Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber: Welcome to the July 21, 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 522 Date: July 21, 2003 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Site Sponsored by Hewlett Packard Company ( ) HP is the premier source for computing services, products and solutions. Responding to customers' requirements for quality and reliability at aggressive prices, HP offers performance-packed products and comprehensive services. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Top Stories for Monday, July 21, 2003: http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html "Senate Votes to Deny Funding to Computer Surveillance Effort" "Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags" "Hard-Disk Drive Industry Braces for Technology Changes" "Two Men, Two Ways to Speak Computerese and Two Big Successes" "CMU Lands $7 Million Federal Contract for Software That Thinks" "Voting Machines Need Paper Trails" "Researchers Study Internet Trust Issues, Create Solution" "Universities Compete for NSF Nanotech Program Worth Millions" "The Merging of GPS and the Web" "Sensors Guard Privacy" "Your House May Track Your Movements" "Grid Computing: Fulfilling the Promise of the Internet" "Doctoral Student Developing New Facial Recognition System" "Survival Guide: John McCarthy, Executive Director of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Project" "Digital Homes" "Every Move You Make" "Security Lockdown" "Holographic Data Storage: When Will It Happen?" ******************* News Stories *********************** "Senate Votes to Deny Funding to Computer Surveillance Effort" The Senate has voted against funding a controversial computer program backed by the Pentagon. A setback for what is now called the Terrorism Information Awareness program, the Senate added a provision to deny funding for the computer surveillance effort in ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item1 "Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags" Steve Wozniak's Wheels of Zeus company has unveiled its first product, a wireless tracking system for personal property, pets, and people. WozNet, as the system is called, involves tags attached to the person or thing to be tracked, base stations that ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item2 "Hard-Disk Drive Industry Braces for Technology Changes" New serial technologies are set to replace standard SCSI and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) interfaces over the next two years, even as hard-disk drive manufacturers prepare for an entirely new form of bit storage. Perpendicular recording will ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item3 "Two Men, Two Ways to Speak Computerese and Two Big Successes" Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum each created their open source scripting languages, Perl and Python, respectively, in the 1980s and earned the loyalty of users by providing an easy way to write code without extensive computer science expertise. Despite the ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item4 "CMU Lands $7 Million Federal Contract for Software That Thinks" Carnegie Mellon University has won a $7 million contract to develop software that will enable computer systems to learn by receiving advice and instruction from human masters. Awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item5 "Voting Machines Need Paper Trails" California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is set to issue rules for so-called "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) machines that tally election votes digitally. The case represents the on-going battle between eager advocates of updated technology and those ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item6 "Researchers Study Internet Trust Issues, Create Solution" Purdue University computer science researchers are working on creating a more trustworthy environment for online transactions. Using mathematic models, the researchers are examining how to collect more reliable information about a certain users' ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item7 "Universities Compete for NSF Nanotech Program Worth Millions" The National Science Foundation (NSF) is ready to award funding to a new university consortium that will carry forward nanotechnology research for the next decade. The new National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) will replace the ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item8 "The Merging of GPS and the Web" Corporate technology leaders still have yet to exploit the integration of global positioning system (GPS) technology and the Web, though the technical standards for doing so are emerging. Map applications, for example, could be integrated with GPS ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item9 "Sensors Guard Privacy" Tracking the location of people accurately via sensor networks while keeping their identities private is the goal of software designed by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Our work applies...anonymity or depersonalization on-the-fly to ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item10 "Your House May Track Your Movements" Pervasive computing could benefit from research in Australia involving the use of sound to track people as they move around a building. Dr. Arkady Zaslavsky, associate professor at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item11 "Grid Computing: Fulfilling the Promise of the Internet" Grid computing allows the Internet to fulfill its full potential, turning the network itself into a powerful computing platform available anytime, anywhere. On its 30th anniversary, the Internet allows collaboration and sharing throughout the world ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item12 "Doctoral Student Developing New Facial Recognition System" Virginia Tech Ph.D. engineering student and Sagem Morpho senior product engineer Creed Jones is developing software involving highly complicated mathematics in order to improve face recognition systems, whose accuracy can be affected by variant ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item13 "Survival Guide: John McCarthy, Executive Director of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Project" The Critical Infrastructure Protection Project, a joint venture between James Madison and George Mason universities in Virginia, seeks to shield the United States' critical infrastructure and solve cybersecurity problems through an interdisciplinary ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item14 "Digital Homes" The concept of the networked home--a living space characterized by "ambient intelligence" where digital devices intuit and respond to user needs--is growing in popularity thanks to a surge in broadband adoption, the development of more user-friendly ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item15 "Every Move You Make" Despite his crushing defeat to Deep Blue six years ago, world chess champion Garry Kasparov insists that computers have given chess new life--indeed, they have effected a radical transformation of the game. The addition of computers and more ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item16 "Security Lockdown" The 2003 InfoWorld Security Survey of over 500 IT executives and strategists finds that readers' security tactics have changed, with greater emphasis on internal security and less investment in outsourcing. Forty-nine percent of respondents report that their ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item17 "Holographic Data Storage: When Will It Happen?" The commercialization of holographic data storage (HDS) is being held back by a lack of funding as well as problems in finding the best recording materials, be they crystals, polymers, or glasses. Photorefractive crystals were highly touted as an HDS medium for ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0721m.html#item18 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- To review Friday's issue, please visit http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0718f.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