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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, May 21, 2003
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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 498
Date: May 21, 2003
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Top Stories for Wednesday, May 21, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html
"Pentagon Details New Surveillance System"
"Has Copyright Law Met Its Match?"
"E-Mail's Backdoor Open to Spammers"
"Leave Me Alone!"
"The Crisis of Computing's Dying Breed"
"A Spy Machine of Darpa's Dreams"
"Congressional Caucus Targets Piracy"
"New System Developed by Pentagon Identifies Walkers"
"Viruses Learn How to IM"
"Bugged Out"
"Nanopits for Nanostorage"
"GPS Data Could Stop Wireless Network Attacks"
"State of the Art: Wasted Chip Power"
"Ultra Wideband: Gaining Momentum"
"Digital Solutions to Government Challenges"
"W3C Readies New Tech Patent Policy"
"Open Source Gets Secure"
"Where Are Your New Ideas Coming From?"
"Surveillance Nation--Part Two"
******************* News Stories ***********************
"Pentagon Details New Surveillance System"
The Pentagon released a comprehensive report about the proposed
Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) program (previously known
as Total Information Awareness) to legislators on Tuesday, but
the details about the computer surveillance system--its projected ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item1
"Has Copyright Law Met Its Match?"
Disabled consumers and their proponents complain that the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) severely restricts their access
to reading material because most available electronic books lock
out text-to-speech software. Advocates such as the American ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item2
"Email's Backdoor Open to Spammers"
Routing junk email through unwitting third parties, usually home
and office Internet users, is the No. 1 distribution method
spammers use, and ISPs such as America Online estimate that over
200,000 computers around the world have been exploited in this ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item3
"Leave Me Alone!"
Brightmail estimates that spam will account for about 50 percent
of all Internet mail sent this year, while Ferris Research
reckons that dealing with junk email will cost American
businesses $10 billion. Many businesses are hesitant to use ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item4
"The Crisis of Computing's Dying Breed"
IT workers knowledgeable in mainframe operations are a dying
breed, although the hardware they run has proven surprisingly
resilient to extinction. IT pundits had predicted server systems
would make the mainframe obsolete, but many companies are loath ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item5
"A Spy Machine of Darpa's Dreams"
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa)
is sponsoring a new project that aims to record every movement,
consumed media, transaction, and action in a person's life. The
LifeLog project could be used as a computer training tool, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item6
"Congressional Caucus Targets Piracy"
Florida Reps. Robert Wexler (D) and Tom Feeney (R), along with
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), are organizing the Congressional
Caucus on Intellectual Property Promotion and Piracy Prevention,
which is likely to cause Congress to narrow its focus on ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item7
"New System Developed by Pentagon Identifies Walkers"
One possible element of the Defense Advanced Projects Research
Agency's (DARPA) proposed Total Information Awareness (TIA) U.S.
citizen surveillance database could be "gait signatures"
extracted by a device developed by Georgia Institute of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item8
"Viruses Learn How to IM"
Computer viruses are adapting IM bot behavior to spread, as
demonstrated by the recent Fizzer worm, which can receive hacker
commands if it can link to the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
network and the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item9
"Bugged Out"
Ellen Ullman, author of "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and
Its Discontents," drew upon real-life experience for her new
novel "The Bug," a parable about a computer programmer confronted
with a bug that thwarts all attempts to lock it down. The basis ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item10
"Nanopits for Nanostorage"
Scientists are looking for alternative data storage media that
offer greater density than magnetic systems, and separate
European research efforts have yielded significant breakthroughs
in nanoscale indentation. A team at the IBM Zurich Research ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item11
"GPS Data Could Stop Wireless Network Attacks"
Carnegie Mellon University's Yi-Chin Hu and Adrian Perrig, along
with Rice University's David Johnson, furnished a report
presented at the 12th World Wide Web conference detailing a
new wireless network security threat and a possible defense ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item12
"State of the Art: Wasted Chip Power"
Despite the marketing hype coming from AMD and Intel, 64-bit
computing is unlikely to make an immediate, dramatic impact on
corporate IT operations. Even if companies adopt 64-bit
computing platforms, much of the possible processing power will ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item13
"Ultra Wideband: Gaining Momentum"
Supporters of ultra wideband (UWB) are predicting a surge in home
networking products based on the technology thanks to the FCC's
February 2002 ruling authorizing commercial, unlicensed UWB
implementation. The agency supposedly approved the authorization ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item14
"Digital Solutions to Government Challenges"
This year's National Conference on Digital Government Research
(dr.o2003) on May 19-21 showcased an array of digital
government projects. UrbanSim from University of Washington
researchers simulates city growth so that policymakers in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item15
"W3C Readies New Tech Patent Policy"
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee recently
announced that a decision on the organization's technology patent
policy--one that addresses patent claims that could be a
hindrance to interoperable Web standards development--is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item16
"Open Source Gets Secure"
The government sector is pushing for official security
credentials for open-source products. A coalition involving the
Open Source Software Institute, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and other
groups, is working to certify an encryption technology commonly ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item17
"Where Are Your New Ideas Coming From?"
The closed innovation model, in which companies build central
labs to research and develop technology and products that pay for
continued R&D, is still valid for certain industries, but is no
longer applicable for many more, writes Henry Chesbrough in his ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item18
"Surveillance Nation--Part Two"
As the United States ramps up widescale surveillance initiatives
with little grumbling from citizens, technologies are being
developed that carry both the promise of better security and the
threat of privacy invasion. But personal privacy may not ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0521w.html#item19
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