The Code Warrior
Worm Slowing, But Still Dangerous
The MyDoom email virus may be losing speed, but experts warn that its effects will linger. MyDoom, which has wrested the dubious honor of most virulent email virus away from Sobig.F, installs backdoors in victim computers that could allow hackers to hijack the infected machines and use ...
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Virginia Tech Migrates G5 Supercomputer to Apple Xserves
Virginia Tech has announced that its G5 Mac-based supercomputing cluster, which ranked third in terms of speed last fall, will immediately begin its migration from Power Mac G5 desktops to Apple's Xserve G5 1U servers; this switch should be completed within four months. Virginia Tech's Lynn ...
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Rover Engineers Hope They Found Problem
The rover Spirit could return to its mission on Mars within a week if NASA engineers have isolated the cause of its recent malfunction, and they think that they have by successfully replicating the computer crashes the rover has been suffering from. Mission managers suspect that the crashes were ...
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H-1B Visas Going Fast
As of Oct. 1, 2003, the annual cap of H-1B visas fell from 195,000 to 65,000, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently reported on its Web site that some 43,500 visas had either been approved or were in the pipeline for approval in the first quarter of fiscal year 2004. The ...
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SGI Sheds More Light on Multi-Paradigm Computing
Silicon Graphics (SGI) CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh detailed Project Ultraviolet, an initiative first unveiled at the Supercomputing 2003 trade show in November as a plan to devise a new class of "multi-paradigm" supercomputers by meshing the best constituents of vector, scalar, and other computing ...
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The Machine That Invents
Imagination Engines CEO Stephen Thaler's experiments with neural networks revealed that disrupting their connections with noise caused the networks to generate new ideas. These trials were the beginnings of Thaler's Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information, a.k.a. the Creativity ...
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Biggest Web Problem Isn't About Privacy, It's Sloppy Security
Web security leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by embarrassing incidents at companies such as the online restaurant reservation service OpenTable.com; Web designers need constant reminding of the security issues they should be aware of as they create Web sites, a situation that MIT ...
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That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News
Researchers at the recent 2004 Spam Conference laid out highly technical solutions to eliminating spam and gave little attention to legal remedies such as lawsuits and enforcing the Can Spam Act. Filtering technology, in particular, is taking its toll on spammers, forcing them to send ...
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Most Flexible Electronic Paper Yet Revealed
Philips researchers have created the most flexible electronic display to date by printing organic electronics on a 25-micron-thick polyimide substrate, and MIT researcher Joe Jacobson calls this breakthrough "an important milestone and another step closer towards 'real' electronic ...
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Time to Redial: VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) Makes a Comeback
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is making a comeback after going through a buzz phase a few years ago; at that time, many people tried out free phone services, but few thought to replace their traditional phone sets with the unreliable and poor quality of VoIP on 56K modems. With the ...
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For Brazil Voters, Machines Rule
For the longest time, it was easy to rig Brazilian elections because they relied on a strictly paper-based voting process. Now, even as electronic voting systems draw fire in the United States for being insecure and unreliable, Brazil's populace is praising e-voting, which was introduced in ...
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Data Storage Worlds Uniting
In an effort to reduce costs and simplify file-sharing, companies are attempting to merge the best elements of network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) technologies. Perhaps one of the most evident trends in this wider convergence are NAS gateways, which connect SANs with ...
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Iridescent Software Illuminates Research Data
The job of sifting through journals and scientific literature to unearth information relevant to studies could become less burdensome--and expensive--for researchers with the help of Iridescent, a software program developed by bioinformatics scientists at the University of Texas Southwest ...
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The Mac Turns 20
Remembering Apple's launch of the Macintosh is like rehashing the early history of PC innovations: Many of the people who helped launch the Macintosh gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and were asked what Apple and the rest of the PC industry have learned from ...
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Grids Moving Beyond Science
Mainstream organizations are starting to embrace grid computing--which has been for the most part confined to academic and scientific pursuits--to make their IT resources more efficient and to squeeze more performance out of business applications. This adoption is in an early phase: Only 4 ...
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The Tyranny of Copyright
Copyright holders are asking for tougher copyright laws to ostensibly curb piracy of intellectual property encouraged by the spread of the Internet, but a growing protest movement--the so-called "Copy Left"--contends that such an approach is anathema to democratic freedoms and is strangling ...
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Know Thy Neighbor
Virtually all networks appear to share the "six degrees of separation" architecture outlined by Harvard's Stanley Milgram, but the sometimes striking dissimilarities between laboratory models and real-world networks reveal insights critical to the development of practical network science ...
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The Code Warrior
F-Secure security specialist Mikko Hypponen characterizes 2003 as the worst year in virus history, and singles out the month of August as the nadir. August 2003 marked the emergence of Blaster, self-replicating malware that served as both a virus and a worm, and that only needed to be linked to the ...
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