The Robots Are Here
Cyber-Terrorism Warning Sounded
Experts and federal officials testifying yesterday before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology, and homeland security warned that terrorists could heighten the devastating effects of physical attacks by launching cyber-attacks against the systems that manage ...
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Controversial Government Data-Mining Research Lives On
The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program may have been killed by congressional decree, but key elements of the program have survived at other intelligence agencies, according to congressional, federal, and research officials. TIA's goal was to employ data-mining to sift through ...
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RSA Panel: Cryptography Can't Foil Human Weakness
Four panelists invited to discuss cryptography with Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier at the RSA Conference devoted most of their attention to information security failures, and concluded that the most advanced cryptographic solutions can be undone by the user, who is the ...
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Tech Jobs: Research and Development
Demand for research and development personnel has never waned, despite the turbulence of the American job market. "R&D continues to be a strong area for jobs for cream-of-the-crop kinds of people," asserts Challenger, Gray & Christmas CEO John Challenger, who also reports that demand is increasing ...
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Immigration & Innovation
The United States is no longer accepting H-1B applications, claiming that the 65,000 annual cap has already been reached. Experts worry that such actions will make the United States a less attractive option for foreign-born IT workers, forcing them to go elsewhere to develop new ...
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Is Broadband Set to Make Power Lines Sing?
The FCC has opened the door for electricity companies to offer broadband over power line (BPL) Internet access, and this move potentially adds electricity companies to the ranks of broadband providers, which currently include phone and cable companies. BPL would also help solve the last-mile ...
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High-Tech R&D: Too Vital to Outsource?
A 2003 study by AMR Research found that 50 percent of research and development units in the automotive, aerospace, defense, and high-tech industries had no plans to outsource IT support, while only 4 percent of tech companies said they outsource R&D. AMR's Lance Travis reports that ...
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Real Genius
Federally funded research and development projects spurred by terrorism concerns are expected to debut as new technologies this year. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) $2.2 million Software for Distributed Robotics program has yielded Centibots to assist in search and ...
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Grid Forum Backs Utility Computing Standards
The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is supporting the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF) initiative to draft utility computing standards. "The collaboration will deliver the usability the industry requires, and provide standards that capitalize on existing efforts to deliver the management ...
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Finding a Way to Fry Spam
Independent Internet and email consultant John Levine, who co-chairs the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group and is a member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, argues that curbing spam must be the responsibility of both users and ISPs, noting that ...
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It's About Connectivity Not the Internet!
Popular thought about the Internet is so muddled that most people do not understand the opportunities lost when discussing Internet governance, media consolidation, and new carrier services, argues Bob Frankston. The word "Internet" no longer denotes the transport of bits, but includes the ...
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It's Time to Talk Mobile Phone Security
The mobile phone industry needs to address the issue of security, thanks to the migration of bugs and digital attacks into that arena. AL Digital's recent study of mobile phones lists Bluetooth-related vulnerabilities in some phones that could allow an attacker to read and write to a phone's ...
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Are You Ready for MDA?
Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is touted to be applicable to a wide-range of development tasks by vendor-backed organizations and modeling experts, but other software development thinkers understand MDA has serious flaws. MDA relies on complex modeling tools to transform platform-independent ...
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Apache Rewrites License
Starting March 1, all Apache projects must employ a rewritten version of the Apache license that eases reuse across projects, increases the license's compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL), and bolsters safeguards against patent infringement claims. "We want to make ...
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Software
The dreams of prospective U.S. software developers have been tempered in the last several years as more and more jobs have been outsourced to cheaper overseas labor, and Silicon Graphics CEO Robert R. Bishop concludes that American programmers "are competing with everyone else in the world ...
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RSA Show to Highlight New Security Approaches
Security vendors and other large IT players plan to unveil new approaches to fixing vulnerabilities and user authentication at the RSA Conference 2004. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is nearing the release of its Application Vulnerability ...
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Want to Stop Spam? Multiple Techniques in Unison Is the Answer
A multi-pronged strategy is the only true option a business can take to curb spam, as there is no one method that can thwart all of the tricks spammers use. A particularly effective approach is to educate end users on spamming techniques and countermeasures, such as: Not purchasing products ...
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10 Tech Trends to Bet On
A number of tech trends are poised to do well over the next few years: Smart dust--tiny, wireless, low-cost sensors that can monitor temperature, vibrations, light, and even radiation and toxicity levels--are expected to make their mark in commercial, military, security, and ecological projects ...
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The Robots Are Here
Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, believes robot technology is currently at the same point that computer technology was in 1978, and contends that robots will become as ubiquitous as email and the Web in 15 more years. He points out ...
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