Forecasts for Artificial Intelligence
The Latest High-Tech Legal Issue: Rooting Out the Spy in Your Computer
Spyware or adware programs can run the gamut from innocent to annoying to obviously illegal: The programs' potential for irritation includes slowing down PC performance to generating distracting pop-up ads, while more sinister applications involve online activity monitoring or keystroke ...
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E-Voting Debate: Can We Trust Computers?
Confidence in touchscreen electronic voting terminals has been rattled by failures in the March primaries, and this has prompted at least 20 states to propose laws that would require a paper ballot. Among the problems noted last month was a delayed vote count in Maryland due to modem ...
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Top Strategic Technologies for 2005
Enterprise technology will become more pervasive and useful for businesses through 2005, says Gartner, and points to 10 technologies expected to make the biggest impact in 2005. Instant messaging has already changed the way many companies work, but improved security will allow companies to include ...
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U.S. Programmers: Bargains Go Begging
Mark Jennings of Synergroup Systems is offering to provide the services of U.S. programmers to customers at rates competitive with those in overseas markets such as India and the Philippines, a practice dubbed "insourcing." Author David E. Gumpert reports that such a proposal is a tough sell due to ...
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Feds Want to Eavesdrop on Internet Phone Calls
Dan Gillmor voices concerns stemming from law enforcement's lobbying of the FCC to force broadband service providers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) companies to allow their customers' Internet phone calls to be monitored. He acknowledges that law enforcement agencies' motives are ...
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Oh, Yeah, He Also Sells Computers
Apple's Steve Jobs continues to bear the standard of pervasive digitalization where his contemporaries have shrunk back, according to experts who note Apple's recent success in selling consumer electronics products. "Despite all of his warts, Jobs has kept the dream alive, ...
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Good Times Roll for Australian IT Jobs, Salaries
Australia has reason to be optimistic about job opportunities for information technology workers, as the IT Skills Hub forecasts a 25 percent increase in advertised information and communications technology (ICT) positions over the first six months of 2004. According to the nonprofit ...
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Fingertips 'Read' Text Messages
Researchers at Germany's Bonn University have developed a system that enables a person to discern a text message as a "tactile melody" using a mobile equipped with arrays of pins, whose movements are directed to produce specific patterns under the user's fingertips. Circles, lines, ...
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Open Your Mind to the Home Automation Era
Information Society Technologies' HOMETALK project involves an open-source home automation and networking platform that links previously unconnected machines--ovens and phones, for example--via a homogenous reference point or Residential Gateway, which can deploy this technology convergence ...
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Optical Quantum Memory Designed
An optical quantum memory device that can store photonic quantum bits (qubits) has been designed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The quantum transponder could be employed to build quantum repeaters that would increase the range of nascent quantum cryptography ...
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Credit Card Only Works When Spoken To
Beepcard engineers have developed a prototype credit card that aims to prevent fraud and deter credit-card theft by responding to a spoken password from its owner. The device builds on an earlier Beepcard technology with an embedded loudspeaker that "squawks" an acoustic ID ...
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Hackers: Under the Hood
Network security cannot be effective without a thorough understanding of the hacker mindset, and several hackers--Brian Martin, Adrian Lamo, and Raven Alder--agreed to be interviewed to discuss their backgrounds and motivation. Martin, 30, is best known by the moniker "Jericho," and his ...
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Cream of the Science Crop
Recruiting students will be among the challenges Randal Bryant faces as the new dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Although Carnegie Mellon still turns away one in 10 students who applies to the computer-science program each year, the number of applications this ...
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Can E-Mail Be Saved?
Email's usefulness in the enterprise is being threatened by the growing problem of spam, which is why email's role in the workplace needs to be reconsidered; a panel of a half-dozen software entrepreneurs offer various solutions, but all concur that the effectiveness of any solution stems from ...
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Use It and Lose It
Disposable technologies offer convenience and significant cost savings, but come with caveats such as uncertainties about security and environmental impact; balancing their advantages and disadvantages is a key challenge for CIOs. Technologies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags ...
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No Wires, No Rules
New wireless technologies promise to revolutionize communications and foster even more breakthroughs through their use of free and unlicensed radio spectrum. "The licensed world tends to move in this fairly ponderous way, but with unlicensed spectrum people can try out other things and learn ...
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Internetworking
Startups that employ social-networking software are helping users build, outline, and take advantage of a web of social and professional associations that stretch beyond their everyday social set. Through companies such as Visible Path and LinkedIn, people are using these webs to ...
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Forecasts for Artificial Intelligence
The roadmap for artificial intelligence's evolution over the next three decades is debatable, but intriguing. Issues to monitor as AI development proceeds include its environmental impact and the growing importance of artificial life. Projected developments in the years 2010 through 2020 ...
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