The Interplanetary
Internet
US Officials Go to Hackers'
Convention to Recruit
The annual Defcon hacker conference illustrates the
mutually beneficial relationship between hackers and the
government, as almost 50 percent of the Defcon audience are
federal employees. Leading federal officials attend the
conference to recruit hackers for government work, cultivate
...
[read more]
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New Energy Bill Has
Cybersecurity Repercussions
President Bush signed a new bill into law this week that
grants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the
authority to set up a national electric reliability entity
that can monitor and review reliability standards, and the
FERC's Ellen Vancko said her organization plans to adopt ...
[read more]
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DHS Head: Businesses Need
to Focus on Cybersecurity
Speaking at the InfraGard National Conference on Aug. 10,
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael
Chertoff urged businesses to devote more attention to
cybersecurity, noting that the private sector needs more
enticements to develop and/or enhance cybersecurity products;
...
[read more]
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Searching for Intelligence
in Edinburgh
Despite the many significant advances in artificial
intelligence exhibited at Edinburgh's recent International
Joint Conference in AI, the industry remains in its infancy,
beset by seemingly unsolvable technical challenges. The
Turkish scientist Zeynep Kiziltan received an award for her
research ...
[read more]
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Remote-Controlled Humans
Enhance Immersive Games
One of the research projects highlighted at the recent 2005
SIGGRAPH conference was a Japanese initiative to control
humans remotely, which NTT researcher Taero Maeda and
colleagues say could be used to enhance the realism of
computer games. The NTT scientists' method involves the remote
stimulation ...
[read more]
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Jerk-O-Meter Rates Phone
Chatter
The Jerk-O-Meter is a software program for cell phones that
can rate a speaker's level of engagement on a scale of 0
percent to 100 percent via analysis of speech patterns and
voice tones. The software is being developed by MIT
researchers under the direction of Anmol Madan, who ...
[read more]
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Next Year's H-1B Visa Quota
Almost Filled
Immigration official Chris Bentley expects the H-1B visa
cap to be reached about two months before the beginning of
fiscal year 2006, according to a Monday announcement. As of
Aug. 4 there were close to 52,000 applications for visas, with
22,383 visas granted and 29,556 pending. H-1Bs are granted ...
[read more]
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Envisioning a Wireless
Future
As Qualcomm recently celebrated its 20th anniversary by
looking back at the state of wireless communications in 1985,
David Mock, author of "The Qualcomm Equation," looks forward
and imagines a world where communications are governed by
hands-free devices and augmented reality. With the ...
[read more]
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Robotics: How to Have Fun
and Learn a Lot Doing It
Mysterious Robo Lab is a program that teaches children
between 10 and 14 years of age how to build robots through
teamwork while also introducing them to fundamental computer
programming and physics. The project was conducted by Timothy
Huff, an instructor with the Regional Access for ...
[read more]
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East Bay Lab's Problem
Solver Tackles Terrorism
Edmond Chow is leader of the Complex Networks project at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Center for Applied
Scientific Computing, where he is helping the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security mine massive databases of information as
part of a counter-terrorism effort, among other things. ...
[read more]
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LinuxWorld SF: OSDL
Announces Patent Commons Project
The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in concerned that
software patents are having a detrimental effect on
open-source collaboration, and mitigating that threat is the
goal behind the Patent Commons initiative the organization
announced on Aug. 9. The effort will involve the collection
...
[read more]
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PluggedIn: Wireless
Networks--Easy Hacker Pickings
Wireless networks are highly vulnerable to exploitation, so
much so that hackers regularly compete to find open Wi-Fi
connections. Mapping out wireless access points, a practice
known as wardriving, is very popular, as demonstrated by
wardriving contests hosted at the recent Defcon hacker ...
[read more]
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E-Voting Vendors Hit With
New Rule
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson recently
announced a new rule requiring e-voting machine manufacturers
to certify that their products comply with the federal Help
America Vote Act (HAVA) to guarantee that voters will not end
up with unreliable systems as technology and ...
[read more]
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IA
Roadmap
The National Security Agency (NSA) is working on an
information assurance (IA) roadmap for the Department of
Defense's Global Information Grid (GIG) effort, with the
protection of information throughout the entire grid being an
overarching priority. Basic elements of the IA roadmap include
the ...
[read more]
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Professor Develops
Software to Help Grade Essays
Qualrus is a computer program developed by University of
Missouri at Columbia sociology professor Ed Brent that can
grade students' essays and provide feedback on how their work
can be improved. The software searches for key words and terms
to assess how well the paper covers the assigned ...
[read more]
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Looking Back to See the
Future
Through a partnership with Stanford University and NASA,
Silicon Graphics has developed a sophisticated,
high-resolution digital imaging simulation. At a recent press
conference, scientists displayed 60,000 two-dimensional images
of a 2,000-year-old mummy that form composite
three-dimensional ...
[read more]
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The "Terrorism"
Information Awareness Initiative
Evergreen Interactive Systems President and author Chris
Peters writes that the U.S. government's attempt to prevent
terrorism through the Information Awareness Office's Terrorism
Information Awareness (TIA) initiative is fraught with
controversy, particularly in its ambition to identify ...
[read more]
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The Interplanetary
Internet
Ambitious plans for future space exploration cannot be
realized without an effective communications network to link
Earth with its far-flung explorers, and all of NASA is in
agreement that the ideal scheme would be an Internet that
spans between planets. But the space agency is split over ...
[read more]
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