Public ENUM--How Important Is It?
Electronic Voting Alternative Offered
A coalition of volunteer programmers and professors known as the Open Voting Consortium has devised an electronic voting scheme that is "technically sound, accurate, secure, inexpensive, uniform and open." In addition to providing a voter-verified paper ballot that many critics of ...
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Industry Urges Tech Security Upgrades
Major software companies recommend in an April 1 report that the Homeland Security Department seriously consider whether "tailored government action" is needed to improve software design in order to bolster the security of U.S. computer networks, admitting that the market may lack the ability to ...
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Russian Schools Sweep Programming Contest
The St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics won the top prize in ACM's 28th International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in Prague, Czech Republic, and Somers, NY. Teams from KTH-Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Belarusian State University in Minsk, and Perm ...
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Mass Resignation for French Scientists
Some 976 French laboratory directors and 1,100 specialist team leaders resigned on March 9 in a demonstration against what they perceive as inertia on the part of the French government to address growing concerns among researchers, including low wages, a lack of funds for new equipment, ...
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Tech Study Provides 'Solid State' Stats
The Milken Institute's 2004 State Technology and Science Index has the same states in the top and bottom of its list, though in slightly different order: The study linked states' technology savvy directly to per-capita income. Massachusetts remains No. 1 in the pound-for-pound ranking of ...
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New EU Grid Project Has International Aspirations
The goal of the European Union's Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe (EGEE) project is to construct a dependable and secure grid that is available 24 hours a day, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). EGEE is envisioned as the successor to the ...
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New Marking Process Traces Spammers, Pirates, and Hackers
Penn State researchers have proposed a new process to make it impossible for hackers, spammers, and digital pirates to spoof source addresses in order to thwart attempts to trace them. The method involves using border routers to mark each message or data packet with an identifying number. ...
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Yoran Rejects Claims of Slow Progress in Securing Key IT Systems
Amit Yoran, director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division (NCSD), refutes recent claims by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) on the Senate Government Affairs Committee that the White House's efforts to secure the United States' critical infrastructure ...
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Conversational Interface Aids Robot Navigation
University of Missouri-Columbia computer scientist Marjorie Skubic, together with fuzzy-logic-based pattern recognition expert James Kelley and Pascal Matsakis of the University of Guelph's computing and information science department, has demonstrated a prototype robot capable of ...
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'Reality Mining' the Organization
When taken by itself, data mining of email, Web pages, and other digital media is not an effective method for determining a company's de facto organization. Instead, MIT Media Lab's Human Design Research Group is focusing on "reality mining," in which widely available, wearable gadgets ...
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Snapshot Chat Creates Automatic Captions
Hewlett-Packard researcher Margaret Fleck has devised a system in which a computer can caption and index digital photos by recording commentary and conversations to identify keywords that describe the pictures. She has developed software that imprints these conversations onto a hard disk, ...
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GNOME 2.6 Out to Up Linux Desktop Stakes
The GNOME Linux desktop version 2.6 is an evolutionary improvement on its predecessor and is equal to the Mac OS X in terms of usability, according to Ximian co-founder and Novell product technology vice president Miguel de Icaza. GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) and KDE are the two ...
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Mathematicians, Computer Scientists Play Key Role in Analysis of Lab Rat Genome
University of California, Berkeley, computer scientists and mathematicians have developed important computational models and analysis software for comparing the genomes of rats, mice, and humans, the only three vertebrates to have their entire genetic code documented. Besides providing important ...
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All the World's a Soundstage as Audio Formats Evolve
Surround sound is coming to MP3 audio compression, bringing the popular format alongside new proprietary technology from Microsoft and RealNetworks: The Fraunhofer Institute says MP3 Surround will play on normal stereo devices such as portable music players, but will enable 5.1 ...
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Seeing-Eye Computer Guides Blind
Visually handicapped people could be guided by iCare, a portable, computerized "seeing" assistant developed by researchers at Arizona State and Wright State universities. ICare's hardware components include a pair of glasses outfitted with cameras, which record images that are converted ...
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Stop the Presses! Roll Out the E-Papers
A major breakthrough in the field of electronic paper was announced last week with Philips Electronics' declaration that it will provide the world's first commercial e-paper display module to Sony for use in an "e-book" device that will become available in Japan in late April; the display's ...
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Face-Off: Is Patch Management the Best Defense Against Vulnerabilities?
Shavlik Technologies chief security architect Eric Schultze contends that intrusion-prevention systems (IPSes), anti-virus software, and firewalls alone cannot shield computers against known software flaws, and that patch management is the key ingredient for ensuring network security. Schultze ...
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Public ENUM--How Important Is It?
The FCC's deliberations on whether to regulate public Voice over IP (VOIP) mask another policy issue of how involved the U.S. should get in ENUM, the electronic number mapping between Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and IP addresses. Thus far, the federal government has ...
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