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ACM TechNews Alert, January 28, 2004



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ACM TechNews
January 28, 2004

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Worm Slowing, But Still Dangerous
  • Virginia Tech Migrates G5 Supercomputer to Apple Xserves
  • Rover Engineers Hope They Found Problem
  • H-1B Visas Going Fast
  • SGI Sheds More Light on Multi-Paradigm Computing
  • The Machine That Invents
  • Biggest Web Problem Isn't About Privacy, It's Sloppy Security
  • That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News
  • Most Flexible Electronic Paper Yet Revealed
  • Time to Redial: VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) Makes a Comeback
  • For Brazil Voters, Machines Rule
  • Data Storage Worlds Uniting
  • Iridescent Software Illuminates Research Data
  • The Mac Turns 20
  • Grids Moving Beyond Science
  • The Tyranny of Copyright
  • Know Thy Neighbor
  • 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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

    to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

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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 ...

    [read more]

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