Dark Matter Revisited
Intel Calls for Internet Overhaul
In an Aug. 9 speech at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger cited the experimental PlanetLab network as an example of the direction the Internet needs to go if it is to be successfully upgraded to resolve issues of adaptability, reliability, and capacity. "We think the work [PlanetLab ...
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In Computers We Trust, Even Fallible Ones
Building intrusion-tolerant networked computer systems that are reliable and secure is the goal of the IST project MAFTIA, a contender for the European Union's 1-million-euro 2004 Descartes Prize to be awarded in December. MAFTIA has dedicated three years to outlining a conceptual ...
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House Panel Gets Tough on Spyware, P2P Piracy
The House Judiciary Committee has toughened its stance on peer-to-peer digital piracy and spyware with the Sept. 8 passage of the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act and the Internet Spyware Prevention Act. The former bill goes after the digital dissemination of copyrighted content ...
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System Alert: Web Meltdown
The Internet has already "melted down" when considering it is impossible for users to avoid spam and viruses, poor-quality software, and vaguely defined restrictions on how they can use their ISP accounts, according to networking expert Lauren Weinstein and other technology experts who met ...
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Simple Search Lightens Net Load
Using funds from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have created a local-rule search mechanism that will keep searches fast even as the network grows dramatically. The search algorithm ...
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At Your Service (or Wits' End)
Companies are saving tens of millions of dollars in labor costs by using automated agents to handle routine inquiries via speech recognition. Unfortunately, speech recognition technology can prove very frustrating when the caller's requests exceed the limited parameters the agents operate ...
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Are Hackers Using Your PC to Spew Spam and Steal?
Since last year, infectious programs have been turning hacked PCs into zombie computers, making them send spam emails and take part in other illegal activities. Experts say the number of infected machines has reached the millions at a time when computers are more powerful and ...
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Rise of the Robot
Future Horizons projects that 55.5 million robots will be shipped by 2010 in a market worth over $75 billion; driving this expected trend is the falling price of software that enables the machines to adapt to diverse conditions. This will significantly boost robots' reliability, which Wow Wee toys consultant Mark Tilden notes is a critical factor to their ...
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Coffee Needs Topping Up? Computer Specks Can Tell
Five universities in Scotland are collaborating to move Speckled Computing out of the conceptual stage and into the real world. Speckled Computing envisions the distribution of thousands of minuscule computers that can network into supercomputers and link ordinary objects to the Internet. ...
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Princeton Research Project Bypasses Internet Shortcomings
Princeton University's computer science department chair Larry Peterson told attendees at a Sept. 7 seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that the commercial Internet is too unfriendly to host experiments with new network architectures and protocols that could be crucial to patching the ...
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Spreading Knowledge, the Wiki Way
Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia assembled and edited by the site's visitors, has grown remarkably in size and popularity: The archive supports more than 340,000 English-language articles and disseminates news via a publicly authored current-events page, but its increasing acceptance ...
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Industry Group Voicing Cybersecurity Concerns in Washington
Executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA) Paul Kurtz says the motivation for the organization's establishment was to give cybersecurity industry leaders "a common voice in Washington on cybersecurity policy issues." The seven-month-old CSIA aims to address ...
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Critics Warn of Post-Election Problems If No Paper Trail Exists
The U.S. presidential election in November could be endlessly disputed if the vote results are close, since nearly 30 percent of voters will be using touch-screen machines, most of which are not equipped to produce a verifiable paper record. The August recall election of President Hugo ...
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Robots Invade the Table Football Pitch
Bernhard Nebel of Germany's University of Freiburg has led a team of roboticists in the development of a robotic foosball table that bested 85 percent of a random sample of players. The rods on one side of the table are linked to high torque motors and an electronic control system that ...
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IT to Help Avoid Astronomical Armageddon
A number of major projects are underway to map the sky in an effort to spot and analyze potentially dangerous near-Earth objects long before they become serious threats so that they can hopefully be deflected in time. New search and processing approaches will need to be developed in order to ...
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Toward a Federated Future
The federated network model, such as the one employed by banks to facilitate seamless ATM transactions, is being considered by IT vendors and their clients as an enabling framework for next-generation integrated network services for enterprise employees, business partners, and ...
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The Dark Side of Small
Efforts to study the potential medical and environmental risks of nanomaterials are lagging behind those to develop and commercialize the technology, and advocates are worried that the nanotech movement could be undone by a shortage of reliable information and warnings of doomsday ...
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Dark Matter Revisited
Distributed computing and integration toolkits tend to lose their simplicity and grow bigger and more complicated to the point where they become just as complex as the approach they were designed to supplant, and this trend is attributable to a number of factors, not the least of which ...
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