A Good First
Impression
Dueling Viruses Are Latest
Computer Pest
Virus authors seem to be using their latest malware not
just to hijack victims' computers, but to snipe at each other
for some as yet unclear reason, according to security experts.
Five new versions of the MyDoom, Bagle, and Netsky bugs were
discovered on the Web in the space of three ...
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'To Speak to an Operator,
Start Swearing Now'
University of Southern California researchers are working
on software that switches from automated telephony to a live
operator by sensing that a caller is angry, which could boost
customer loyalty if the technology can be practically applied.
USC professor Shrikanth Narayanan explains that a ...
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Lurking "Spyware" May Be a
Security Weak Spot
Researchers led by Steven Gribble at the University of
Washington in Seattle conducted a study of campus network
traffic and discovered that 5.1 percent of all
Internet-connected systems had one of four known spyware
programs--Cydoor, eZula, Gator, and SaveNow--running on them,
while 69 ...
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Putting Wireless to the
Test(bed)
U.S. university researchers have established a distributed
wireless testbed for the integration and testing of new
wireless communications technologies. Dubbed WHYNET and funded
with a $5.5 million National Science Foundation grant, the
meta-testbed consists of the linked wireless ...
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Warning: Blogs Can Be
Infectious
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs used Intelliseek's
BlogPulse Web crawler to mine numerous Weblogs, after which
they mapped out the connections and topics shared among a
large number of sites. Analysis showed that topics would often
appear on a small number of relatively ...
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A Car That Drives Itself?
He's Working on It
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA)
Grand Challenge is a March 13 race from Barstow, Calif., to
the California-Nevada border: The racers are automated
vehicles that will be required to cross some 200 miles
off-road without human assistance, their only guidance ...
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Tools Let Network Operators
See Their Way to Security
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
researchers have developed a new network monitoring tool that
puts raw network data in visual form so human operators can
process it more quickly and effectively. The idea for the new
software tools came after two NCSA researchers ...
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Walking
'Signature'
Researchers are working on gait signature technology whose
applications, if perfected, could include security
surveillance, medical diagnosis of movement disorders, and
computer animation. Human motion signatures would be
determined by the same techniques facial-recognition software
employs to ...
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Hands Off! That Fact Is
Mine
The Database and Collections of Information
Misappropriation Act, which is expected to be reviewed by the
House Commerce Committee on March 4, is drawing controversy
because its provisions essentially permit certain companies to
own and license facts, making anyone who copies and ...
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Paul Debevec on
Illuminating Effects
Paul Debevec of the Institute of Creative Technologies
(ICT) has spent much of his career developing techniques to
integrate computer graphics with computer vision to achieve
more realistic visual effects, and he notes that attaining
such realism greatly depends on giving computer-generated ...
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NASA Considers Open-Source
License to Publish Software
NASA is creating a license so that it can release its own
applications as open-source software, and says that a final
version should be ready by early summer. NASA has submitted a
draft to the Open Source Initiative, which accredits
open-source software standards. NASA lawyer Bryan Geurts ...
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The Future of Computing
Part 5: Evolution and the Bump
Computing continues to evolve smoothly as software tools
become more lithe and powerful and hardware scales in speed,
but eventually limits to hardware development will force a
jolting change in computing. Software evolution is shedding
more complexity as programmers take to scripting ...
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IU's CAVE Offers Virtual
Reality
Computer science majors are not the only students at
Indiana University taking advantage of the high-tech Cave
Automated Virtual Environment inside Lindley Hall. Studio art
majors Jackie Nykiel and Lisa Reinwald used the CAVE to design
a replica of an ancient Buddhist temple surrounded by a ...
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The Nuclear Weapon of
Digital Rights Law
The European Union Directive for the Enforcement of
Intellectual Property Rights has raised the ire of a number of
civil liberties groups, which describe the draft legislation
as going way beyond the controversial Digital Millennium
Copyright Act in the United States. The Electronic ...
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What Tomorrow May
Bring
The U.S. government is investing in pattern recognition
software as a tool for anticipating and stopping terrorist
incidents by organizing vast amounts of raw, unstructured
data--email, voice transcripts, surveillance photos,
etc.--into a minable model. Examples include an expansion of
the ...
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Software and the Future of
Programming Languages
Few people truly understand the scale and reach of software
or the programming languages that support it; but such
understanding is critical to addressing security, maintenance,
and functionality issues that will grow in complexity as the
embedded software base expands. It is estimated ...
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Sensors on the
March
Sensor technology has made enormous strides recently thanks
to power supply and programmability breakthroughs, and further
milestones on the horizon will help make sensors and sensor
networks even more efficient, flexible, and interoperable. So
that sensors can conserve battery power, a ...
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Rekindle the
Fire
Scott Studham of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
writes that cost-effective commodity supercomputing clusters
are effective tools for carrying out "first-principles
simulations" of such things as weather systems and basic
science, which are based on fundamental physical ...
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A Good First
Impression
B.J. Fogg, director of the Stanford University Persuasive
Technology lab, has determined through research that the first
impression of a Web site's visual design is the single most
important factor people use to establish a site's credibility
or lack of same. He says this is a disappointing ...
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