An Insecure Future
E-Voting: Nightmare or Nirvana?
The debate over electronic voting's advantages and drawbacks has become increasingly polarized, with advocates and computer scientists alike vehemently disagreeing on issues such as e-voting's security, verifiability and reliability; its convenience to handicapped, non-English-reading, and ...
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Engineering Breakthrough Develops Artificial Neuron That 'Learns'
A microelectronics research team led by Richard Wells of the University of Idaho has spent the last two-and-a-half years developing a "biomimic" artificial neuron that serves as the basic component of computers that learn by themselves without any programming. Information is conveyed by ...
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Wiretap Ruling Could Signal End of E-Mail Privacy
Privacy advocates warn that a recent federal appeals court ruling makes email vulnerable to spying, since it is not afforded the same Wiretap Act protections as live communications are. The new ruling found that Interloc vice president Bradford Councilman was not illegally eavesdropping when he ...
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Mozilla, Opera Unite to Standardize Web
The Mozilla Foundation, along with Opera, Apple, Sun Microsystems, and Macromedia, announced plans on June 30 to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Interface (NPAPI) in order to furnish an open source, scriptable, and secure plug-in model, thus standardizing plug-in ...
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Interface Blends Screen and Video
FaceTop is a videoconferencing system developed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that overlays transparent images of a computer's desktop over video images of the user so that the user can view both images simultaneously. The video consists of an ...
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Investigating Digital Images
Dartmouth associate computer science professor Hany Farid and graduate student Alin Popescu have developed an algorithm that can distinguish between a genuine digital image and one that has been doctored by studying the image's underlying code and looking for statistical changes that signal ...
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Software for a Safer World
Ten international student teams are competing in the fifth annual Computer Society International Design Competition being held in Washington, D.C., this week to see which of their projects will best fulfill the judging panel's criteria of making the world safer. Nepalese students from ...
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Searching for the Perfect OS
Both Microsoft and Apple Computer are promoting technology that makes it possible for users to search for information on their computer's hard drive regardless of what format it is in through their Longhorn and Tiger offerings, respectively. MIT computer science professor and Haystack ...
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Knock 3 Times on the Ceiling (to Turn on the DVD Player)
Professor Ros K. Ing of the University of Paris has devised an inexpensive system that turns common surfaces into tactile screens through the use of a computer linked to vibration-sensitive sensors. Such a system could enable users to communicate with and control lights, email, DVD players, CDs, or ...
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The Opening Lines of Innovation Success Stories
The first two Russian Innovation Competitions were disappointing because the technologies that were honored attracted little capital investment--but the results of this year's contest were much more encouraging. The Grand Prix award was given to Qmodule founder and physicist Martyn Nunuparov for ...
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Is Java Cooling Off?
This week's JavaOne conference highlights the growing discontent over Sun Microsystems' handling of the cross-platform programming language. Many companies and legions of corporate developers depend on Java as an alternative to Microsoft's .Net and development tools, but the business ...
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Let Software Catch the Game for You
Several research teams are trying to develop software that can automatically recognize key moments in live TV sports broadcasts and edit them into a clip of highlights. A team at Dublin's Trinity College is working out a methodology by using PC-based software to study table-based ...
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Apple's RSS Embrace Could Bolster Adoption
Apple Computer says RSS (really simple syndication) support will be built into the next Safari browser, to be released with the upcoming Tiger Mac OS X in the first half of 2005. Opera 7.50, released in May, also supports XML syndication and Mozilla plans to include the technology in its upcoming ...
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Hardware Today--Cutting Through the Infiniband Buzz
Mellanox's Kevin Deierling characterizes Infiniband technology's four key strengths as being a standards-based protocol, 10 Gbps performance, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and transport offload. The open Infiniband standard is supported by the 225 companies comprising the Infiniband Trade ...
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Supercomputers to Examine Life Itself
More and more high-performance computing projects will focus on life itself for the purposes of drug discovery, bioinformatics, and biological simulation, whereas previous initiatives have emphasized such applications as weapons testing, weather forecasting, and space exploration. Grid ...
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Sixth Sense
MIT's Media Lab straddles the leading edge of electric field imaging systems research and development. People have been exploiting electric fields to detect objects in close proximity for approximately 100 years, but Media Lab researchers started exploring electric field imaging in the ...
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Kerry Pledges $30B for Tech R&D, Broadband
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) promised that, if elected, he would spend $30 billion to boost American research and development of science and technology through budget increases for federal agencies and tax incentives. In his recent speech at San Jose University, ...
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Emerging Technologies Progress Report
Tablet PCs, InfiniBand, server blades, and Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) networked storage have had their ups and downs in the two years since they first generated interest as potential enterprise tools: Some appear to be ready for mainstream enterprise adoption, while others ...
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An Insecure Future
Embedded systems designers are facing diverse security threats that make reliance on third-party security products or the underlying operating system (OS) impossible. These systems will become more susceptible to viruses, worms, and malware that typically target desktop computers as they ...
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