A Call to Arms
"Computing Officials Worry That Proposed Federal Database Could Be Hacked"
The U.S. Department of Education is considering a "unit record" database listing information on individual students, but technology experts are worried about the database's vulnerability to hacking, a pressing concern in light of recent intrusions into college and company servers. Purdue ...
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"Lawmaker Rips RFID Passport Plans"
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) told European diplomats last week that he was distressed at European countries' plans to equip passports with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, because they were an unproven technology that would hold up and add costs ...
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"Memory Mimic Aids Reading"
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) scientists have developed software that mimics the human brain's mechanism for modeling words to expedite the process of skimming or reading through digitized text. ScentHighlights helps ease the cognitive burden of finding what a user is looking for by ...
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"Guarding Information"
In the end, the burden of improving U.S. cybersecurity falls on the shoulders of policy makers, says presidential cybersecurity adviser Eugene Spafford, who chairs ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee and runs the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University ...
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"Patent Litigation Worries Tech Industry"
Government and tech industry representatives urged legislators to institute patent system reforms at a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Intellectual Property subcommittee. Reforms are needed as a way to rein in "patent trolls" that obtain patent rights and sue other ...
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"A Bandwidth Breakthrough Hints at a Future Beyond Wi-Fi"
The FCC broke an ultrawideband (UWB) standards deadlock last March between two competing industry groups, ensuring products will appear on the market by early next year. UWB is seen as the third wave of wireless technology because of its speed and the way in which it transmits data by sharing ...
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"USB Ready to Ride the Wireless Wave"
Numerous devices that support wireless Universal Serial Bus (USB) connections to simplify the installation and maintenance of computer peripherals are expected by year's end. "Vendors would like to drive down the cost of wireless peripheral communications by moving to a standard way ...
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"Global Poker Game for the Internet Goes On"
The leaders of Centr--an organization representative of many of the world's Internet registries--and ICANN have been engaged in a heated war of words over several issues affecting Internet governance. Meanwhile, the United Nations is assessing the future of ICANN, with the International ...
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"Innovation in Process: Plugging Together Business Software May Soon Be Painless"
The largest software vendors are preparing to integrate the heterogeneous IT environment left over from the 1990s surge in technology spending. Services-oriented architecture (SOA) promises to tie together departmental silos and dramatically change the way businesses operate; in the process, ...
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"'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data"
"Tagging" digital photos and other electronic documents with descriptions of content simplifies the organization and management of digital archives whose volume is increasing exponentially, and the technique could potentially transform the discovery and tracking of information. Tagging ...
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"Scaling Up Productivity in Scale-Out Clusters"
High-performance computing (HPC) technology has matured to the point where the focus is no longer on performance but rather productivity, says Hewlett-Packard high performance computing CTO Scott McClellan in an interview. Clustered supercomputers are growing quickly because of ...
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"A Whole New World...Shining, Shimmering, Splendid"
The Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) is home to the Landmark Graphics Visualization Laboratory, a $20 million facility that features a domed IMAX theater where 3D images are back-projected onto a transmissive screen. Viewers wear LCD Shutter Glasses to get the full three-dimensional ...
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"Augmenting the Animal Kingdom"
Some theorists champion the idea of enhancing animals with technology to increase their chances of surviving, leading happy lives, or even boosting their intelligence. But there are also scientists who oppose such ideas on ethical grounds. One supporter of technological animal enhancement is ...
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"BitTorrent as Friend, Not Foe"
Despite Hollywood's adversarial attitude toward peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, ICANN Chairman Vinton Cerf says there is "serious" interest among Hollywood producers to distribute movies and other content online with BitTorrent P2P software. The more people who download a file with ...
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"A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation"
Software agents cannot automatically negotiate with each other without a common negotiation mechanism that indicates what possible actions each party can follow at any given time, when negotiation ends, and the resulting agreements' framework. The authors propose a generic automated ...
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"Hooked on Photonics"
BBN Technologies principal scientist Chip Elliott says his team has assembled a very secure, 12-mile-long test network of quantum cryptography systems that runs under the streets of Boston and Cambridge. Quantum cryptography, which uses single photons of light to distribute ...
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"Patents: Cuffing Innovation?"
Forrester Research consultant Navi Radjou says patents are a critical incentive for technological advancement, but acknowledges that they can also impede innovation if they stifle the creativity of others; defining an invention's patentability is therefore a major challenge. Though patents ...
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"A Call to Arms"
Jim Gray with Microsoft's Bay Area Research Group and Mark Compton of Hired Gun Communications write that database architecture is undergoing a reevaluation as a consequence of an unending tide of information inundating people and organizations. Data and algorithms are being brought together ...
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