A Good First Impression
Dueling Viruses Are Latest Computer Pest
Virus authors seem to be using their latest malware not just to hijack victims' computers, but to snipe at each other for some as yet unclear reason, according to security experts. Five new versions of the MyDoom, Bagle, and Netsky bugs were discovered on the Web in the space of three ...
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'To Speak to an Operator, Start Swearing Now'
University of Southern California researchers are working on software that switches from automated telephony to a live operator by sensing that a caller is angry, which could boost customer loyalty if the technology can be practically applied. USC professor Shrikanth Narayanan explains that a ...
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Lurking "Spyware" May Be a Security Weak Spot
Researchers led by Steven Gribble at the University of Washington in Seattle conducted a study of campus network traffic and discovered that 5.1 percent of all Internet-connected systems had one of four known spyware programs--Cydoor, eZula, Gator, and SaveNow--running on them, while 69 ...
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Putting Wireless to the Test(bed)
U.S. university researchers have established a distributed wireless testbed for the integration and testing of new wireless communications technologies. Dubbed WHYNET and funded with a $5.5 million National Science Foundation grant, the meta-testbed consists of the linked wireless ...
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Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs used Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler to mine numerous Weblogs, after which they mapped out the connections and topics shared among a large number of sites. Analysis showed that topics would often appear on a small number of relatively ...
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A Car That Drives Itself? He's Working on It
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand Challenge is a March 13 race from Barstow, Calif., to the California-Nevada border: The racers are automated vehicles that will be required to cross some 200 miles off-road without human assistance, their only guidance ...
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Tools Let Network Operators See Their Way to Security
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) researchers have developed a new network monitoring tool that puts raw network data in visual form so human operators can process it more quickly and effectively. The idea for the new software tools came after two NCSA researchers ...
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Walking 'Signature'
Researchers are working on gait signature technology whose applications, if perfected, could include security surveillance, medical diagnosis of movement disorders, and computer animation. Human motion signatures would be determined by the same techniques facial-recognition software employs to ...
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Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine
The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act, which is expected to be reviewed by the House Commerce Committee on March 4, is drawing controversy because its provisions essentially permit certain companies to own and license facts, making anyone who copies and ...
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Paul Debevec on Illuminating Effects
Paul Debevec of the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) has spent much of his career developing techniques to integrate computer graphics with computer vision to achieve more realistic visual effects, and he notes that attaining such realism greatly depends on giving computer-generated ...
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NASA Considers Open-Source License to Publish Software
NASA is creating a license so that it can release its own applications as open-source software, and says that a final version should be ready by early summer. NASA has submitted a draft to the Open Source Initiative, which accredits open-source software standards. NASA lawyer Bryan Geurts ...
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The Future of Computing Part 5: Evolution and the Bump
Computing continues to evolve smoothly as software tools become more lithe and powerful and hardware scales in speed, but eventually limits to hardware development will force a jolting change in computing. Software evolution is shedding more complexity as programmers take to scripting ...
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IU's CAVE Offers Virtual Reality
Computer science majors are not the only students at Indiana University taking advantage of the high-tech Cave Automated Virtual Environment inside Lindley Hall. Studio art majors Jackie Nykiel and Lisa Reinwald used the CAVE to design a replica of an ancient Buddhist temple surrounded by a ...
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The Nuclear Weapon of Digital Rights Law
The European Union Directive for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights has raised the ire of a number of civil liberties groups, which describe the draft legislation as going way beyond the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States. The Electronic ...
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What Tomorrow May Bring
The U.S. government is investing in pattern recognition software as a tool for anticipating and stopping terrorist incidents by organizing vast amounts of raw, unstructured data--email, voice transcripts, surveillance photos, etc.--into a minable model. Examples include an expansion of the ...
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Software and the Future of Programming Languages
Few people truly understand the scale and reach of software or the programming languages that support it; but such understanding is critical to addressing security, maintenance, and functionality issues that will grow in complexity as the embedded software base expands. It is estimated ...
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Sensors on the March
Sensor technology has made enormous strides recently thanks to power supply and programmability breakthroughs, and further milestones on the horizon will help make sensors and sensor networks even more efficient, flexible, and interoperable. So that sensors can conserve battery power, a ...
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Rekindle the Fire
Scott Studham of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory writes that cost-effective commodity supercomputing clusters are effective tools for carrying out "first-principles simulations" of such things as weather systems and basic science, which are based on fundamental physical ...
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A Good First Impression
B.J. Fogg, director of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology lab, has determined through research that the first impression of a Web site's visual design is the single most important factor people use to establish a site's credibility or lack of same. He says this is a disappointing ...
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