ACM TechNews - Wednesday, September 3, 2003

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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 540
Date: September 1, 2003

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Top Stories for Wednesday, September 3, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"As Digital Vandals Disrupt the Internet, a Call for Oversight"
"European Patent Law Draws Fire"
"Scientists Plan New Supercomputer Linking System"
"Heavyweights Sending R&D Overseas"
"MIT to Uncork Futuristic Bar Code"
"Processor Adapts to Shifting Loads"
"At CMU, Scientists Are Building Sense Into Cell Phones"
"Spamming Sleazebags Ruining Email"
"Chilly Future May Await Tomorrow's Computers"
"More Power to Portable Electronics"
"Voting By Net Proxy?"
"Cellophane Turns LCDs 3D"
"Platform Internet: The Promise of Grid Computing"
"'Smart Dust' Could Lead to Tiny Robots"
"Corporate Data in Hand"
"Genoa II: Man and Machine Thinking as One"
"'Conversational' Isn't Always What You Think It Is"

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

"As Digital Vandals Disrupt the Internet, a Call for Oversight"
The growing sophistication and frequency of computer virus
attacks, such as those that afflicted systems in recent weeks, is
making government oversight of cybersecurity a more palatable
concept for many people.  Michael A. Vatis, former head of the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item1

"European Patent Law Draws Fire"
The European Parliament is scheduled to vote in September on a
proposed patent law that is supposed to reconcile software patent
legislation between European Union member states, but critics
contend the mandate endangers both Europe's open-source ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item2

"Scientists Plan New Supercomputer Linking System"
Researchers worldwide are collaborating to create an
international data grid that would make supercomputing resources
available to normal users.  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
(Fermilab) scientist Lothar Bauerdick, whose laboratory is one of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item3

"Heavyweights Sending R&D Overseas"
Offshore IT outsourcing is no longer limited to low-level
programming, as evidenced by research and development work being
exported to inexpensive overseas labor markets by major Silicon Valley
companies.  Washington Alliance of Technology Workers President ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item4

"MIT to Uncork Futuristic Bar Code"
Researchers and large corporate interests are uniting behind a
new product-tracking technology called electronic product code
(EPC).  The 96-bit format would assign a unique number to each
individual item, unlike the group identifiers that today's bar ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item5

"Processor Adapts to Shifting Loads"
Computer architects at the University of Texas in Austin have
been granted $11 million from the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) to co-develop with IBM's Austin Research
Lab a prototype polymorphic processor that uses instruction-level ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item6

"At CMU, Scientists Are Building Sense Into Cell Phones"
Carnegie Mellon University graduate and undergraduate students
have developed SenSay (Sensing and Saying) cell phone technology
that is "context-aware" of the user's situation and activities,
which Human-Computer Interaction Institute director Dan Siewiorek ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item7

"Spamming Sleazebags Ruining Email"
Dan Gillmor places the blame for email's declining appeal mainly
on the shoulders of unscrupulous, corrupt virus authors and
spammers who exploit poor software and oblivious users, ISPs, and
systems administrators.  He notes that spammers would be undone ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item8

"Chilly Future May Await Tomorrow's Computers"
David Reid of the Institute of Physics notes that quantum
computers could compute 1,000 times faster than classical
machines, but Laszlo Kish of Texas A&M observes that they may
also produce at least 100 times more heat than conventional ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item9

"More Power to Portable Electronics"
The growing power consumption of increasingly sophisticated
portable devices is boosting the appeal of micro fuel cells,
which promise to boost conventional battery life by a factor of
10.  Allied Business Intelligence analyst Atakan Ozbek forecasts ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item10

"Voting By Net Proxy?"
Futurist Jason Tester foresees a chilling corruption of democracy
if the development of electronic voting systems continues to
follow its current path, in the form of software agents that vote
for candidates on their users' behalf, even when users are not ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item11

"Cellophane Turns LCDs 3D"
University of Toronto researcher Keigo Iizuka has discovered a
cheap method to create 3D displays by covering half of a laptop
screen with a sheet of cellophane.  The screen displays two
copies of an image with different polarization that look ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item12

"Platform Internet: The Promise of Grid Computing"
The Internet continues to evolve, becoming the platform for even
more services and applications:  Since its inception as a Defense
Department project 30 years ago, the Internet and the subsequent
World Wide Web have benefited from open standards and initial ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item13

"'Smart Dust' Could Lead to Tiny Robots"
University of California at San Diego (UCSD) chemists have
created sensors approximately the width of an average human
hair that can identify oily liquids in water.  The researchers say
the small silicon chips are a first step in the development of  ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item14

"Corporate Data in Hand"
The J2ME platform--a streamlined version of Java--supports the
widest spectrum of embedded and mobile devices and is highly
secure, but there are tradeoffs.  J2ME applications can run on
any embedded device with a Java run time with little if any ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item15

"Genoa II: Man and Machine Thinking as One"
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) $54
million Genoa II project focuses on potential information
technology that could enable humans and computers to think in
unison in real time so they can predict and forestall terrorist ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item16

"'Conversational' Isn't Always What You Think It Is"
Dr. Bill Byrne of Stanford University argues that, while
"conversational" speech interfaces should boost usability
overall, their true range of applications is limited by
designers' tendency to have "conversational" refer to the type of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0903w.html#item17


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