ACM TechNews - Friday, August 1, 2003

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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 527
Date: August 1, 2003

Top Stories for Friday, August 1, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Plays Up Interaction"
"Digital (Fill in the Blank) Is on the Horizon"
"Security Experts on Alert for Large-Scale Hacker Assault"
"Surveillance Proposal Expanded"
"Caltech Professor Peter Schroder Receives ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award"
"Security Pros Talk, But Can They Walk?"
"I Think, Therefore I Communicate"
"The New Era of Wireless Tracking"
"Senators to Quiz New ICANN Leader"
"UK, U.S. IT Pros Top the Salary Charts"
"From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code"
"'Point-and-Connect' Links for Wireless Devices"
"High Tech Worker Visas Come Under Fire"
"Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software"
"Homeland Security Courts Silicon Valley"
"Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?"
"Code Reuse Gets Easier"
"Spam Technology Seeks Acceptance"
"Technology Trend Predictions"

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

"ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Plays Up Interaction"
The corporate and academic sectors are trying to make the control
of technology more intuitive by designing immersive systems built
around interactivity, which is a major theme of ACM's SIGGRAPH
conference this week in San Diego.  One such system is Body-Brush from the
...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item1

"Digital (Fill in the Blank) Is on the Horizon"
Despite the rise and fall of technology investment, the digital
age continues its advance in nearly every area of
society--communications, automation, science, entertainment, art,
and even on the domestic front.  A four-month home technology ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item2

"Security Experts on Alert for Large-Scale Hacker Assault"
Security experts are worried that a dramatic increase in hacker
activity targeting a bug in the Microsoft Windows RPC Interface
Buffer Overrun may be the harbinger of a major cyberattack that
could encompass millions of networks; one expert, Internet ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item3

"Surveillance Proposal Expanded"
Government officials want to expand the application of the CAPPS
II passenger screening system, which could potentially become the
largest surveillance network ever created by the government, but
limit the information gathered on each individual.  The new ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item4

"Caltech Professor Peter Schroder Receives ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award"
ACM SIGGRAPH has named California Institute of Technology
professor Peter Schroder the winner of its 2003 Computer Graphics
Achievement Award.  Schroder, a professor of computer science and
applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, has conducted a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item5

"Security Pros Talk, But Can They Walk?"
As computer security experts gather in Las Vegas for the Black
Hat Briefings and DefCon gatherings this week, many say the
debate about how to improve security is more strident than ever,
yet has still not produced results.  Spire Security research ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item6

"I Think, Therefore I Communicate"
The past 15 years have seen notable progress in the development
of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), although the technology is
still not ready for commercialization.  The objective of BCI
research is to directly connect computers to the neural impulses ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item7

"The New Era of Wireless Tracking"
Wireless-tracking technology is being developed and touted by
small vendors, but its adoption hinges on how those vendors
market the technology and what their agendas are.  Radio
frequency identification (RFID) technology is already in use by ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item8

"Senators to Quiz New ICANN Leader"
During his first scheduled appearance before a Senate
subcommittee scheduled for July 31, ICANN President Paul Twomey
will address the reforms the authority has made, ICANN's plans
for continually ensuring its responsibility to companies and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item9

"UK, U.S. IT Pros Top the Salary Charts"
The 2003 Information Technology Toolbox (ITtoolbox) Salary Survey
lists the United States and Britain as the regions with the
highest IT industry pay scales, with American and British IT
workers earning an average yearly salary of more than $80,000. ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item10

"From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code"
Researchers are developing machine translation systems that can
decipher many obscure texts thanks to the advent of statistical
machine translation, which involves computers learning new
languages on their own.  Traditional machine translation requires ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item11

"'Point-and-Connect' Links for Wireless Devices"
Researchers at Sony are developing a system that will make
linking devices via a wireless network a more intuitive process.
The prototype camera-based system, which makes use of
"point-and-connect" technology, eliminates the need to manually ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item12

"High Tech Worker Visas Come Under Fire"
Allegations that the L-1B visa program is being abused has
prompted a raft of proposed legislation in both the House and the
Senate calling for limits on the number of L-1Bs that can be
approved.  The L-1Bs were originally designed to allow ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item13

"Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software"
Some experts are concerned that a "digital dark age" is looming
in which important digitized material could be lost forever
because the software programs needed to unlock it were never
archived, or the knowledge of how the old software works was ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item14

"Homeland Security Courts Silicon Valley"
Silicon Valley technology firms and entrepreneurs caught in a IT
spending downturn could have reason to smile with the Department
of Homeland Security's announcement of a roughly $1 billion
budget for academic and private-sector research and development ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item15

"Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?"
Dislike for spam is fairly universal, but not all Internet
interests are in support of centralized blacklists, delivery
charges, or other aggressive regulations that would aim to block
spam, because they fear such measures could serve to ruin the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item16

"Code Reuse Gets Easier"
Software reuse was touted heavily in the 1980s, but widescale
adoption remained elusive until object-oriented languages and
applications emerged; reusing code has been simplified even
further with the advent of XML-based Web services, Universal ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item17

"Spam Technology Seeks Acceptance"
The growth of spam and the importance of deploying email filters
to staunch its spread has renewed interest in Sieve, a proposed
Internet Engineering Task Force Standard originally designed to
help end users write filters that sort messages clogging up ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item18

"Technology Trend Predictions"
Technology Best Practices authors Robert H. Spencer and Randolph
P. Johnston foresee wireless dominating long-term technology
trends--indeed, they posit that all networks could conceivably go
wireless within a decade.  There is a push to extend the useful ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0801f.html#item19


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