. Various Microsoft programs were found to be
vulnerable to "buffer overflow," which can be used to
illicitly obtain information from computers. The problem is
...
[read more]
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Tin Ears and the Social
Fabric
Within a span of five years, technology that is able to
improve the effectiveness of people working together in
information environments has grown to include Weblogs, instant
messaging, Wikis, and comment threads within blogs, and Web
services have been used to create software systems ...
[read more]
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Data
Avalanche
Managing the massive amount of data generated by
radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips will be a major
challenge, and failure to do so will result in an overload of
information. Makers of consumer packaged goods believe RFID
systems embedded in the supply chain will give them ...
[read more]
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Users Tap
Network-Monitoring Technology
The value of the sFlow draft standard, approved by the IETF
three years ago, is growing among high-speed network users,
who are employing the technology for security and network
performance tracking. Foundry Networks and Hewlett-Packard,
which developed the sFlow technology along with InMon, ...
[read more]
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Unlocking Our
Future
Sandstorm CTO and technology writer Simson Garfinkel
maintains that computer security has Grand Challenges
equivalent to putting a man on the moon or forecasting weather
via supercomputing--in fact, he was one of dozens of leading
security researchers invited by the Computing Research ...
[read more]
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Molecular Nanotech:
Benefits and Risks
The emergence of molecular nanotechnology (MNT) may be
closer than common wisdom dictates: Though a 1999 media report
indicates that the research community expects decades to pass
between the creation of a nanofactory assembler and the
fabrication of consumer goods, a summer 2003 study from ...
[read more]
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