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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, March 2, 2005



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ACM TechNews
March 2, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Academics Support File-Sharing Companies
  • Clinton, Boxer Pushing E-Voting Bill in Senate
  • ACM Awards Honor Advances in Internet, Programming, Software Technology
  • Cracking Software Development Complexity
  • Showing PRESENCE at the World's ICT Fair
  • Ending the Grid Lock
  • European Commission Stands by Patent Proposal
  • Fighting for the 'Freedom to Tinker'
  • New Tool May Aid Digital Investigators
  • Mind Reader
  • Cornell Robotics Team Drives for the Gold
  • Attack on a Cryptographic RFID Device
  • 'Perfect Storm' for New Privacy Laws?
  • IT Skills Crisis Haunts Government
  • Too Much Information
  • Primed for Numbers
  • The H-1B Equation
  • Beyond the Book
  • Software Synthesis for Embedded Systems

     

    Academics Support File-Sharing Companies

    Leading U.S. computer scientists added their voices to those of technology companies and consumer organizations on March 1 in urging the Supreme Court not to overturn a lower-court decision declaring the Grokster and StreamCast online file-sharing firms unaccountable for digital piracy ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Clinton, Boxer Pushing E-Voting Bill in Senate

    The Count Every Vote Act sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) calls for the provision of a voter-verified paper ballot for each vote cast in electronic voting systems, and also mandates that all citizens have access to voter verification regardless of language, ...

    [read more]      to the top


    ACM Awards Honor Advances in Internet, Programming, Software Technology

    The ACM announced on March 1 the winners of the 2004 ACM awards, which will be handed out on June 11. "Like the recently announced winners of ACM's A.M. Turing Award, these contributions all recognize ground breaking innovations that influence how ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Cracking Software Development Complexity

    Software complexity continues to increase faster than Moore's Law, meaning that programmers will be unable to write and manage code without rethinking how to create programs, writes Partech's Nicolas El Baze. A number of companies are addressing this issue and moving toward model-based ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Showing PRESENCE at the World's ICT Fair

    The European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies initiative will showcase nine IST projects that will offer demonstrations of cutting-edge Presence research to visitors at the CeBIT 2005 Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) fair later this month. "Presence research ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Ending the Grid Lock

    The Globus Consortium, launched with the backing of IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel in January, aims to make the Globus Toolkit more appealing to companies that have previously been concerned with security and support for grid systems. The non-profit consortium is headed by one ...

    [read more]      to the top


    European Commission Stands by Patent Proposal

    The European Commission has rejected the European Parliament's request that the proposed "patentability of computer-implemented inventions" directive be scrapped, despite heavy opposition from members of Parliament, small and midsized businesses, and open-source organizations. Opponents fear that ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Fighting for the 'Freedom to Tinker'

    Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten was galvanized by a recording industry lawsuit in 2001 that sought to prevent him and colleagues from publishing their examination of anti-copying technology. Felten is known as an intellectual property expert that has testified ...

    [read more]      to the top


    New Tool May Aid Digital Investigators

    University of Florida computer science doctoral student Mark Foster has devised a "process forensics" technique that blends check-pointing and intrusion detection as a tool against hackers, which Foster detailed in a recent issue of the International Journal of Digital Evidence. The process ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Mind Reader

    University College London professor of human-centered technology Angela Sasse doubts that biometric technologies are mature enough to be implemented in a national ID card system. She argues that such a system could fail without additional research into three key areas--universal ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Cornell Robotics Team Drives for the Gold

    A team of Cornell University students is working on robot vehicles to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge, a contest in which self-navigating vehicles will be required to traverse an off-road course of roughly 170 miles without human assistance. Two Cornell ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Attack on a Cryptographic RFID Device

    Security researchers from Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories say the radio frequency identification (RFID) industry needs to take cryptographic measures more seriously considering the wireless capabilities and widespread use of RFID technology, writes RSA Laboratories principal ...

    [read more]      to the top


    'Perfect Storm' for New Privacy Laws?

    A spate of high-profile data security breaches has caught the attention of a number of U.S. senators who are advocating more unified privacy laws. Just 10 days following the announcement of ChoicePoint's loss of more than 145,000 individuals' information to fraud, Bank of America said it lost ...

    [read more]      to the top


    IT Skills Crisis Haunts Government

    A national shortage of skilled Australian IT personnel is on the horizon, according to officials who cited postponed government IT projects and rising costs as harbingers of the crisis. An anonymous source within Centrelink said many projects were paralyzed by the October election with ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Too Much Information

    Earthquakes, ecosystems, economies, and other inherently complex systems and events long regarded to be mathematically irreducible could be more measurable then previously thought, according to research into cellular automata, which are computer programs that can form complex patterns by ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Primed for Numbers

    Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' remarks that innate differences between genders might partially explain why fewer women than men pursue science and engineering careers instigated a storm of protest, but there may be some merit in his reasoning, according to a growing body ...

    [read more]      to the top


    The H-1B Equation

    The debate over whether H-1B visa holders are beneficial or detrimental to the U.S. workforce will likely be rekindled as the U.S. government starts accepting visa applications from companies that wish to hire foreign workers with advanced degrees from American universities, a provision that ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Beyond the Book

    The limitations of printed textbooks will be largely circumvented by new technologies, such as the proposed Electronic Learning Tutorial Instrument System (ELTIS), to help meet the world's long-range educational needs and allow teachers to concentrate harder on individual students, while letting ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Software Synthesis for Embedded Systems

    Zeidman Technologies founder Bob Zeidman suggests that now is the time to take an evolutionary step in embedded systems software design by automatically generating or synthesizing software. He recommends that software engineers take a cue from hardware engineers, who expedited chip ...

    [read more]      to the top


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