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Отправлено: 31 августа 2005 г. 21:15
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Тема: ACM TechNews - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
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ACM TechNews
August 31, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • State Law Would Mandate Following E-Vote Paper Trail
  • Universal Software, Universal Appeal
  • Sampling Finds Federal Data Mining Fails to Assure Privacy Protections
  • Don't Fear Software Patents
  • Hollywood, Microsoft Align on New Windows
  • Distance Detection May Help Secure Wi-Fi
  • Research Uncovers Genetic Instructions to Build Life
  • Intel Helps UCSD Teach Students About Wireless, Multimedia Embedded Systems
  • Scientists Reignite Open Access Debate
  • Open Source Project Aims at Middleware
  • Faster Supercomputers Aiding Weather Forecasts
  • LANL Computers Weather Daily Cyber Assaults
  • Google Talk Gives Boost to XMPP
  • The Future of Computer Worms
  • Senator Coleman Denounces U.N. Internet Governance Report
  • Fewer CS Majors Not a Big Concern
  • Supernets for Global Research to Shine at iGrid
  • New Legal Code
  • 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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


    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]      to the top


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