One Week With the
Gurus
Bush's High-Tech Report
Card
Silicon Valley executives give the Bush administration's
efforts to shore up the U.S. high-tech industry a failing
grade, complaining that too many goals remain unrealized. The
White House received high marks for prioritizing education,
passing class-action lawsuit reforms, and strongly ...
[read more]
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Japan Plans Mind-Boggling
Number-Cruncher
Japan announced plans on July 25 to construct an amazingly
powerful supercomputer for modeling climate change, the
formation of galaxies, and new drug behavior that will likely
cost between $712 million and $890 million and involve the
participation of NEC, Hitachi, Kyushu University, ...
[read more]
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Companies See 'Crisis' in
R&D
A lack of leadership in federal cybersecurity research and
development funding will have serious long-term consequences
for the United States without a quick resolution, according to
a Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA) report released on
July 25. The organization says cybersecurity has ...
[read more]
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Insecurity at Black
Hat
Issues to be discussed at this week's Black Hat Briefings
conference and the subsequent DefCon event include new kinds
of hacker exploits and targets, such as weaknesses in
antivirus software. Internet Security Systems (ISS)
researchers Neel Mehta and Alex Wheeler plan to disclose ...
[read more]
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Privacy Guru Locks Down
VoIP
PGP email creator Phil Zimmermann will present his
prototype for encrypting VoIP calls later this week at the
BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas. Zimmermann says
VoIP calls are susceptible to eavesdropping, and that hackers
can sabotage calls and reroute them to an alternate number; he
...
[read more]
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Change in Daylight-Saving
Time Could Confuse Some Programs
Congress is expected to soon pass the Energy Policy Act of
2005, which proposes a four-week extension of daylight-saving
time (DST), an adjustment that could confuse applications and
electronic gadgets programmed to re-calibrate their internal
clocks according to the "summer schedule" the ...
[read more]
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Two Professors Go Fishing
for Phishers
Stanford computer science professors John Mitchell and Dan
Boneh are leading a team developing anti-phishing tools
designed to help email users avoid bogus Web sites and prevent
crooks from stealing other peoples' passwords. The SpoofGuard
software plug-in the team created last year ...
[read more]
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China Not a Big Tech
Innovator, But It's Spending a Lot on
R&D
Some experts say China's lack of technology innovation is
keeping its economy from joining the ranks of world leaders
such as the United States, although the country is spending
billions of dollars on research and development. "China is
making a lot of progress in technology, but they ...
[read more]
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The Automated 'Virtual
Commentator' for Video Content
A "virtual commentator" algorithm developed by the
IST-funded COGVISYS project can automatically create textual
descriptions of video streams by assessing specific cues from
the video input signal, which are translated into conceptual
representations and then converted into natural language ...
[read more]
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Dual Roles: The Changing
Face of IT
The erosion of U.S. computer programming and other low- to
mid-level tech jobs as a result of offshoring and outsourcing
is causing the IT worker's profile to change, concludes a new
report from Forrester Research. Surviving senior-level job
holders--CIOs, project managers, vendor managers ...
[read more]
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Traffic Model Maps
Congestion
Researchers at Oxford University in England have modeled
networks in an effort to determine the optimum passage of
traffic. Their model, a wheel with spokes on the inside,
applies with equal validity to the flow of blood, street
traffic, and computer networks, because in all those ...
[read more]
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Grid Group Issues Security
Requirements
The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) issued a list of
security requirements identifying and addressing
vulnerabilities common to grids in the hope of spurring more
widespread adoption of grid technology by enterprises,
including provisioning and deprovisioning, and the potential
weaknesses of ...
[read more]
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The Weird Web and Other
Safety Concerns
Tech visionary Bill Joy, speaking at the recent AlwaysOn
Innovation conference, discussed how during his tenure at Sun
Microsystems he envisioned the concept of a "Here Web" that is
always accessible through mobile devices. He also talked about
the as-yet-unrealized "Weird Web," in ...
[read more]
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Making Purchases at Your
Fingers' Ends
Biometrics, the technology that identifies a person through
certain physical attributes, is enjoying greater popularity in
the consumer retail arena, where some companies are offering a
payment option where, by pressing a finger to a screen, a
customer's payment information is ...
[read more]
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Co-opting the Creative
Revolution
Digital thinkers say organizations will have to get used to
distributed groups of people working together to innovate on
content now that more powerful and easy-to-use computing tools
are in their hands. At the Technology, Entertainment and
Design (TED) conference in Oxford, U.K., ...
[read more]
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Buggy Software: Up From a
Low-Quality Quagmire
CIOs are studying how software bugs are introduced into the
application development process and why they seem so resistant
to prevention in an effort to stave off the tremendous losses
in revenue, production, data, and customer satisfaction such
flaws can entail. Experts on bad software blame ...
[read more]
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Seamless Communications
Closer as 3G, LAN Fuse
Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information
and Communications Technology (NICT) are working on a
next-generation mobile network project that integrates
third-generation cellular and wireless LAN technologies,
overcoming protocol incompatibilities to combine the ubiquity
of the former ...
[read more]
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Voting Machine Standards
Move Forward
The widespread adoption of electronic voting systems in
U.S. states and territories necessitates the continuous
upgrading of voting machine and voting machine software
standards, and the IEEE and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) are working on such standards.
The IEEE ...
[read more]
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One Week With the
Gurus
The 18th annual Software Development West Conference and
Expo was a beehive of discussion about topics ranging from
project agility to programming languages to user interface
design. Keynote speaker and IBM computing pioneer Jerry
Weinberg wryly observed that computing technology's awesome
...
[read more]
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