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ACM TechNews - Monday, August 11, 2003



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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 531
Date: August 11, 2003

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Top Stories for Monday, August 11, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"The Bandwagon to Fight Spam Hits a Bump"
"Jolted Over Electronic Voting"
"Radical Geeks Launch a New IT Revolution"
"3-D Printing's Great Leap Forward"
"Single Slow User Can Throttle Wi-Fi Network"
"Linux on a Mission"
"This Is One Case Where You'll Want the Little Guy to Lose"
"Neural-Network Technology Moves Into the Mainstream"
"GPL May Be Unenforceable Under German Law"
"Should E-mail Still Be Free?"
"Online Forms Standard Gets a Push"
"Robot Challenge: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work"
"The Internet Security Demon That Won't Die"
"Glove Won't Speak for the Deaf"
"Animation Lets Murder Victims Have Final Say"
"Out, Out, Damned Spam"
"Sourcing Linux"

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

"The Bandwagon to Fight Spam Hits a Bump"
The latest congressional wrangling over proposed anti-spam
measures revolves around Sen. Charles E. Schumer's (D-N.Y.) bill
to deploy a do-not-spam list modeled after the do-not-call
registry the FTC started implementing in June.  Jerry Cerasale of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item1

"Jolted Over Electronic Voting"
Some U.S. states are having second thoughts about replacing their
old voting machines with electronic systems because of a recent
Johns Hopkins University report that calls the machines' security
into question.  Report co-author Avi Rubin, technical director of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item2

"Radical Geeks Launch a New IT Revolution"
Programmers and engineers are exerting their political influence
online as a way to fight for civil liberties and other pressing
issues.  The leaders of these pushes have become cyber-activists
because they have the money and the means to do so--Wes Boyd, for ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item3

"3-D Printing's Great Leap Forward"
The development of rapid prototyping devices or 3D printers is
about to advance with the development of machines that can print
out moving components.  Although RP devices can print out objects
from metal, starch, plastic, or paper using a 3D blueprint as a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item4

"Single Slow User Can Throttle Wi-Fi Network"
Researchers at the Institut d'Informatique et Mathematiques
Appliquees de Grenoble have determined through the study of Wi-Fi
network performance that a single person with a slow wireless
link can reduce data transfer speeds for everyone using the same ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item5

"Linux on a Mission"
The Centibots, whose development was funded by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), were put through their
paces at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, where they were
tasked to navigate a maze in order to locate a stuffed penguin.   ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item6

"This Is One Case Where You'll Want the Little Guy to Lose"
SCO has filed a $1 billion suit against IBM for allegedly
including elements of its copyrighted Unix code in the free Linux
operating system, and is threatening to sue all Linux users for
as much as $700 each.  Lee Gomes writes that SCO appears to have ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item7

"Neural-Network Technology Moves Into the Mainstream"
Neural-network technology, which is modeled after the synaptic
architecture of the human brain, is being developed as a tool
that enables computers to record information as patterns, and use
those patterns to solve problems in much the same way human ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item8

"GPL May Be Unenforceable Under German Law"
Legal expert Gerald Spindler warns that the open-source General
Public License (GPL) is not valid in Germany, mostly because that
country's law demands some type of liability or warranty from
distributors or developers.  Spindler wrote a 123-page study for ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item9

"Should E-mail Still Be Free?"
In response to Vipul Prakash's observations and suggestions about
spam control, Barry Shein finds fault with his position that
there should be no per-message charging for email.  Shein writes,
"charges should be incurred to help pay for the resources being ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item10

"Online Forms Standard Gets a Push"
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has finally published its
specification for creating Web forms.  Initially scheduled to be
released in March, XForms 1.0 uses Extensible Markup Language
(XML) to bring greater flexibility to current documents based on ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item11

"Robot Challenge: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work"
Grace, the robot built in response to a general challenge by the
American Society for Artificial Intelligence, is now preparing
for more ambitious missions.  Formally named the Graduate Robot
Attending Conference in Edmonton, Grace successfully registered ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item12

"The Internet Security Demon That Won't Die"
The vulnerability of the Internet is a lingering problem, and
security experts concur that private industry must lead the
charge to improve Net security.  "Internet security is...about
teaching people that there is a lot more to security than buying ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item13

"Glove Won't Speak for the Deaf"
Some hearing-impaired people have conflicting feelings about
technology designed to translate American Sign Language into
spoken and written speech, the latest example being Jose
Hernandez-Rebollar's AcceleGlove, a sensor-laden glove that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item14

"Animation Lets Murder Victims Have Final Say"
German researchers have developed a 3D graphics program that can
help forensics experts in their efforts to reconstruct faces from
the skeletal remains of dead people found by the police.  The
graphics system of Kolja Kahler and Jorg Haber of the Max Planck ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item15

"Out, Out, Damned Spam"
Lauren Weinstein was on the receiving end of the first spam
ever--an email from Digital Equipment--in May,1978, while
involved in work to develop an early version of the Internet.
Today, junk email accounts for 49 percent of network traffic, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item16

"Sourcing Linux"
SCO Group's $3 billion lawsuit against IBM for allegedly
incorporating patented Unix code into Linux has ignited a flurry
of speculation on whether the open-source development process is
in need of serious revision.  Some IT analysts are advising ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0811m.html#item17


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