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Отправлено: 9 февраля 2004 г. 21:02
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Тема: TechNews Alert for Monday, Feb. 9, 2004
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ACM TechNews
February 9, 2004

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Online Search Engines Help Lift Cover of Privacy
  • Chip That Speaks Languages of Asia Levels Playing Field
  • Securing Electronic Voting
  • MIT Student Dances with Robots
  • Smart Switching Could Solve Communication Tangle
  • Software Innovation Is Dead
  • False Hope for Stopping Spam
  • Official Urges Strengthening of Anti-Terrorism Strategies
  • Voice XML 2.0 Nears Final W3C Standard
  • The Net: Safety, Blogs and Protocols
  • Why 802.11 Is Underhyped
  • Tackling the Secure Web Mail Challenge
  • Apple Continues Safari for Panther Users
  • Storage Reality Check--Open Systems Standardization
  • Senator Calls for Mandatory Reporting of Viruses
  • Beating a Path to the Datacenter
  • SIP Rollouts Hit Variety of Snags
  • 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World

     

    Online Search Engines Help Lift Cover of Privacy

    Sophisticated search engines such as Google are being used to legally seek out and uncover confidential information and documents--credit card numbers, spreadsheets, Social Security numbers, etc.--and Computer Sciences researcher Johnny Long reports than "tens of thousands" of Web sites are ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Chip That Speaks Languages of Asia Levels Playing Field

    A breakthrough in microchip technology could significantly lower the cost of PCs in China and help remove Asia's dependence on Western high-tech. Culturecom Holdings researcher Chu Bong-foo has developed a chip that is responsive to the myriad characters of Chinese and other Asian languages. ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Securing Electronic Voting

    A recent review of Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting machines commissioned from Raba Technologies by the Maryland legislature indicates that the systems' software suffers from vulnerabilities that would allow votes to be manipulated. The researchers reported that they altered voting ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    MIT Student Dances with Robots

    MIT graduate student Sommer Gentry is investigating how dancing partners communicate haptically (through movement) to perform coordinated actions, and the insights she is drawing from her experiments could be applied to human-robot collaboration. She says that robotic surgical assistants ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Smart Switching Could Solve Communication Tangle

    The Mercury system currently under development at IBM could enable people to seamlessly switch between communications modes without interrupting the flow of discussion, using a combination of location-aware and context-aware methods. Mercury was devised by IBM's Hui Lei and the University of ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Software Innovation Is Dead

    Jonathan Love, a computing student at Imperial College, London, claims that software innovation is dead, arguing that software developers are no longer motivated to pursue innovative projects. He reports that security software has experienced the largest amount of growth in the last several years, ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    False Hope for Stopping Spam

    Legislative attempts to control spam, such as the recently passed CAN-SPAM Act, are unlikely to significantly impede the deluge of junk email, partly because the amount of spam originating outside the United States is growing. Anti-spam advocates gathered at MIT's Spam Conference in January ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Official Urges Strengthening of Anti-Terrorism Strategies

    The Bush administration needs to strengthen its plans for cybersecurity, data collection, and related fields as it works to fight terrorism, says Randall Yim, General Accounting Office managing director of homeland security and justice issues. "We're moving to the implementation stage, ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Voice XML 2.0 Nears Final W3C Standard

    The Voice XML 2.0 specification took the next-to-last step towards becoming an official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard with its publication as a Proposed Recommendation by the W3C. The consortium declared that the Voice XML standard will provide access to Web-based services to an ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    The Net: Safety, Blogs and Protocols

    Uncertainty abounds when the topic is the immediate future of the Internet, and while the subject is debated regularly on email lists, Web sites, and discussion groups, corporations and individuals will have a hand in shaping the technology. Hackers have stepped up their attacks, prompting concerns ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Why 802.11 Is Underhyped

    People have failed to recognize the significance of the 802.11 communications standard, considering the impact Wi-Fi will have on the wireless communications industry, writes Benchmark Capital's J. William Gurley. Although some vendors are pushing competing technologies, 802.11b ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Tackling the Secure Web Mail Challenge

    The secure Web mail technology sector is trending toward appliances that serve other email infrastructure security purposes besides Web mail protection, but they require some knowledge of how to handle Web mail security, writes information security professional Keith Pasley. Web-based ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Apple Continues Safari for Panther Users

    Apple has rolled out Safari version 1.2, an upgrade to its Safari platform whose features include built-in Google search; a new technique for naming, organizing, and presenting bookmarks; tabbed browsing; a SnapBack tool that allows users to return to search results instantaneously; and automatic ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Storage Reality Check--Open Systems Standardization

    Open systems storage lags behind the standards compliance and interoperability expectations of open systems networking, and catching up may ultimately prove impossible. To appease customers' desire to retain vendor value-added features and establish interoperability, the open ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Senator Calls for Mandatory Reporting of Viruses

    There is a flaw in the Homeland Security Department's virus alert system, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who contends that the announcement of the email alert system last month by the agency's National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) was a challenge to hackers to mimic the ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    Beating a Path to the Datacenter

    Linux creator Linus Torvalds expects the recently released Linux v2.6 kernel to be a significant driver of Linux's migration into the corporate datacenter. "The greatest impact is really how we've extended the reach of the kernel; both up through scalability to enterprise hardware, and down to ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    SIP Rollouts Hit Variety of Snags

    The emerging Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard is designed to facilitate real-time multimedia communications on the Internet, but unanticipated interoperability problems are holding up the rollout of commercial Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. These problems ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World

    Yuqing Gao of IBM's Watson Research Center has set the ambitious goal of developing universal translation software that uses semantic analysis in which meaning is extrapolated from phrases in one language and converted into any other language; the progress toward universal translation is being ...

    [read more]

    to the top


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