A Conversation With Teresa
Meng
Easier Internet Wiretaps
Sought
An FCC petition recently filed by U.S. Justice Department
lawyers asserts that Internet broadband and online telephone
providers should be beholden to the same laws that require
traditional telecom providers to allow the FBI to set up
wiretaps and other surveillance measures to monitor
communications. ...
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Tech Jobs: Linux on the
Move
The market for Linux programmers, system administrators,
and other experts is growing, but with threats of outsourcing
and automation in the background. With Linux server sales up
42% for the year and major IT vendors IBM and Sun Microsystems
planning Linux desktop initiatives, the ...
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If You Want to Protect a
Security Secret, Make Sure It's Public
The U.S. government recently awarded two self-proclaimed
"Linux hackers" for their publicly developed encryption
scheme, and will soon begin using the Daemen-Rijmen Advanced
Encryption Standard for all top-secret communication. The
competition was an entirely open process with extensive ...
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Privacy Fears Erode Support
For a Network to Fight Crime
The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange
(Matrix), envisioned as a law enforcement tool for tracking
down terrorists and other criminals by integrating and mining
information from public and private databases--vehicle
registrations, driver's license data, real estate ...
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Search Tool Aids
Browsing
With funding from the Palo Alto Research Center, Carnegie
Mellon University researchers have developed prototype
software that can help Web surfers find the data they want
faster. ScentTrails shows how strongly the search results
match the topics the user is querying by enlarging the font
size of ...
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Robots to Get Boss
Upgrades
Attendees at this week's Emerging Robotic Technologies and
Applications Conference attested that next-generation robots
will not just have military applications, but entertainment
and caregiver applications as well. IRobot co-founder Rodney
Brooks, whose company invented the Roomba robot vacuum ...
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Emotional About
Design
Former Apple fellow and Northwestern University professor
of computer science, psychology, and cognitive science Don
Norman, whose book "The Psychology of Everyday Things" is
regarded as a milestone in the way product designers perceive
usability, is an advocate of emotional design, ...
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$2 Million NSF Grant Funds
Grid Security Research and Builds Self-Defense Toolkits at
USC
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2 million
grant to underwrite a joint project between University of
Southern California computer scientists and international
partners to develop an automated defense system for computer
grids. Project leader Kai Hwang of the USC ...
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DARPA Aims for Machine
Cognition
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants
to develop the first cognitive personal assistant--a computer
that can learn from experience and anticipate its user's needs
based on the data. "They need to be able to learn about their
environment over time so that once they ...
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An Effort to Make Arabic
Easier
Arabetics, a simplified Arabic alphabet that can be read
right-to-left in the traditional Arabic manner or
left-to-right in English fashion, is the result of a two-year
effort by Saad D. Abulhab, director of technology at New
York's Baruch College, to make Arabic less intimidating to ...
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Robot Designers Get in the
Swim
Aqua, an underwater robot designed by Canadian researchers
at McGill University, is equipped with six individually
controlled rotating flippers that enable the machine to swim,
dive, perambulate, and sit on the bottom of the sea floor. The
robot is controlled by a laptop connected to a ...
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Watts Humphrey on Software
Quality
The Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software
Process (TSP) are designed to show individual developers and
their teams how to apply the principles of the Software
Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in
their work, according to Watts S. Humphrey in an interview ...
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The Path to
Safety?
Some of the biggest U.S. companies are due this month to
announce voluntary recommendations to secure
cyber-infrastructure, in an effort to keep the federal
government from enacting legislation to make it mandatory.
Federal policymakers fear that industry-owned networks are
vulnerable to terrorist ...
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The Many Forms of
'Rugged'
The U.S. Air Force Standard Systems Group recently awarded
the Information Technology tool blanket purchase agreements
(BPAs) to six providers of ruggedized computers, reflecting
the increasing need for more reliable mobile computing
technologies. There are several divisions of ruggedized ...
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Return of the Homebrew
Coder
Henry Ford's assembly line and computerized supply chains
squelched the lively trade of cobblers, tailors, and
carpenters, but now a new type of artisan is reversing the
trend--the homebrew coder. Programmers have long distributed
their shareware via dial-up bulletin boards, computer disks
...
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America's Flimsy
Fortress
Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier dismisses
the tremendous effort to beef up homeland security in the wake
of the Sept. 11 tragedy as largely ineffectual. He observes
that security technologies that have become embedded in our
daily lives--suspected terrorist databases, face ...
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Fighting a War of
Words
The war on terrorism cannot be won unless effective and
accurate translation software is provided, and government
agencies are spearheading the development of next-generation
multilingual text-based technologies to make this dream a
reality. The U.S. Defense Department's Language and Speech ...
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A Conversation With Teresa
Meng
Atheros Communications founder Teresa Meng, now Reid Dennis
Professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University,
explains that she set up Atheros "to provide the technology to
change [people's perception of wireless] so that when people
think about wireless in the future, they ...
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