Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber: Welcome to the July 11, 2003 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. For instructions on how to unsubscribe from this service, please see below. ACM's MemberNet is now online. For the latest on ACM activities, member benefits, and industry issues, visit http://www.acm.org/membernet Remember to check out our hot new online essay and opinion magazine, Ubiquity, at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ACM TechNews Volume 5, Number 518 Date: July 11, 2003 Top Stories for Friday, July 11, 2003: http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html "Half-Dozen Anti-Spam Bills Presented to Congress" "Cybersecurity Laws Expected" "Visionaries See Flexible Computers Using Less Power" "Hacker Plot Hijacks PCs for Sex Sites" "Machines That Reproduce May Be Reality" "U.S. Researchers Invent Wall Climbing Robot" "Taking the Measure of IT's Pain" "Military Campaigns for New Net" "The New Card Shark" "A Linux Mystery: Configuring for Virtual Processors" "OASIS Takes the Wraps Off SPML" "Researchers Keep an Eye on the Future of Security" "Software Finds Tunes You Want to Hear" "Computer That Can Tell the Write Sex Just by Reading" "Sensors of the World, Unite!" "Pipelining the Web" "I.T. Professionals Cash in on Company Training" "A Conversation With Jim Gray" "Model Maker" ******************* News Stories *********************** "Half-Dozen Anti-Spam Bills Presented to Congress" Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) says the spam issue has reached "a tipping point" where Congress will either have to impose tough spam regulations or institute a prohibition on all forms of unsolicited commercial email, which is estimated to be costing ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item1 "Cybersecurity Laws Expected" Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) told attendees at a recent forum on e-government and cybersecurity that Congress will pass legislation this year that outlines the standards businesses should follow to fortify their cyber-defenses, but added that it ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item2 "Visionaries See Flexible Computers Using Less Power" Expert computer engineering groups convening in Germany predict Moore's Law will continue for approximately 10 more years, while semiconductors will continue to be silicon-based. Although quantum and neuro-computers may exist on the sidelines, ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item3 "Hacker Plot Hijacks PCs for Sex Sites" Security experts recently indicated that a ring of hackers are hijacking home computers with high-speed Internet access, and equipping them with software that sends them pornographic material and offers to sign up for explicit Web pages as ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item4 "Machines That Reproduce May Be Reality" A team of Canadian researchers from the University of Waterloo and the National Research Council of Canada are attempting to illustrate the importance of self-replicating machines to nanotechnology by developing a digital primordial soup where ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item5 "U.S. Researchers Invent Wall Climbing Robot" A number of initiatives being overseen by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) focus on technologies that will enhance homeland security and military operations. American and Canadian engineers have collaborated to develop a ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item6 "Taking the Measure of IT's Pain" Economic Policy Institute expert Jared Bernstein says Labor Department statistics show U.S. mathematicians and computer scientists are suffering from record unemployment and real-wage decreases. Jobless rolls for those workers are at the highest ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item7 "Military Campaigns for New Net" The U.S. Defense Department plans to dramatically improve Internet-coordinated battlefield tactics by becoming an early adopter of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a next-generation IP designed to eliminate the overcrowding of Net-connected ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item8 "The New Card Shark" Online gambling and poker software is changing the face of the real-world game, allowing players who hardly play in casinos to learn effective card strategy. The 2003 World Series of Poker coup by Chris Moneymaker, an accountant who had never before ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item9 "A Linux Mystery: Configuring for Virtual Processors" Hyperthreading, or simultaneous multithreading, is a process designed to speed up application performance by coaxing the operating system to regard a single physical processor as two or more logical processors, thus allowing one processor to ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item10 "OASIS Takes the Wraps Off SPML" Members of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) used the Burton Group's recent Catalyst conference to unveil Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML), an open standards-based XML modification that ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item11 "Researchers Keep an Eye on the Future of Security" Biometric security systems such as fingerprint and iris scanners are currently a niche technology, but a team of Kent University researchers expects to widen the acceptance of such interfaces through the development of stronger and more dependable tools. ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item12 "Software Finds Tunes You Want to Hear" University of Rochester researcher Mitsunori Ogihara is developing software that analyzes signals and patterns in songs and sorts them by genre and emotional content. Such a program could be used to sift through stored digital files or radio ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item13 "Computer That Can Tell the Write Sex Just by Reading" A computer algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel at Israel's Bar Ilan University can reportedly determine the gender of an author with 80 percent accuracy. The program was fed 604 documents from the British National Corpus that were equally split between male ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item14 "Sensors of the World, Unite!" Ember CTO Robert Poor expects self-organizing wireless sensor networks to provide users with numerous advantages, and his company, a spinoff of MIT, is one of the first to commercialize the technology. Poor remarks that "sensor networks" should not ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item15 "Pipelining the Web" Businesses are laying down Web-service active intermediaries or "pipelines" to link their computer systems to internal business units, business partners, and clients; the flexibility of a pipeline architecture enables an enterprise to more easily adapt ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item16 "IT Professionals Cash in on Company Training" The latest InformationWeek Research IT Salary Survey suggest that a large number of American IT employees plan to access training as they approach 2004, despite having to work extended schedules and take on extra assignments. The survey examines the responses ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item17 "A Conversation With Jim Gray" In an interview with the University of California, Berkeley's David Patterson, Microsoft Bay Area Research Center director and ACM Turing Award recipient Jim Gray discusses the future of disk storage and its implications. Gray notes that disk ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item18 "Model Maker" Icosystem Chairman Eric Bonabeau is a strong advocate of agent-based modeling, a simulation technique that is used to pattern the behavior of complex systems such as computer networks by studying the function of their most fundamental elements. ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0711f.html#item19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- To review Wednesday's issue, please please visit http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0709w.html -- To visit the TechNews home page, point your browser to: http://www.acm.org/technews/ -- To unsubscribe from the ACM TechNews Early Alert Service: Please send a separate email to listserv@listserv2.acm.org with the line signoff technews in the body of your message. -- Please note that replying directly to this message does not automatically unsubscribe you from the TechNews list. -- To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact: technews@hq.acm.org -- ACM may have a different email address on file for you, so if you're unable to "unsubscribe" yourself, please direct your request to: technews-request@acm.org We will remove your name from the TechNews list on your behalf. -- For help with technical problems, including problems with leaving the list, please write to: technews-request@acm.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Site Sponsored by IBM () Purchase a select ThinkPadR notebook and receive free double memory. 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