ACM TechNews - Monday, December 30, 2002

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ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 440
Date: December 30, 2002

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Top Stories for Monday, December 30, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Could Diamond Chips Supplant Silicon?"
"Hired Hackers Expose Flaws"
"Removable Hard Disk Group to Show New Device"
"2002 Marked by Sophisticated Attacks"
"2002: The Year in Technology"
"Hi-Tech Ghosts of Christmas Future"
"10 Gig Ethernet: Speed Demon"
"InfiniBand: What's Next?"
"Mind Games"
"Robust Speech Recognition at KAIST"
"The Biggest Hole in the Net"

******************* News Stories ***********************

"Could Diamond Chips Supplant Silicon?"
Under the aegis of the New Energy and Industrial Technology
Development Organization, the Japanese government has
earmarked $6 million for fiscal year 2003 for research into
diamond semiconductors.  Japanese electronics companies ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item1

"Hired Hackers Expose Flaws"
Just about any computer system can be broken into given unlimited
time and resources, says Fred Rica, the leader of a 130-member
team for PricewaterhouseCoopers that performs threat and
vulnerability assessments for companies.  He compares the hacking ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item2

"Removable Hard Disk Group to Show New Device"
A prototype 1.8-inch Information Versatile Disk for Removable
usage (iVDR) hard disk will be unveiled at next month's Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), the first time the new removable hard
disk system will be displayed outside Japan.  The technology uses ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item3

"2002 Marked by Sophisticated Attacks"
A report from F-Secure finds that the number of computer virus
outbreaks this year was lower than that of last year, but the
sophistication of the attacks appears to have increased.  A
spokesman for the security company says that the rate of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item4

"2002: The Year in Technology"
The Year 2002 saw more efforts on the part of the music and movie
industries to control the distribution and use of their content.
New copy-protection technologies angered users, and even
pioneering digital storage companies such as Philips, which ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item5

"Hi-Tech Ghosts of Christmas Future"
In 2050, the Christmas meal will probably include synthetic
turkey put together using molecular raw materials.  Christmas
will be different in many other ways as well, according to
British Telecom futurologist Ian Pearson, due to advances in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item6

"10 Gig Ethernet: Speed Demon"
The10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, which the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved in June, has
a lot of potential:  It could provide high-bandwidth remote data
center replication over greater distances than single-mode fiber; ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item7

"InfiniBand: What's Next?"
Vendors and customers alike are taking a wait-and-see approach to
InfiniBand, although smaller companies have begun releasing some
components needed for an InfiniBand environment.  Rather than
migrating data center architectures, companies are considering ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item8

"Mind Games"
Video games are taking advantage of artificial intelligence in
order to become smarter and more entertaining; GameAI.com editor
Steven M. Woodcock explains that such qualities will help game
companies be more competitive as 3D graphics and features that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item9

"Robust Speech Recognition at KAIST"
The Brain Neuroinformatics Research Program at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a
multidisciplinary effort to understand how biological brains
process information and to develop intelligent machines whose ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item10

"The Biggest Hole in the Net"
Newsweek columnist Steven Brill writes that civil libertarians
have been so appalled at the idea of a standard national ID card
that they do not even discuss it, even though debate is critical
to the development of a system that both shields civil liberties ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item11


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