Identity Crisis
Apple Plans to Switch From
I.B.M. to Intel for Chips
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is planning an alliance with Intel
that will have future Macintoshes powered by Intel chips in an
effort to counter Microsoft and Sony's growing influence in
home multimedia. The shift from the IBM and Motorola-developed
PowerPC to Intel chips will be a serious engineering ...
[read more]
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BlackBoxVoting Finds Voting
Scan Machines Hackable
Recent findings by e-voting technology expert Bev Harris
and BlackBoxVoting.org indicate that Diebold optical scanning
machines are susceptible to hacking, which makes them just as
big a risk for election fraud as touch-screen voting machines.
Harris confirms that her technical ...
[read more]
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Computer Science Losing
Students
The dimming job prospects for IT workers has more students
avoiding computer science as a major, according to a new study
from the Computer Research Association authored by Stuart
Zweben, chairman of computer science and engineering at Ohio
State University. ...
[read more]
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End User: Thumbs Up for
Easy Use
Data delivered to mobile devices is on the rise, as is
research on how to visualize and wade through such information
easily, as evident by the papers presented at ACM's CHI 2005
conference last April. Microsoft Research sociologist Richard
Harper says communication and navigation ...
[read more]
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New Hack Cracks 'Secure'
Bluetooth Devices
Bluetooth security features no longer have to be
deactivated for Bluetooth-enabled devices to be attacked,
thanks to a method discovered by Israeli cryptographers. A
British cryptographer demonstrated last April that a hacker
could hijack Bluetooth devices in secure mode, but only if he
...
[read more]
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New Group Aims to Move
Women Into Top IT Research Posts
One out of three women involved in IT research wants a
top-level research job, compared with 22 percent of men,
according to the women@CL (Women in the Computer Laboratory)
initiative. However, just one woman in 20 is a computing
professor, one in eight is a researcher, and one in four is a
...
[read more]
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FBI Pushed Ahead With
Troubled Software
A confidential report to the House Appropriations Committee
indicates that the FBI was aware that its $170 million Virtual
Case File (VCF) system was highly flawed, but willfully
pressed on with a $17 million pilot program last December,
even though by then it was obvious that the software would ...
[read more]
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UB's Supercomputing Center
Makes Virtual Traffic Make Sense to the
Public
Visualization software developed by researchers at the
Center for Computational Research (CCR) in the University at
Buffalo's New York State Center of Excellence in
Bioinformatics and Life Sciences is being used to reconstruct
car accidents and simulate traffic in three dimensions. The
...
[read more]
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Japanese Has High Hopes for
Robot
Fears that Japan's technology leadership is eroding with
the growing influence of China and increasingly successful
businesses in other Asian countries have spurred the
nationwide "super science" effort to cultivate future Japanese
tech leaders by providing money for high schools to finance
...
[read more]
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Making SMART Homes
Smarter
Juan Carlos Augusto with the University of Ulster's School
of Computing and Mathematics seeks to further "smart homes"
technology through the application of ambient intelligence. He
says houses equipped with sensors can detect movement as well
as determine its cause, and the information ...
[read more]
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The Philosophical Case for
Expanding the Domain Name Space
Currently, TLDs fall into two categories: those that
identify a geographic location, such as .uk for the United
Kingdom, and those that identify a type of entity, such as
.com for commercial organizations. In this opinion piece,
CentralNic CIO Gavin Brown suggests that DNS stakeholders take
these ...
[read more]
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Device Drivers Filled With
Flaws, Threaten Security
Although operating system code has improved in recent
years, device drivers still have numerous flaws that threaten
operating system security. The responsibility of securing
device driver code lies primarily with the third-party
hardware vendors that create the drivers, but also with ...
[read more]
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For the
Record
Government agencies are grappling with an explosion of
digital records and a lack of policy and technology standards
directed toward those records. Wisconsin CIO Matt Miszewski
notes that while digitization has made government processes
more efficient, existing records retention policy and ...
[read more]
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Revitalizing Computing
Science Education
Computing science (CS) departments must make their courses
more attractive and more reflective of current IT industry
trends in order to reverse the decline of student enrollments,
writes University of Guelph professor Qusay H. Mahmoud. One of
the most discouraging factors for prospective CS ...
[read more]
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Global Technology and
Local Patents
University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor George H.
Pike confirms the territoriality of patent law as a result of
the global expansion of the Internet and its patented
technologies and business methods. He recommends that U.S.
patent holders recognize available options to shield their ...
[read more]
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Transformational
Communications
The U.S. military is moving ahead with efforts to deploy
wireless tactical networks to facilitate the sharing of
battlefield knowledge in real time, a concept known as
transformational communications. In a shared knowledge
environment, troops, ground vehicles, aircraft, sensors,
satellites, ...
[read more]
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Identity
Crisis
Moves by the U.S. Transportation and Homeland Security
departments to standardize driver's licenses have come under
fire by civil libertarians, who allege that such a maneuver
might lead to a de facto national ID card that could be used
to monitor citizens as well as legal immigrants. Secure ...
[read more]
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