ACM TechNews - Wednesday, August 6, 2003

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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 529
Date: August 6, 2003

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Top Stories for Wednesday, August 6, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html


"Voting Suit Gains Momentum"
"U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database"
"Free Software Faces a Rocky Road to Court"
"Computer Groupthink Under Fire"
"Three Minutes With Marcus Sachs"
"Country-Coded Computer Worms May Be Ahead"
"A Brilliant Future for the Smart Home"
"Eyes Off, Screen Off"
"Battle of the Blog"
"Life Imitates Art"
"'People Want Simple Home Networking'"
"Tech Future for Women Starts Young"
"Robotics to Play Major Role in Future Warfighting"
"Interview With Brian Kernighan"
"Random Numbers Hit and Miss"
"Critics Tell Congress ICANN Needs Reforms"
"The IT Productivity Gap"
"Future Tech: 20 Hot Technologies to Watch"

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

"Voting Suit Gains Momentum"
A lawsuit that questions the constitutionality of computerized
touch-screen voting machines is moving to an appeals court, at a
time when the reliability of such systems is a topic of heated
debate.  The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item1

"U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database"
Florida's Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix)
counterterrorism database is being developed as a resource that
national law enforcement agencies can use to scan billions of
available records about both lawbreakers and innocent citizens in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item2

"Free Software Faces a Rocky Road to Court"
Hanging over the LinuxWorld trade show this week in San Francisco
is the SCO lawsuit against IBM over Unix intellectual property
infringement that not only threatens the future of Linux, but
potentially a host of commercial software as well.  SCO says IBM ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item3

"Computer Groupthink Under Fire"
A July House Science Committee hearing was the focus of a heated
debate on the relative merits of supercomputers compared to those
of grid and cluster computing configurations, which critics
charge are insufficient for certain computing operations.  Grids ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item4

"Three Minutes With Marcus Sachs"
Marcus Sachs, who collaborates with analysts on the development
of the Homeland Security Department's Cyber Program, asserts that
the program is "really, really, really prepared" to defend the
United States against cyberattacks, but maintains that the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item5

"Country-Coded Computer Worms May Be Ahead"
Jonathan Wignall of the U.K. Data and Network Security Research
Council used the DefCon 11 security conference to address the
possibility that computer worm creators could more effectively
distribute their malicious code by targeting specific countries ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item6

"A Brilliant Future for the Smart Home"
Futuristic home networking technologies are reaching the
commercial market, allowing users to unobtrusively integrate
computing into their everyday lives.  Homebuilders and household
appliance vendors such as Sears are promoting smart technologies ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item7

"Eyes Off, Screen Off"
Duke University researchers led by Angela Dalton have developed a
prototype energy-efficient device that detects people's presence
and can activate or deactivate a computer screen depending on
whether anyone is watching or not.  The FaceOff system, fashioned ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item8

"Battle of the Blog"
The format that controls Web logs (blogs) is at the heart of an
acrimonious dispute between Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
manager and Harvard University fellow Dave Winer and those who
resent his decision to freeze the RSS core and his governance ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item9

"Life Imitates Art"
Dean Economou of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization's Center for Networking Technologies for
the Information Economy comments that sci-fi movies not only
offer a window onto future technologies, but exert an influence ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item10

"'People Want Simple Home Networking'"
A household featuring an array of networked devices that
seamlessly share digital content--music, video, pictures,
etc.--is the goal of the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG), an
industry alliance dedicated to making future networking products ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item11

"Tech Future for Women Starts Young"
Despite studies indicating that more women than men are going
online and assertions from female tech professionals that gender
has little to do with their struggle to rise in the industry, IN
CONTEXT Managing Partner Marcie Sayiner foresees a shortage of IT ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item12

"Robotics to Play Major Role in Future Warfighting"
A study being conducted by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's
Project Alpha think tank suggests that integrated autonomous
machines may become a standard component of battlefield tactics
by 2025.  Project Alpha organized a Johns Hopkins University ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item13

"Interview With Brian Kernighan"
Former Bell Labs programmer and Princeton University computer
science professor Brian Kernighan muses that computing's biggest
headache is the difficulty of using and programming computers.
He argues that the last half-century of progress has not reduced ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item14

"Random Numbers Hit and Miss"
Stephan Martens of the Abdus Salam International Center for
Theoretical Physics and Heiko Bauke of Otto von Guericke
University have found the root cause of the difficulty computers
have in generating random numbers, which is a key process in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item15

"Critics Tell Congress ICANN Needs Reforms"
At the recent Senate subcommittee meeting on ICANN, critics
raised concerns about the organization--specifically in relation
to the transparency of ICANN's business transactions, ICANN's
involvement of normal Internet users in rulings, and its decision ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item16

"The IT Productivity Gap"
Statistical research suggests a definite link between a company's
general productivity and its IT capital per worker, although
company performance varies considerably, according to Erik
Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management.  IT intensity ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item17

"Future Tech: 20 Hot Technologies to Watch"
Technologies that promise to fundamentally change computing are
in various stages of development:  Autonomous driving is far from
reality, but technologies that could facilitate the development
of self-driving cars are converging, such as assistive vision
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0806w.html#item18


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