A Call to Arms
"Computing Officials Worry
That Proposed Federal Database Could Be
Hacked"
The U.S. Department of Education is considering a "unit
record" database listing information on individual students,
but technology experts are worried about the database's
vulnerability to hacking, a pressing concern in light of
recent intrusions into college and company servers. Purdue ...
[read more]
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"Lawmaker Rips RFID
Passport Plans"
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner
(R-Wis.) told European diplomats last week that he was
distressed at European countries' plans to equip passports
with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, because they
were an unproven technology that would hold up and add costs
...
[read more]
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"Memory Mimic Aids
Reading"
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) scientists have developed
software that mimics the human brain's mechanism for modeling
words to expedite the process of skimming or reading through
digitized text. ScentHighlights helps ease the cognitive
burden of finding what a user is looking for by ...
[read more]
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"Guarding
Information"
In the end, the burden of improving U.S. cybersecurity
falls on the shoulders of policy makers, says presidential
cybersecurity adviser Eugene Spafford, who chairs ACM's U.S.
Public Policy Committee and runs the Center for Education and
Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue
University ...
[read more]
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"Patent Litigation Worries
Tech Industry"
Government and tech industry representatives urged
legislators to institute patent system reforms at a recent
hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Intellectual
Property subcommittee. Reforms are needed as a way to rein in
"patent trolls" that obtain patent rights and sue other ...
[read more]
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"A Bandwidth Breakthrough
Hints at a Future Beyond Wi-Fi"
The FCC broke an ultrawideband (UWB) standards deadlock
last March between two competing industry groups, ensuring
products will appear on the market by early next year. UWB is
seen as the third wave of wireless technology because of its
speed and the way in which it transmits data by sharing ...
[read more]
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"USB Ready to Ride the
Wireless Wave"
Numerous devices that support wireless Universal Serial Bus
(USB) connections to simplify the installation and maintenance
of computer peripherals are expected by year's end. "Vendors
would like to drive down the cost of wireless peripheral
communications by moving to a standard way ...
[read more]
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"Global Poker Game for the
Internet Goes On"
The leaders of Centr--an organization representative of
many of the world's Internet registries--and ICANN have been
engaged in a heated war of words over several issues affecting
Internet governance. Meanwhile, the United Nations is
assessing the future of ICANN, with the International ...
[read more]
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"Innovation in Process:
Plugging Together Business Software May Soon Be
Painless"
The largest software vendors are preparing to integrate the
heterogeneous IT environment left over from the 1990s surge in
technology spending. Services-oriented architecture (SOA)
promises to tie together departmental silos and dramatically
change the way businesses operate; in the process, ...
[read more]
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"'Tags' Ease Sifting of
Digital Data"
"Tagging" digital photos and other electronic documents
with descriptions of content simplifies the organization and
management of digital archives whose volume is increasing
exponentially, and the technique could potentially transform
the discovery and tracking of information. Tagging ...
[read more]
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"Scaling Up Productivity
in Scale-Out Clusters"
High-performance computing (HPC) technology has matured to
the point where the focus is no longer on performance but
rather productivity, says Hewlett-Packard high performance
computing CTO Scott McClellan in an interview. Clustered
supercomputers are growing quickly because of ...
[read more]
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"A Whole New
World...Shining, Shimmering, Splendid"
The Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) is home to
the Landmark Graphics Visualization Laboratory, a $20 million
facility that features a domed IMAX theater where 3D images
are back-projected onto a transmissive screen. Viewers wear
LCD Shutter Glasses to get the full three-dimensional ...
[read more]
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"Augmenting the Animal
Kingdom"
Some theorists champion the idea of enhancing animals with
technology to increase their chances of surviving, leading
happy lives, or even boosting their intelligence. But there
are also scientists who oppose such ideas on ethical grounds.
One supporter of technological animal enhancement is ...
[read more]
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"BitTorrent as Friend, Not
Foe"
Despite Hollywood's adversarial attitude toward
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, ICANN Chairman Vinton Cerf says
there is "serious" interest among Hollywood producers to
distribute movies and other content online with BitTorrent P2P
software. The more people who download a file with ...
[read more]
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"A Software Framework for
Automated Negotiation"
Software agents cannot automatically negotiate with each
other without a common negotiation mechanism that indicates
what possible actions each party can follow at any given time,
when negotiation ends, and the resulting agreements'
framework. The authors propose a generic automated ...
[read more]
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"Hooked on
Photonics"
BBN Technologies principal scientist Chip Elliott says his
team has assembled a very secure, 12-mile-long test network of
quantum cryptography systems that runs under the streets of
Boston and Cambridge. Quantum cryptography, which uses single
photons of light to distribute ...
[read more]
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"Patents: Cuffing
Innovation?"
Forrester Research consultant Navi Radjou says patents are
a critical incentive for technological advancement, but
acknowledges that they can also impede innovation if they
stifle the creativity of others; defining an invention's
patentability is therefore a major challenge. Though patents
...
[read more]
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"A Call to
Arms"
Jim Gray with Microsoft's Bay Area Research Group and Mark
Compton of Hired Gun Communications write that database
architecture is undergoing a reevaluation as a consequence of
an unending tide of information inundating people and
organizations. Data and algorithms are being brought together
...
[read more]
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