We Like to Watch
Brain Drain in Tech's Future?
The National Science Foundation (NSF) reports an alarming drop in the number of technology-related doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. universities, but there is wide-ranging debate about what this means for the U.S. technology sector and what can be done about it. Although 27,300 students ...
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Passport ID Technology Has High Error Rate
The State Department plans to start issuing passports with embedded digital photos next spring, even though federal researchers, industry experts, and privacy proponents advise that fingerprints should be used instead. The digital photo could be compared with an image of the traveler taken at the ...
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FCC Takes on Spam, Copying
The FCC adopted a number of proposals on Aug. 4 concerning wireless spam and digital copying controls, as well as how wiretapping rules should be applied to voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) services. The commission motioned that certain wireless spam messages be banned as part of its ...
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IETF Prepares to Forward Sender ID
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plans to nominate a consolidated technology standard that would prevent email address spoofing: The Sender ID technology combines the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), already used by some 50,000 domain owners worldwide, with Microsoft's Caller ID framework, ...
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'Super Computers Will Soon Become a Commodity'
Anand Babu, who led the effort that developed the second fastest supercomputer in the world at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in the United States, anticipates the commoditization of supercomputing thanks to technologies such as Intelligent Platform Management Interface, Explicit ...
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Classic System Solutions to Present at San Francisco BayCHI on Designing User Interfaces for Rich Internet Applications
BayCHI has chosen Classic System Solutions President James Hobart to be a key speaker and panelist at the BayCHI Rich Internet Application event on Aug. 10, 2004. Joining other industry leaders on Rich Internet Applications such as Macromedia, Lazlo, and Oddpost, Classic will help ...
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As Photos Fade, Texts Crumble, U.S. Archives Tries to Save Data
Digital data as well as printed and recorded information is subject to deterioration and loss, and on Aug. 3 the National Archives awarded $20 million to Harris Corp. and Lockheed Martin to develop a permanent medium for preserving the history of the United States. National Archives and ...
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Programming Wetware
Various projects in developing biological computers are underway, although the obstacles are formidable. Researchers say the value of DNA-based computers is their ability to perform massively parallel problem-solving, but Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program manager Eric ...
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Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby.
Many people are championing spam filters as the saviors of email, but filters can unintentionally block legitimate messages and can also be circumvented by creative spammers; this fact is forcing users to be even more vigilant over what kinds of email is being weeded out, and to ...
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Playing Along Virtually in Sports
In the near future, viewers of television sports events will be able to personalize and interact with program content just as Web users can do at many online sites today, says PISTE project coordinator Thanos Demiris. The PISTE (Personalized, Immersive Sports TV Experience) program combines ...
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Can You Hack the Vote?
Vocal electronic voting critic and Harvard University research fellow Rebecca Mercuri aims to demonstrate how unreliable and insecure e-voting machines are through the Mercuri Challenge, an invitation to hackers to try to break undetectably into such systems. "I'm not asking anyone to break ...
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Onion Routing Averts Prying Eyes
Tor is a second-generation communications system being developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab that employs onion routing to anonymize Web surfers and protect their activities from corporate or government eavesdropping. In an onion-routing scheme, messages are sent through a distributed network ...
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Stealth Wallpaper Keeps Company Secrets Safe
BAE Systems, under contract with British telecoms regulator Ofcom, has developed a technique to thwart the interception of Wi-Fi signals from office base stations while ignoring mobile phone signals, through a system based on a secret "stealth" technology originally created to hide military ...
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A Sweet Spot for Every Listener
Iosono, the brainchild of Karlheinz Brandenburg of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, is a sound system that employs computers, sound-processing algorithms, and speakers to dramatically enhance a listener's perception of recorded sounds. Standard ...
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Interview With United Nations Head Secretariat of WGIG
The increasing interest that a number of governments have in managing and coordinating the Internet, especially on the issues of convergence and telephone networks, has erupted into the debate over Internet governance, says Markus Kummer, executive coordinator, secretariat of the United ...
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Ultrawideband: A Better Bluetooth
Ultrawideband (UWB) technology is here, but faces significant standards and regulatory hurdles before it can be safely deployed for business applications. UWB demonstrations from Freescale Semiconductor show data transfer speeds of up to 110 Mbps, enough for three concurrent video ...
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Tech-Job Upheaval
The U.S. IT job outlook is improving now, but recent Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show the extent of the damage caused over the last three years: The government says the IT job market peaked three years ago when 3.47 million out of 3.57 million U.S. IT workers held jobs; this year, just ...
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Makers of Ground Robots Ask for Better Sensors and Communication Links
Robotic ground vehicles are being developed and deployed for military operations such as ordinance detection and disposal, reconnaissance, and security patrols, but their usability will remain limited until sensor technology is improved and technical obstacles such as communications range ...
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We Like to Watch
Political, cultural, and economic forces are converging to usher in an age of virtually anytime-anywhere surveillance of people, transactions, and things, bringing society closer to a point in which advanced sensor technology, search tools, and public databases can be leveraged to set up ...
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