Web Metadata Standards: Observations and Prescriptions
Vote for Change
New federal rules for voting machines are on track to be enacted before the 2006 mid-term elections, while electronic voting machine companies are preparing products that will be certified under 2002 federal standards. However, whether e-voting systems will be more secure and reliable by the ...
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The Bleeding Edge of Computing
Computing technology is expected to make radical leaps in the future, thanks to progress in many areas of research. Thad Starner with the Georgia Institute of Technology notes that artificial intelligence systems have begun to perceive the world much like humans do using cameras and ...
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EU Patent Law Could Impede Open Source
Attorneys warn that the European Union's proposed directive on "computer-implemented inventions" legitimizes software patenting, which will enable patent holders to hinder the progress of smaller software companies and open-source developers. For any developer doing business in ...
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Laying Foundations for Component-Based Software Markets
The European Commission is blazing the way for component-based software engineering with several Information Society Technologies projects that address technical, economic, and organizational aspects of commercialized component-based software development. The COMPONENT+ project uses built-in ...
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Space Snakes and Scorpions
Scientists in NASA's Autonomy and Robotics group are working on improved intelligence and efficiency in new generations of robot vehicles for interplanetary exploration. Experimentation is proceeding on new software algorithms to enable vehicles to automate chores that are currently ...
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Sender Authentication Hops Off the Standards Track
Reconciliation between Microsoft's Sender ID Framework (SIDF) and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) has been sidelined by technical disagreements between the two specifications, and Microsoft and the SPF community are for now taking diverging paths within the Internet Engineering Task Force's ...
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Tracking PCs Anywhere on the Net
University of California Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno has published a paper indicating that he has devised techniques for fingerprinting computer hardware remotely, potentially allowing any physical device to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet, even without the device's cooperation. His ...
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No Redress Route in Terror Screening Plan
The Homeland Security Department is creating a new office to handle terrorist screening programs, such as those that check domestic airline passengers, cargo shipments, port employees, and hazardous materials transport. The new Screening and Coordination Office is still more than a ...
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AI Expert Calls for E-Defense for the UK
The United Kingdom needs to become more of an information power, says Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt, who believes the UK needs to focus more on e-defense, is scheduled to talk ...
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IPod 'Squeaks' Betray Software Secrets
A 17-year-old computer science student from Germany has worked out the code that allows Apple's iPod music player to start up by listening to how the device generates "squeaks" when scrolling through the on-screen menu. Nils Schneider's impetus for tinkering with his Christmas present was to install ...
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Linux Security Rough Around the Edges, But Improving
The National Security Agency's Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) provides greater security for the country's computer infrastructure, and although the technology has won the support of the Linux developer community, SELinux's complexity threatens its widespread adoption by government ...
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Domain Owners Lose Privacy
Last month, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) ordered domain registrars that sell .us domain names, including Network Solutions, eNom, and Go Daddy, to stop allowing registrants to hide their contact information via proxy services. ...
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The Semantic Aspects of E-Learning: Using the Knowledge Life Cycle to Manage Semantics for Grid and Service Oriented Systems
Applying semantics to learning content and services will allow the grid infrastructure to support large-scale collaboration of e-learning activities. The computers and people participating in e-learning activities should comprehend and communicate among themselves via a common ...
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Q&A: Author of 'Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?' Sounds Off
Programmer N. Sivakumar says in an interview that the point of his book, "Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?," is to explain the economic benefits of H-1B visa holders hired to work in the United States, as well as address the perception that such professionals are taking jobs away from U.S. workers. ...
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Whatever Happened To...?
Examples of highly hyped technologies that have not panned out or whose rollout is slower than anticipated include mobile broadband, whose spread has been impeded by huge 3G deployment costs; however, forthcoming deployments of High Speed Data Packet Access, EvDO, and Universal Mobile ...
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It's Raining Code! (Hallelujah?)
CIOs are growing more interested in open-source development, and have adopted cooperative strategies to minimize the associated risks and expenses. One such initiative is the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative, a collaborative development effort to identify mutually ...
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Caution: COTS Ahead
The aerospace and defense fields are under more pressure to adopt commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source software for cost and flexibility reasons, but still find it difficult to formulate unbiased policy and keep up with standards efforts for COTS adoption. COTS software ...
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Is Realtime Real? Part 1
Video game realism has taken a big step forward in the last year largely thanks to new graphic boards that facilitate more refined real-time rendering. The advances in gaming hardware and software were made possible by the advent of programmable hardware. Microsoft's High-Level Shading ...
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Web Metadata Standards: Observations and Prescriptions
David Bodoff of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Mordechai Ben-Menachem of Ben-Gurion University, and Patrick C.K. Hung of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology examine the development efforts of Web metadata standards and prescribe solutions to various ...
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