Identity Crisis
Apple Plans to Switch From I.B.M. to Intel for Chips
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is planning an alliance with Intel that will have future Macintoshes powered by Intel chips in an effort to counter Microsoft and Sony's growing influence in home multimedia. The shift from the IBM and Motorola-developed PowerPC to Intel chips will be a serious engineering ...
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BlackBoxVoting Finds Voting Scan Machines Hackable
Recent findings by e-voting technology expert Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org indicate that Diebold optical scanning machines are susceptible to hacking, which makes them just as big a risk for election fraud as touch-screen voting machines. Harris confirms that her technical ...
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Computer Science Losing Students
The dimming job prospects for IT workers has more students avoiding computer science as a major, according to a new study from the Computer Research Association authored by Stuart Zweben, chairman of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University. ...
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End User: Thumbs Up for Easy Use
Data delivered to mobile devices is on the rise, as is research on how to visualize and wade through such information easily, as evident by the papers presented at ACM's CHI 2005 conference last April. Microsoft Research sociologist Richard Harper says communication and navigation ...
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New Hack Cracks 'Secure' Bluetooth Devices
Bluetooth security features no longer have to be deactivated for Bluetooth-enabled devices to be attacked, thanks to a method discovered by Israeli cryptographers. A British cryptographer demonstrated last April that a hacker could hijack Bluetooth devices in secure mode, but only if he ...
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New Group Aims to Move Women Into Top IT Research Posts
One out of three women involved in IT research wants a top-level research job, compared with 22 percent of men, according to the women@CL (Women in the Computer Laboratory) initiative. However, just one woman in 20 is a computing professor, one in eight is a researcher, and one in four is a ...
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FBI Pushed Ahead With Troubled Software
A confidential report to the House Appropriations Committee indicates that the FBI was aware that its $170 million Virtual Case File (VCF) system was highly flawed, but willfully pressed on with a $17 million pilot program last December, even though by then it was obvious that the software would ...
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UB's Supercomputing Center Makes Virtual Traffic Make Sense to the Public
Visualization software developed by researchers at the Center for Computational Research (CCR) in the University at Buffalo's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences is being used to reconstruct car accidents and simulate traffic in three dimensions. The ...
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Japanese Has High Hopes for Robot
Fears that Japan's technology leadership is eroding with the growing influence of China and increasingly successful businesses in other Asian countries have spurred the nationwide "super science" effort to cultivate future Japanese tech leaders by providing money for high schools to finance ...
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Making SMART Homes Smarter
Juan Carlos Augusto with the University of Ulster's School of Computing and Mathematics seeks to further "smart homes" technology through the application of ambient intelligence. He says houses equipped with sensors can detect movement as well as determine its cause, and the information ...
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The Philosophical Case for Expanding the Domain Name Space
Currently, TLDs fall into two categories: those that identify a geographic location, such as .uk for the United Kingdom, and those that identify a type of entity, such as .com for commercial organizations. In this opinion piece, CentralNic CIO Gavin Brown suggests that DNS stakeholders take these ...
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Device Drivers Filled With Flaws, Threaten Security
Although operating system code has improved in recent years, device drivers still have numerous flaws that threaten operating system security. The responsibility of securing device driver code lies primarily with the third-party hardware vendors that create the drivers, but also with ...
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For the Record
Government agencies are grappling with an explosion of digital records and a lack of policy and technology standards directed toward those records. Wisconsin CIO Matt Miszewski notes that while digitization has made government processes more efficient, existing records retention policy and ...
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Revitalizing Computing Science Education
Computing science (CS) departments must make their courses more attractive and more reflective of current IT industry trends in order to reverse the decline of student enrollments, writes University of Guelph professor Qusay H. Mahmoud. One of the most discouraging factors for prospective CS ...
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Global Technology and Local Patents
University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor George H. Pike confirms the territoriality of patent law as a result of the global expansion of the Internet and its patented technologies and business methods. He recommends that U.S. patent holders recognize available options to shield their ...
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Transformational Communications
The U.S. military is moving ahead with efforts to deploy wireless tactical networks to facilitate the sharing of battlefield knowledge in real time, a concept known as transformational communications. In a shared knowledge environment, troops, ground vehicles, aircraft, sensors, satellites, ...
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Identity Crisis
Moves by the U.S. Transportation and Homeland Security departments to standardize driver's licenses have come under fire by civil libertarians, who allege that such a maneuver might lead to a de facto national ID card that could be used to monitor citizens as well as legal immigrants. Secure ...
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