Software Patents Don't Compute
Behind-the-Scenes Battle on Tracking Data Mining
Despite opposition from the Bush administration and some prominent Republican legislators, a measure requiring the Justice Department to report to Congress on its use of data-mining techniques passed in the House this week. Opponents of the provision, which was an amendment to one of ...
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When Cell Phones Become Oracles
The Reality Mining project led by MIT Media Lab researcher Nathan Eagle distributed 100 cell phones to students and employees that documented their everyday lives by logging cell-tower data to record the devices' location; the phones also scanned the immediate vicinity for other participating ...
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Retracing Spam Steps Could Halt Mass Emails
A team of researchers from IBM and Cornell University have devised SMTP Path Analysis, a method that traces an email's Internet route by examining Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) data embedded within the message's concealed "header," and determines from this information whether the ...
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May I Have Your Identification, Please?
Several email authentication technologies will go before the Internet Engineering Task Force as candidates for an industry standard. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Cisco Systems that marries the former's DomainKeys and the latter's Internet Identified ...
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SIGGRAPH 2005 Hosts Full-Dome Animation Theater
Computer graphics and interactive technology professionals will have an opportunity to see the best full-dome animation from DomeFest 2005 at SIGGRAPH 2005. The Full-Dome Animation Theater will be a part of the event's Computer Animation Festival, and will feature animation from ...
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Web Services Chugging Along
Although Web services boast lower operational and development costs, more ease of legacy-system and external-system integration, and faster system development than previous techniques such as EDI, they still have significant pitfalls. Among the disadvantages Column Technologies project ...
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Students Imagine a World Where Technology Kills Boundaries
The best entries from this year's Imagine Cup, a competition sponsored by Microsoft that challenges students from around the world to conceive of real-world applications for technology, will compete this week for the top prizes. With its focus on solutions for today, rather than theoretical ...
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Computers Graduate in Education
The IST-funded Diogene project has developed a prototype information and communication technology training system that selects course materials that are relevant to the topic and a single student, allowing courses to be tailored to individual students' level of expertise and the subject they ...
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'We Have the Technology'
Spinal cord stimulators and cochlear implants are some of the commercially available computer technologies being used to recover lost sensory input or manage chronic pain. The stimulators employ internal leads that channel electrical currents over nerve fibers that relay pain signals to the brain, ...
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Software Learns to Recognize Spring Thaw
NASA is pleased with the performance of new software controlling the Earth Observing-1 satellite that is able to track changes in the frozen section of the Earth and provide scientists with updates of information and images, all on its own. The software behind the Space Technology 6 Autonomous ...
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I Think, Therefore I Am--Sorta
PsychSim, a virtual reality artificial intelligence technology, is helping train the U.S. military as it crafts real-life scenarios and thrusts its trainees in the middle of them, forcing them to interact with simulations, known as agents, endowed with human intelligence. Stacy Marsella, one of ...
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Open Authentication Initiative Gaining Ground
An estimated 85 percent of enterprise users are not using authentication, and the Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH) seeks to change that by promoting the adoption of interoperable authentication technologies based on open standards, which OATH also certifies. OATH officials say people ...
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A First Programming Language for IT Students
Quintin Gee, Gary Wills, and Eric Cooke of the University of Southampton's Learning Technologies Group discuss what programming language should initially be taught to IT students, taking into account substantial differences between IT students and traditional computer science students. ...
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Digital Watermarks Make Life Tougher for Bootleggers
To combat the growing popularity of digital bootlegging, many content providers are turning to digital watermarks to protect a file from sharing by identifying copyright information. The watermark is appealing because even if a file is bootlegged, special software allows the copyright holder ...
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Think Thin
Thin client hardware is starting to break out of its niche roles in industries such as health care, banking, city government, and education because it offers better security than desktop PCs, with less inconvenience. Enterprises can avoid expensive upgrades since thin clients ...
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Home Is Where the Work Is
Domestic jobs are plentiful for high-end U.S. software programmers, according to the latest findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The organization estimates that jobs in "computer and mathematical occupations" experienced second-quarter growth of 7.5 percent over the previous year; ...
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Magical History Tour
Museums are deploying pervasive or ubiquitous computing as a visitor-assistive technology, and the knowledge such deployments yield about the presentation of personalized multimedia to mobile users, among other things, will point the way toward more commercial applications. ...
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Look Ma--No Wires
Many IT experts agree that Egypt is on track to becoming a major global IT player, but a lot more has to be done. Industry analysts say Egypt must adopt India's software industry as a template for its own IT sector, and substantially improve the quality of its products in order to become a ...
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Software Patents Don't Compute
Brookings Institution guest scholar Ben Klemens attributes the advent of software patents to the blurred line between machinery and mathematical algorithms, and writes that a clear boundary must be laid down. He outlines two approaches to distinguishing between patentable machines and ...
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