Visions of VoIP
State Law Would Mandate
Following E-Vote Paper Trail
The California Senate voted unanimously on Aug. 29 to pass
a bill requiring e-voting systems to include a paper trail,
which was conceived by computer scientists as a safeguard
against election fraud or voting errors. "People need and
deserve to know their votes have been counted accurately, ...
[read more]
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Universal Software,
Universal Appeal
Addressing the inefficiencies of designing software for
devices that run on heterogeneous networks is the underlying
motivation of the IST-funded DEGAS project, which devised a
theory for managing such networks and created tools to write
software that can work on a wide spectrum of devices. Demos
...
[read more]
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Sampling Finds Federal Data
Mining Fails to Assure Privacy
Protections
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) held a study of
five federal agencies that employ data mining and issued a
report on Aug. 29 concluding that none of the agencies fully
comply with the Privacy Act, federal information security
statutes, or government directives concerning the ...
[read more]
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Don't Fear Software
Patents
International Intellectual Property Institute Chairman
Bruce Lehman says the concern over software patents is
overblown, and sees no evidence that such patents have had a
detrimental effect on the U.S. software industry in the 24
years since the landmark Supreme Court decision that
legitimized ...
[read more]
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Hollywood, Microsoft Align
on New Windows
As part of Microsoft's promise to Hollywood studios to
shield their content from video piracy, the next version of
the Windows operating system, called Vista, will feature
unprecedented protections. The most fundamental change will be
the management of some audio and video in a new "protected ...
[read more]
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Distance Detection May Help
Secure Wi-Fi
At last week's Fall Intel Developer Forum, Intel senior
fellow Justin Rattner unveiled a method of user identification
that could lead to more secure Wi-Fi networks. The technology,
known as precision location, measures the time it takes for
packets to travel back and forth from an ...
[read more]
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Research Uncovers Genetic
Instructions to Build Life
The genetic instructions for building mammalian life have
been discovered by University of Toronto researchers, who
accomplished this breakthrough by feeding biological data into
an artificial intelligence program, as detailed in the Aug. 28
issue of Nature Genetics. University of Toronto ...
[read more]
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Intel Helps UCSD Teach
Students About Wireless, Multimedia Embedded
Systems
Intel is donating $193,638 worth of microprocessor
development kits typically reserved for its own developers or
partner companies to the University of California, San Diego.
The kits are designed for the creation of embedded systems
with multimedia and wireless applications in ...
[read more]
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Scientists Reignite Open
Access Debate
A group of computer scientists that includes World Wide Web
inventor and Southampton University professor Tim Berners-Lee
yesterday issued a rebuttal to journal publishers' allegations
that freely releasing publicly funded research on the Internet
will ultimately destroy scientific ...
[read more]
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Open Source Project Aims
at Middleware
Companies' increasing dependence on middleware has led to
an open source movement from the Apache Software Foundation,
known as Synapse, that could eventually challenge commercial
applications such as IBM's WebSphereMQ and Tibco's Rendezvous.
Though Synapse is still in its embryonic stages, and ...
[read more]
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Faster Supercomputers
Aiding Weather Forecasts
Accurate weather forecasts can mean the difference between
life and death when killer storms and other dangerous
meteorological conditions arise, and they also play a critical
role in the global economy; for example, up to one-third of
the American GDP--$3 trillion worth of goods and services--is
...
[read more]
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LANL Computers Weather
Daily Cyber Assaults
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) runs 25,000 computers
that process 850GB of data in 20 million legitimate sessions
per day. Up to 15 million malicious sessions occurred during
peak traffic between May and mid-August with more than 90% of
weekend activity coming from malicious ...
[read more]
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Google Talk Gives Boost to
XMPP
Google's venture into the IM sector will lend considerable
support to the emerging protocol on which it is based: the
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). XMPP and
SIMPLE appeared a few years ago as the two major protocols
competing for hegemony in the IM space; XMPP is based ...
[read more]
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The Future of Computer
Worms
Trend Micro research engineer David Sancho outlines
possible future attack strategies of bot worms and what steps
can be taken to counter them. He says the modular design of
bot worms enables them to exploit vulnerabilities faster,
which means the interim between the disclosure of a ...
[read more]
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Senator Coleman Denounces
U.N. Internet Governance Report
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) recently decried a U.N.
proposal to wrest away governance of the Internet from the
United States. The United Nations' Working Group on Internet
Governance (WGIG) has issued a report suggesting that it
supplant the U.S. in overseeing the evolution of the ...
[read more]
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Fewer CS Majors Not a Big
Concern
Chela Education Financing CIO Virginia Robbins argues that
most corporations have little use for people with computer
science degrees per se. Rather, business-oriented personnel
(marketers, accountants, and the like) with computer skills
are desired. Robbins does not think the decline ...
[read more]
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Supernets for Global
Research to Shine at iGrid
The iGrid alliance will meet next month to demonstrate
global-computing applications of 10Gbps optical networks
developed by researchers from 21 countries. The group has been
meeting every two years or so since 1998 to prototype the
transnational use of existing 10Gbps networks for scientific
...
[read more]
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New Legal
Code
The Brookings Institution guest scholar and author Ben
Klemens suggests that software developers can create
innovative new products without running afoul of
patent-holders by having software covered by copyright law
rather than patent protection. Copyrighting inventions has the
advantage of ...
[read more]
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Visions of
VoIP
Although the vision of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
continues to outclass the reality, the technology's potential
for digital convergence, cost savings, and cool
experimentation is spurring experts to predict wide consumer
adoption. Since the emergence of Asynchronous Transfer Mode
...
[read more]
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