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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, May 29, 2002
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ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 354
Date: May 29, 2002
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Top Stories for Wednesday, May 29, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html
"Instant Messaging at Work Can Open Door to Hackers"
"Supreme Court Bolsters Protections for Patents"
"ITAA's Job Stats Doubted, Questions Raised About H1-B Quotas"
"Tech Companies Vie for Billions in Homeland Security Deals"
"Down in the Valley"
"A Changed IT World"
"A Sudden Host of Questions on Bell Labs Breakthroughs"
"From Junkie to, Well, Junkman"
"Lieberman to Visit Bay Area in Push for Broadband Strategy"
"From Database to 3D, a New Vision Thing"
"More Wireless Trends in the Making"
"Waiting for Wi-Fi: Europeans Trail U.S. in Wireless Net Hubs"
"Venture Capitalists Still on the Lookout for New Technologies"
"Talking Heads Get Real Mouths"
"The Incredible Shrinking PC"
"Graduate Tech Classes Slump As Creative Writing Courses Gain: Survey"
"Passwords: The Weakest Link"
"The Incredible Shrinking Form Factor"
"Workforce Glass Half Full and Half Empty"
"Economic Bust, Patent Boom"
******************* News Stories ***********************
"Instant Messaging at Work Can Open Door to Hackers"
Free instant messaging (IM) systems pose a security risk for
corporate computer networks, especially since employees may use
them to send and receive messages of a sensitive nature. Such
systems lack fundamental security components in order to promote ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item1
"Supreme Court Bolsters Protections for Patents"
The Supreme Court on Monday unamiously overturned a 1999 appeals
court ruling that did not allow investors to amend their patent
applications and still retain access to protection from the
"doctrine of equivalents," which prevents the creation of a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item2
"ITAA's Job Stats Doubted, Questions Raised About H1-B Quotas"
American IT professionals are criticizing the Information
Technology Association of America (ITAA) of providing false
statistical projections as evidence of the need to maintain or
raise the cap of H1-B visas granted to foreign workers. The ITAA ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item3
"Tech Companies Vie for Billions in Homeland Security Deals"
Technology companies want a piece of the homeland security pie by
developing and marketing new technologies designed to aid the war
on terrorism. Such technologies include facial recognition
systems currently being used in about a dozen airports; biometric ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item4
"Down in the Valley"
Silicon Valley's business model may not recover from the current
tech slump, which has led to a precipitous tumble in sales,
venture capital, and new businesses. The factors that previously
made Silicon Valley an unrivaled financial success and center for ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item5
"A Changed IT World"
The technology job market in Minneapolis has changed
significantly as a result of the dot-com and telecom meltdowns,
as well as Sept. 11: Salaries have fallen, finding a job takes
longer, and employers now call the shots in terms of negotiation. ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item6
"A Sudden Host of Questions on Bell Labs Breakthroughs"
Bell Labs scientist Dr. J. Hendrik Schon is under investigation
for scientific misconduct because several papers detailing
different experiments feature graphs with nearly identical data;
this has prompted researchers to call into question Dr. Schon's ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item7
"From Junkie to, Well, Junkman"
James Burgett heads the Alameda County Computer Resource Center,
one of the country's biggest nonprofit computer recycling
facilities. His company is refurbishing computers and freely
distributing them to needy people worldwide, as well as building ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item8
"Lieberman to Visit Bay Area in Push for Broadband Strategy"
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) will visit Silicon Valley this
week to release a "white paper" report on the importance of
broadband, and the need for government to help make high-speed
Internet access available to all Americans. A draft copy of the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item9
"From Database to 3D, a New Vision Thing"
Boston University has developed a large 3D display system that
allows researchers to see their experiments before actually
testing them out. The Deep Vision Display Wall, which costs less
than $3 million, uses a massive amount of supercomputing power, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item10
"More Wireless Trends in the Making"
Experts and analysts predict that the coming decade will see
wireless become more personalized and mobile devices evolve into
natural extensions of consumers. Datacomm Research's Ira Brodsky
foresees wireless local area networks (WLANs) proliferating ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item11
"Waiting for Wi-Fi: Europeans Trail U.S. in Wireless Net Hubs"
European telecommunications firms and Internet service providers
are taking the lead in that region's fledgling Wi-Fi access
market, having set up about 600 hot spots throughout the
continent, while operators in the United States set up 1,000 hot ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item12
"Venture Capitalists Still on the Lookout for New Technologies"
Venture capital investments in new Internet technologies may no
longer be proceeding at the breakneck pace that characterized the
years 1998 to 2000, but experts such as Polaris Ventures partner
Robert M. Metcalfe say the slowdown reflects a return to normal ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item13
"Talking Heads Get Real Mouths"
To increase the realism of computer-generated talking heads, MIT
researchers are teaching a computer to simulate mouth movements
by studying and recreating digitized video images of a woman
speaking. Software enables the computer to select and recombine ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item14
"The Incredible Shrinking PC"
Antelope Technologies' plan to build a handheld-sized PC based on
IBM's Meta Pad illustrates what boosters call a growing market
for small computing. Another startup, OQO, unveiled a PC the
size of a PDA that it plans to market by year's end for less than ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item15
"Graduate Tech Classes Slump As Creative Writing Courses Gain: Survey"
Creative writing has emerged as the hottest graduate course
today, according to a new survey from Gradschools.com, while
interest in information systems is down significantly, followed
by information technology and mechanical engineering. The survey ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item16
"Passwords: The Weakest Link"
It can take less than a minute for hackers to crack most
passwords, since so many users share the same habits when it
comes to choosing them: Picking them from Webster's dictionary
and using personal information such as lovers' or pets' names are ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item17
"The Incredible Shrinking Form Factor"
Vendors are working to make personal digital assistants (PDAs)
evolve from their square, flat-box model into much more flexible,
customizable designs to accommodate the almost 100 million mobile
workers that analysts expect to be around by 2007. Each worker ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item18
"Workforce Glass Half Full and Half Empty"
A report from the Information Technology Association of America
(ITAA) published in May finds that 500,000 IT workers were laid
off last year, reducing the workforce from 10.4 million to 9.9
million between 2000 and 2001. The study found that tech workers ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item19
"Economic Bust, Patent Boom"
Patent activity in the high-technology industry shows no signs of
a downturn despite the economic recession, according to the
latest Patent Scorecard from Technology Review. Semiconductor
companies, telecoms, and computing firms applied for more new ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/0529w.html#item20
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