Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber: Welcome to the August 1, 2003 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. For instructions on how to unsubscribe from this service, please see below. ACM's MemberNet is now online. For the latest on ACM activities, member benefits, and industry issues, visit http://www.acm.org/membernet Remember to check out our hot new online essay and opinion magazine, Ubiquity, at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ACM TechNews Volume 5, Number 527 Date: August 1, 2003 Top Stories for Friday, August 1, 2003: http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html "ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Plays Up Interaction" "Digital (Fill in the Blank) Is on the Horizon" "Security Experts on Alert for Large-Scale Hacker Assault" "Surveillance Proposal Expanded" "Caltech Professor Peter Schroder Receives ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award" "Security Pros Talk, But Can They Walk?" "I Think, Therefore I Communicate" "The New Era of Wireless Tracking" "Senators to Quiz New ICANN Leader" "UK, U.S. IT Pros Top the Salary Charts" "From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code" "'Point-and-Connect' Links for Wireless Devices" "High Tech Worker Visas Come Under Fire" "Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software" "Homeland Security Courts Silicon Valley" "Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?" "Code Reuse Gets Easier" "Spam Technology Seeks Acceptance" "Technology Trend Predictions" ******************* News Stories *********************** "ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Plays Up Interaction" The corporate and academic sectors are trying to make the control of technology more intuitive by designing immersive systems built around interactivity, which is a major theme of ACM's SIGGRAPH conference this week in San Diego. One such system is Body-Brush from the ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item1 "Digital (Fill in the Blank) Is on the Horizon" Despite the rise and fall of technology investment, the digital age continues its advance in nearly every area of society--communications, automation, science, entertainment, art, and even on the domestic front. A four-month home technology ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item2 "Security Experts on Alert for Large-Scale Hacker Assault" Security experts are worried that a dramatic increase in hacker activity targeting a bug in the Microsoft Windows RPC Interface Buffer Overrun may be the harbinger of a major cyberattack that could encompass millions of networks; one expert, Internet ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item3 "Surveillance Proposal Expanded" Government officials want to expand the application of the CAPPS II passenger screening system, which could potentially become the largest surveillance network ever created by the government, but limit the information gathered on each individual. The new ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item4 "Caltech Professor Peter Schroder Receives ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award" ACM SIGGRAPH has named California Institute of Technology professor Peter Schroder the winner of its 2003 Computer Graphics Achievement Award. Schroder, a professor of computer science and applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, has conducted a ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item5 "Security Pros Talk, But Can They Walk?" As computer security experts gather in Las Vegas for the Black Hat Briefings and DefCon gatherings this week, many say the debate about how to improve security is more strident than ever, yet has still not produced results. Spire Security research ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item6 "I Think, Therefore I Communicate" The past 15 years have seen notable progress in the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), although the technology is still not ready for commercialization. The objective of BCI research is to directly connect computers to the neural impulses ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item7 "The New Era of Wireless Tracking" Wireless-tracking technology is being developed and touted by small vendors, but its adoption hinges on how those vendors market the technology and what their agendas are. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is already in use by ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item8 "Senators to Quiz New ICANN Leader" During his first scheduled appearance before a Senate subcommittee scheduled for July 31, ICANN President Paul Twomey will address the reforms the authority has made, ICANN's plans for continually ensuring its responsibility to companies and ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item9 "UK, U.S. IT Pros Top the Salary Charts" The 2003 Information Technology Toolbox (ITtoolbox) Salary Survey lists the United States and Britain as the regions with the highest IT industry pay scales, with American and British IT workers earning an average yearly salary of more than $80,000. ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item10 "From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code" Researchers are developing machine translation systems that can decipher many obscure texts thanks to the advent of statistical machine translation, which involves computers learning new languages on their own. Traditional machine translation requires ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item11 "'Point-and-Connect' Links for Wireless Devices" Researchers at Sony are developing a system that will make linking devices via a wireless network a more intuitive process. The prototype camera-based system, which makes use of "point-and-connect" technology, eliminates the need to manually ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item12 "High Tech Worker Visas Come Under Fire" Allegations that the L-1B visa program is being abused has prompted a raft of proposed legislation in both the House and the Senate calling for limits on the number of L-1Bs that can be approved. The L-1Bs were originally designed to allow ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item13 "Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software" Some experts are concerned that a "digital dark age" is looming in which important digitized material could be lost forever because the software programs needed to unlock it were never archived, or the knowledge of how the old software works was ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item14 "Homeland Security Courts Silicon Valley" Silicon Valley technology firms and entrepreneurs caught in a IT spending downturn could have reason to smile with the Department of Homeland Security's announcement of a roughly $1 billion budget for academic and private-sector research and development ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item15 "Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?" Dislike for spam is fairly universal, but not all Internet interests are in support of centralized blacklists, delivery charges, or other aggressive regulations that would aim to block spam, because they fear such measures could serve to ruin the ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item16 "Code Reuse Gets Easier" Software reuse was touted heavily in the 1980s, but widescale adoption remained elusive until object-oriented languages and applications emerged; reusing code has been simplified even further with the advent of XML-based Web services, Universal ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item17 "Spam Technology Seeks Acceptance" The growth of spam and the importance of deploying email filters to staunch its spread has renewed interest in Sieve, a proposed Internet Engineering Task Force Standard originally designed to help end users write filters that sort messages clogging up ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item18 "Technology Trend Predictions" Technology Best Practices authors Robert H. Spencer and Randolph P. Johnston foresee wireless dominating long-term technology trends--indeed, they posit that all networks could conceivably go wireless within a decade. There is a push to extend the useful ... http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- To review Wednesday's issue, please please visit http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0730w.html -- To visit the TechNews home page, point your browser to: http://www.acm.org/technews/ -- To unsubscribe from the ACM TechNews Early Alert Service: Please send a separate email to listserv@listserv2.acm.org with the line signoff technews in the body of your message. -- Please note that replying directly to this message does not automatically unsubscribe you from the TechNews list. -- To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact: technews@hq.acm.org -- ACM may have a different email address on file for you, so if you're unable to "unsubscribe" yourself, please direct your request to: technews-request@acm.org We will remove your name from the TechNews list on your behalf. -- For help with technical problems, including problems with leaving the list, please write to: technews-request@acm.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Site Sponsored by IBM () Ask for a free CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combination Drive with the purchase of select NetVista or ThinkCentre A Series tower. 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