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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, March 30, 2005



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ACM TechNews
March 30, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Lively Debate as Justices Take on File Sharing
  • Even Tech Execs Can't Get Kids to Be Engineers
  • Wordspotter Searches Historical Documents
  • Why IT Workers Are Lying About Their Age
  • Laying the Foundation for the Next-Generation Web
  • The U.N. Thinks About Tomorrow's Cyberspace
  • Secure Flight Faces Uphill Battle
  • Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend
  • Going for the Code
  • Rolling Out Next Generation's Net
  • VeriSign Poised to Retain Operation of ".Net" Domain
  • Identity Theft Made Easier
  • Report: P-Languages Better for Enterprise
  • Cars Are Getting Computer-Jacked
  • Quantum Computing Scheme Cuts Errors
  • Intel Goes to School
  • Internet Governance Issue Heats Up as Next World Summit Nears
  • Agile CMMI: No Oxymoron
  • The Ascent of the Robotic Attack Jet

     

    Lively Debate as Justices Take on File Sharing

    The case of Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios v. Grokster, which is before the Supreme Court, has become a flashpoint between the entertainment industry and technology companies over whether file sharing services should be liable for digital copyright infringement committed by customers. Lawyers ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Even Tech Execs Can't Get Kids to Be Engineers

    Technology executives are stressing the United States' need to step up its efforts to get more young people interested in engineering so that an engineer shortage can be mitigated and the country can maintain its global competitiveness. The decline in interest in engineering careers hits close ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Wordspotter Searches Historical Documents

    University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) computer science professor R. Manmatha has developed a computer interface that can search handwritten documents for information in a manner similar to the Google search engine. Toni Rath, a UMass grad student who helped create a demo of Manmatha's ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Why IT Workers Are Lying About Their Age

    The IT industry is riddled with ageist recruitment policies, according to over-40 IT professionals who have often had to lie about their age to attract interest from prospective employers. Unemployed IT veteran Tony Wells, 49, claims these practices are partly responsible for a shortage in ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Laying the Foundation for the Next-Generation Web

    The core element of the next-generation Internet envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is the Semantic Web, and the IST-funded WonderWeb project has made significant contributions to the Semantic Web's ongoing development by fulfilling and in some cases surpassing its goals. A major achievement is ...

    [read more]      to the top


    The U.N. Thinks About Tomorrow's Cyberspace

    The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) wants a greater say in Internet governance, including allocating IPv6 address blocks, overseeing top-level root servers, and coordinating spam fighting and law enforcement cooperation, says ITU telecommunications standardization bureau director ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Secure Flight Faces Uphill Battle

    The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has only fulfilled one of 10 requirements set by Congress for the Secure Flight passenger screening system, set to launch in August. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the TSA has set up an oversight committee for the Secure Flight ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend

    Brazil is becoming free software's largest benefactor with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's mandate that government ministries and state-run businesses transition from expensive proprietary operating systems to free operating systems in an effort to save millions of dollars in royalties and ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Going for the Code

    Stepping up to the plate for the University of Wisconsin-Madison at ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals this year are the Harmless Fluffy Bunnies, a team of graduate and undergraduate students that will vie with 77 other teams to ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Rolling Out Next Generation's Net

    The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large, globe-spanning community of network designers, operators, researchers, and vendors that collectively oversee the workings, expansion, and evolution of the Internet by developing free and open standards and protocols to ensure ...

    [read more]      to the top


    VeriSign Poised to Retain Operation of ".Net" Domain

    Telcordia Technologies, an outside firm hired by ICANN, has recommend that VeriSign be given a new six-year contract to continue running the .net registry, the Internet's third-most popular suffix. VeriSign, which already generates $200 million annually operating the .com registry, is ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Identity Theft Made Easier

    Identity thieves made headlines with security breaches at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, but common search engines provide a much easier route to obtaining illicit personal information. Google hacking, the practice of crafting specific search queries using special commands to find sensitive ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Report: P-Languages Better for Enterprise

    A Burton Group report finds that P-Languages such as Perl, Python, and PHP have come a long way over the last several years thanks to their ability to complement the use of G-Languages such as Java, C++, and C#, and suggests that P-Languages should be favored over G-Languages because of their ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Cars Are Getting Computer-Jacked

    The presence of automotive electronics is expanding both in the dashboard and under the hood, reducing clutter and freeing up designers to experiment aesthetically. "Everything is blending into one unified theme," notes Ford Motors designer Anthony Pozzi, who designed the Meta One concept sports car ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Quantum Computing Scheme Cuts Errors

    In a recent issue of Nature, National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist Emanuel Knill details a proposed quantum computing architecture that could make large-scale quantum computers tolerant of the faults that might crop up in practical quantum circuits. Up to now, all proposed ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Intel Goes to School

    Intel Research is funding a quartet of university "lablets" to identify and investigate technologies that merit "acceleration and amplification," according to company representative Kevin Teixeria. He says Intel has no claim on the intellectual property produced by the labs, because it is ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Internet Governance Issue Heats Up as Next World Summit Nears

    The second phase of the conference of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is scheduled for Nov. 16-18 in Tunisia, and is a follow-up to the December 2003 gathering in Geneva. The first phase produced the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, and has resulted in the ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Agile CMMI: No Oxymoron

    Mike Konrad and James W. Over with Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) write that Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a combination of Software CMM and Carnegie Mellon's other primary maturity models, should be reconsidered as an agile software ...

    [read more]      to the top


    The Ascent of the Robotic Attack Jet

    The U.S. military already uses unmanned drone aircraft for surveillance, but a new generation of autonomous aircraft capable of flying in coordinated groups and identifying and attacking targets is being developed and tested. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has made ...

    [read more]      to the top


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