ACM TechNews - Wednesday, April 2, 2003

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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 477
Date: April 2, 2003

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Top Stories for Wednesday, April 2, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Does Security Mean Sacrificing Privacy?"
"'Big Iron' Retains Lustre"
"ISMA Pushes DRM for MPEG-4"
"DMCA Critics Decry State-Level Proposals"
"Proposed Encryption Laws Could Prove Draconian, Many Fear"
"High-Performance Computing Clusters Have Gridlike Features"
"Are We Doomed Yet?"
"First American Open in Robot Soccer"
"Big Bang Project Sparks Cosmic Response"
"A Vision of Superefficient Displays"
"Molecule Toggle Makes Nano Logic"
"IBM, Government Talk Big Iron"
"Yeast Protein Wires Supercomputers"
"Wider-Fi"
"Cyber-War Tools Still on the Shelf"
"Smart Dust"
"The Wired War Has Arrived"
"Pushing the Edge"
"Surveillance Nation"

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

"Does Security Mean Sacrificing Privacy?"
ACM's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference, now
underway in New York City, is highlighting how government electronic
surveillance efforts have accelerated in the wake of Sept. 11,
and topics of discussion will include the Total Information ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item1

"'Big Iron' Retains Lustre"
Enterprise applications, scientific research, and other factors
are fueling demand for mainframes and supercomputers; Bill
Zeitler of IBM Enterprise Systems notes that the mainframe market
has remained more or less the same over the last several years, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item2

"ISMA Pushes DRM for MPEG-4"
In an effort to develop digital rights management (DRM)
capabilities to shield multimedia content formatted in MPEG-4,
the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) is moving forward
with its Content Protection specification, which provides an ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item3

"DMCA Critics Decry State-Level Proposals"
Critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are
alarmed over indications that state legislators are considering
proposals that would place even broader restrictions on the
circumvention of digital copy-protection safeguards.  The ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item4

"Proposed Encryption Laws Could Prove Draconian, Many Fear"
Critics are decrying Justice Department draft legislation that
calls for stiffer penalties on the use of encryption in the
commission of a crime, arguing that it would negatively impact
legitimate applications of cryptography and make little headway ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item5

"High-Performance Computing Clusters Have Gridlike Features"
Enterprise applications will not be suited for high-performance
computing clusters (HPCCs) until 2008, but there are several key
indicators showing readiness, including processor advances,
server density, and application development tools.  Unlike grid ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item6

"Are We Doomed Yet?"
Sheldon Pacotti writes that the computerization of information
and the spread of networking could lead to what Sun Microsystems'
Bill Joy terms "knowledge-enabled mass destruction," in which
freely disseminated information accessible to anyone could have ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item7

"First American Open in Robot Soccer"
Carnegie Mellon University is hosting the International RoboCup
Federation's first American Open in late April to early May,
where over 150 researchers and their soccer-playing robots will
congregate.  The goal of the international research and sports ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item8

"Big Bang Project Sparks Cosmic Response"
The CERN research institute in Switzerland is the site of the
Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator designed to test
the "big bang" theory by generating particles believed to have
existed when the universe was born, if they existed at all.  The ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item9

"A Vision of Superefficient Displays"
Ching Tang, who bears the title of Distinguished Inventor at
Eastman Kodak, is a pioneer of organic light-emitting diode
(OLED) technology, having found a breakthrough technique in 1985.
Tang discovered that sandwiching certain organic compounds ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item10

"Molecule Toggle Makes Nano Logic"
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories researcher Pavel Kornilovitch has
been working on a toggle switch that can open and close a circuit
much like a household light switch--except that this switch
exists on the molecular level.  For computing, molecular-scale ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item11

"IBM, Government Talk Big Iron"
IBM reports that company executives met with representatives from
the Homeland Security Department, the Energy Department, the
National Science Foundation, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories, and other federal outfits this week to discuss ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item12

"Yeast Protein Wires Supercomputers"
Handheld supercomputers equipped with nanoscale wires could one
day become a reality thanks to the efforts of researchers at the
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.  Such wires could be
fashioned from highly durable fibers derived from genetically ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item13

"Wider-Fi"
The rapid adoption of the Wi-Fi standard is the sole bright spot
in the bleak economic climate hovering over Silicon Valley, but
the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
recently released a new standard, Wider-Fi, that promises to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item14

"Cyber-War Tools Still on the Shelf"
Experts from the security and defense sectors say chances are
slim that the U.S. military will use cyber-warfare to disrupt
Iraq's infrastructure in the current conflict.  Mark Rasch of
Solutionary says the government has been wrestling with ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item15

"Smart Dust"
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) form the basis of "smart
dust," a sophisticated wireless sensor network composed of
minuscule, autonomous "motes" that could collect data for many
diverse operations, including patient and traffic monitoring, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item16

"The Wired War Has Arrived"
The U.S. Army expects that communications and computer gear will
prove to be beneficial to its Third Infantry Division (3ID) as it
spearheads the Army's push to Baghdad.  The Army has equipped 3ID
armored vehicles with a system designed to provide a real-time ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item17

"Pushing the Edge"
Thrifty enterprises are turning to network edge appliances as an
efficient, inexpensive alternative to more costly software
deployments in order to handle fluid security needs, as well as
accommodate incoming XML data and support single networks that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item18

"Surveillance Nation"
The era of the surveillance society is rapidly approaching due to
increasing technological sophistication--speedier networking,
more powerful microprocessors, improved software, cheaper
electronics, bigger hard drives, and so on.  Unmonitored public ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0402w.html#item19


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