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U.S. Students Shun Computer Sciences
Enrollment of U.S. undergraduate students in computer technology and engineering fields declined by 19 percent in the 2002-03 academic year, while the number of newly declared computer science majors experienced a precipitous 23 percent drop-off last year, according to the Computing ...
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Online Swindlers, Called 'Phishers,' Lure the Unwary
A growing number of "phishing" emails is worrying Internet companies, banks, and insurance firms who often end up absorbing the cost of identity theft. ISP Earthlink has launched an aggressive campaign against phishers, who cost the company approximately $100,000 in customer support and related ...
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Next Net Moves Forward
The second phase of testing for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was recently completed as the Moonv6 testbed network was put through its paces for two weeks in March by the North American IPv6 Task Force, the Defense Information Systems Agency's Joint Interoperability Testing Command, and ...
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Copy Protection Plan Squeezes Home Users
Consumer electronics makers, PC hardware firms, and software companies are working together to define an "Authorized Domain" where all the digital content in a home would be subject to technical constraints. Metadata attached to the content would regulate how it is copied, stored, displayed, ...
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Pay Once, Share Often With LWDRM
Light Weight Digital Rights Management (LWDRM) technology developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute has the potential to resolve the bitter feud between the music industry and file sharers by granting consumers more freedom without compromising the rights of the industry. The institute ...
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Robolympics Contestants Shoot for Gold
Some 414 robots and 600 human entrants have registered for the first-ever Robolympics, an international competition that will test the machines' mettle across a variety of disciplines through an assortment of grueling contests. Robotics Society of America President James Calkins, who founded ...
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Ad-Hoc Wireless Networking Technology for Battlefield Environments
Under the auspices of its Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI) program, the U.S. Defense Department has apportioned about $3 million in funding over three years to a project to develop "space-time processing for tactical mobile ad-hoc networks" for establishing wireless mobile ...
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Technology Solution to Slicing Spam Lags
Efforts to develop anti-spam technology standards are displaying a profound lack of unification, and some anti-spam experts are taking a long, hard look at the standards issue's progress in the wake of AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo!'s joint lawsuit against scores of spammers. There ...
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Clever Critter May Detect Hard-Drive Failures
Variations in temperature may presage a hard-drive failure, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have designed a new sensor to detect such variations. Chriss Swaney of CMU reports that gauging the amount of heat produced in a hard drive on a daily basis could help extend the life ...
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Computers and Sensors Find Home in UF Seniors Project
University of Florida researchers are developing and testing assisted-living technologies designed to aid senior citizens without sacrificing their freedom. A lab in UF's computer science engineering building is decked out as a mockup of a living space outfitted with ...
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'Nano-Lightning' Could Be Harnessed to Cool Future Computers
Purdue University scientists have developed an ion-driven cooling device for electronic circuits that could prove significantly more reliable and less expensive than liquid-based cooling, and perhaps enable laptops to employ higher-performance chips whose heat output is beyond the tolerance ...
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Digital Revolutionary: Interview With Leonardo Chiariglione
After ushering in the MP3 and MPEG standards, electronics engineer Leonardo Chiariglione says the digital revolution is still far from being realized: His new Digital Media Project (DMP) is meant to complete the picture and bring about a new digital music experience for end users, new business ...
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All Our Lives Are on File, for Sale
Many companies sell or trade consumers' personal information, gathering it from Internet sites, credit applications, government Web sites, and other sources. Much of the data is publicly available, and volunteered by consumers, but privacy experts worry that the accumulation of such data ...
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IIT Software to Break Language Barriers
Students and professors in IIT Kharagpur's computer science department are collaborating with leading Indian linguists to develop translation software designed to close the gap between the "educated elite" of India's urban centers and the less literate rural residents. "We have been given the ...
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Location Awareness: The Key to Better Mobile Networks
Mobile phones' location awareness capabilities could be tapped to significantly improve mobile network performance and management, as demonstrated by tests conducted under Information Society Technologies' CELLO project. The network-capacity difficulties mobile operators must ...
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Blueprint for Code Automation
Model-driven architecture (MDA) is slowly gaining acceptance among organizations that start with small projects highlighting MDA's benefits: For instance, the state of Wisconsin used MDA to develop a new Web-based unemployment insurance benefit system, laying down business process ...
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All Eyes on Google
The Google search engine developed by Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page has turned Web searching into a profitable enterprise and become so vital that former Lycos CEO Bob Davis exclaims, "The Internet without search is like a cruise missile without a guidance system." ...
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Primary Concerns
During the Democratic primary on March 2, Maryland used touch-screen voting machines statewide for the first time with no instances of voter fraud, but RABA Technologies security advisor Michael Wertheimer says the silence is deafening because those with malicious intent have had an opportunity to ...
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Search Beyond Google
Google's enormous success with its search engine--and its apparent inability to develop a follow-up innovation momentous enough to sustain the company's market dominance--is encouraging Microsoft and other companies to invent their own tools that could eventually capture a good portion of ...
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