Innovators 2004
Gaps Seen in 'Virtual Border' Security System
Technologists and engineers are highly skeptical that the U.S.-Visit program, a government plan to establish a system that combines biometrics and databases to monitor foreigners entering the United States in real time, is viable. Critics such as RAND Corporation scientist Willis Ware ...
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Spam's Assault Going Beyond Annoying E-Mail
Spam is relentlessly moving beyond desktop computer email and invading Web logs, cell phones, instant messaging, and Internet bulletin boards. Privacy Inc. co-founder Doug Peckover observes, "[Spam is] like water flowing down a hill--you try to block it, and it just flows elsewhere." ...
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Government Data-Mining Lives On
A new report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that federal agencies are engaging in 199 data-mining programs, many of which bear an unsettling resemblance to the Total Information Awareness initiative killed by congressional mandate because of its privacy ...
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Science Middleware Initiative Goes Open-Source
The National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative (NMI) is quickly picking up U.S. academic support, as well as interest from industry middleware groups and international partners. NMI recently made the fifth version of its software available for free download, which incorporates a ...
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Europe Braces for Patent Rules
The European Parliament's upcoming vote on a software-patenting law recently passed by regional ministers could become a flashpoint for computer programmers concerned that its enactment will trigger U.S.-style patent wars that could establish multinational monopolies and hamstring the ...
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Using Tech to Fix Elections
Paul Murphy, author of "The Unix Guide to Defenestration," describes the electronic voting process as a quagmire of inexperienced and poorly educated voters and election officials, practically nonexistent audit trails, systems dominated by insecure Microsoft technologies, and easily ...
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Giant Grid Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
Researchers have discovered the largest known prime number, described as 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1, using a grid of approximately 240,000 networked computers. The number, which features 7,235,733 decimal digits, is the 41st Mersenne Prime to be discovered, and was found through the ...
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PC In a Pocket Promises Big Performance
The days of pocket-sized PCs are fast approaching as a handful of American startups ready new ultra-personal computers (UPCs) that can run the full version of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and all of its accompanying applications, whereas the software used by personal digital ...
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Engineers Visualize Electric Memory as It Fades
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Argonne National Laboratory have examined the atomic arrangement of ferroelectric memory, which can store data without power, to learn why it loses reliability over time, a problem known as fatigue. A better understanding of the structure ...
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Who Tests Voting Machines?
The so-called independent testing of electronic voting machines that election officials rely on is in desperate need of reform and transparency, according to this editorial. Testing companies are in the pocket of voting machine manufacturers, which means that they often rush through e-voting ...
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Software Helps Rights Groups Protect Data
Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman's open-source Martus software was spawned from a need to aid human-rights activists in abusive Third World countries by offering a sophisticated but simple data encryption program that could be used by people with minimal technology skills. ...
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Slow Going for Linux in Iraq
Extremely few Iraqis have experience with Linux, but the Iraqi Linux User Group (LUG) out of Baghdad University is trying to change that: Ashraf Tariq and Hasanen Nawfal, both engineering students at the school, launched the Iraqi LUG with the aim of "putting Linux on every server in Iraq," ...
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Outsourcing Ax Falls Hard on Tech Workers
Technology workers held enviable positions in the U.S. job market several years ago, but now face lay-offs due to their companies' offshore outsourcing programs. Offshoring is billed as a way to generate more valuable jobs in the United States, but the reality is that it is purely ...
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Technology Applications for the Health Sector
Telkom has launched a new South African Center of Excellence (CoE) at the University of the North near Polokwane to develop speech technology applications for the medical sector. For instance, such applications will allow patients to receive the correct medication dosage over the telephone, ...
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The Scope of Network Distributed Computing
In the first chapter of his book "Network Distributed Computing: Fitscapes and Fallacies," author Max Goff provides an overview of numerous NDR areas, noting that all aspects of NDR are interconnected to almost every other aspect. Goff stresses that ubiquitous computing is needed to achieve the ...
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Gunning for Speed
The dislodging of U.S. supercomputers' ranking as the world's fastest machines by NEC's 41-teraflop Earth Simulator in Japan about two years ago served as a wake-up call to Washington, which realized that the United States was lagging behind other nations not just in the speed and ...
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True Grid
Enterprises are cutting information processing time and making faster business decisions through grid computing, which is a less expensive option than a complete hardware upgrade; the end result for business users is faster responses, less time to market for new products, and reduced prices ...
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Is It Time to Make the Network Smarter?
Internet infrastructure needs to become more sophisticated in order to provide better reliability, security, and performance, writes networking expert Peter Sevcik: Although the idea of a dumb network served the Internet well during its nascent days by allowing greater innovation and ...
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Innovators 2004
Seventy-five percent of technology developers singled out by InfoWorld for making contributions that have led to significant improvements in our daily lives focus on security, XML, or Web services solutions. Dr. Dan Boneh of Stanford University and Dr. Matt Franklin of the University of California, ...
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