ACM TechNews - Monday, December 8, 2003

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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 580
Date: December 8, 2003

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Top Stories for Monday, December 8, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet"
"For Some Older IT Workers, Job Prospects Improve"
"NASA: Looking Back at Earth"
"Wi-Fi to Face Interoperability Challenges"
"Linux Guru: Move Quickly to New Kernel"
"Robotics Revolution"
"Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End"
"Smart Assistant Will Cut Driver Distraction"
"Gartner Sees "Massive Disruption" to IT Workers"
"Japan's Robot Developers Go Linux"
"That 1994 Feeling"
"Software Paraphrases Sentences"
"Technology Facilitates Data Gathering"
"Section 508: Built Into Business"
"Blueprint for Web Services"
"A Look at Telematics"
"Malcode Melee"
"What Do Users Want From Converged Multimodal Communications?"

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

"Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet"
World governments are frustrated at the singular control the
United States exerts over Internet governance, and officials at
the United Nations are readying a new Internet governance
structure that would make it a more multilateral endeavor.  ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item1

"For Some Older IT Workers, Job Prospects Improve"
Older IT professionals have had to face not just the economic
recession, shrinking IT budgets, and increased offshore
outsourcing, but age discrimination as they struggle to find
work.  Over-50--sometimes even over-30--IT workers are often cast ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item2

"NASA: Looking Back at Earth"
NASA conducts a number of programs designed to model how the
Earth works, and develops new computer technologies to help in
its task.  NASA operates 18 satellites that gather raw data such
as ocean current, temperatures, and spread of invasive species ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item3

"Wi-Fi to Face Interoperability Challenges"
Industry executives gathered at the recent Wi-Fi Planet show in
San Jose stressed that establishing interoperability among an
"alphabet soup" of IEEE 802.11 technologies will be a major
challenge as the industry embarks on a project to implement ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item4

"Linux Guru: Move Quickly to New Kernel"
Marcelo Tosatti, who maintains the 2.4 Linux kernel by the
authority of Linux developer Linus Torvalds, announced via a Dec.
1 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List that the 2.6 kernel is
sufficiently mature to form the basis of new projects; he ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item5

"Robotics Revolution"
Lance Ulanoff writes that robotics technology showcased at Comdex
was impressive enough to make him consider that the field could
one day become the savior of the tech industry.  He was
particularly taken with Paro, a Japanese robot that resembles a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item6

"Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End"
Designers of rogue "Trojan horse" programs are adopting a
decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network model that threatens to
make the spread of their malware impossible to halt, warn
computer experts.  LURHQ computer specialist Joe Stewart found ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item7

"Smart Assistant Will Cut Driver Distraction"
Laws banning the use of certain devices by drivers in order to
reduce the number of accidents attributed to distraction have not
halted the flood of in-vehicle electronic devices, so BMW and
Robert Bosch engineers, partially funded by the government of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item8

"Gartner Sees "Massive Disruption" to IT Workers"
By 2008, the IT industry is expected to experience a "massive
disruption to the IT workforce," according to Gartner, which
predicts huge changes to the industry over the next few years.
Software code will become more modular and reusable by 2008, as ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item9

"Japan's Robot Developers Go Linux"
Japanese companies say the robotics industry could outpace the PC
industry:  In anticipation of this development, firms such as
Mitsubishi are designing robots for practical use that are also
convenient, inexpensive, ubiquitous, and powered by Linux ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item10

"That 1994 Feeling"
Like HTML in 1994, RSS technology today promises to revolutionize
the way people receive and distribute information.  While RSS has
yet to receive an easily understood moniker, such as HTML's World
Wide Web title, it is slowly gathering grass-roots support in the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item11

"Software Paraphrases Sentences"
Cornell University researchers are developing computer programs
that can automatically paraphrase sentences, a capability that
could prove useful in machine translation, technologies to help
disabled people, and computer processing of natural language.  ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item12

"Technology Facilitates Data Gathering"
Noun-phrase coreference resolution was the subject of a speech at
the University of Pennsylvania delivered by Cornell University
computer science professor Claire Cardie.  A process for
identifying nouns or phrases that refer to the same entity, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item13

"Section 508: Built Into Business"
Government agencies, contractors, and vendors have normalized
Section 508 accessibility requirements as part of their business,
said policymakers at the Interagency Disabilities Educational
Awareness Showcase (IDEAS) conference last month.  White House ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item14

"Blueprint for Web Services"
Web services are being planned by companies eager to establish a
service-oriented architecture (SOA) that turns applications into
services and rolls them into other applications, supporting
application reusability and low-cost integration.  What is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item15

"A Look at Telematics"
Telematics is the integration of location-based information
services with two-way wireless communication, and telematics
systems have wide applications in automotive services such as
customized infotainment, location-based safety, security, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item16


"Malcode Melee"
Last August's Welchia worm looked like a "white hat" worm to some
because it automatically patched computers and deleted the
Blaster worm, released just one week earlier.  And despite
causing Air Canada flights to be cancelled and disrupting the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item17

"What Do Users Want From Converged Multimodal Communications?"
The deployment of unified messaging and unified communications
has become possible through the development of a converged
voice/data network framework, while the market movement toward
instant messaging and IP telephony is driving the vision of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1208m.html#item18


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