The Interplanetary Internet
US Officials Go to Hackers' Convention to Recruit
The annual Defcon hacker conference illustrates the mutually beneficial relationship between hackers and the government, as almost 50 percent of the Defcon audience are federal employees. Leading federal officials attend the conference to recruit hackers for government work, cultivate ...
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New Energy Bill Has Cybersecurity Repercussions
President Bush signed a new bill into law this week that grants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the authority to set up a national electric reliability entity that can monitor and review reliability standards, and the FERC's Ellen Vancko said her organization plans to adopt ...
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DHS Head: Businesses Need to Focus on Cybersecurity
Speaking at the InfraGard National Conference on Aug. 10, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff urged businesses to devote more attention to cybersecurity, noting that the private sector needs more enticements to develop and/or enhance cybersecurity products; ...
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Searching for Intelligence in Edinburgh
Despite the many significant advances in artificial intelligence exhibited at Edinburgh's recent International Joint Conference in AI, the industry remains in its infancy, beset by seemingly unsolvable technical challenges. The Turkish scientist Zeynep Kiziltan received an award for her research ...
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Remote-Controlled Humans Enhance Immersive Games
One of the research projects highlighted at the recent 2005 SIGGRAPH conference was a Japanese initiative to control humans remotely, which NTT researcher Taero Maeda and colleagues say could be used to enhance the realism of computer games. The NTT scientists' method involves the remote stimulation ...
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Jerk-O-Meter Rates Phone Chatter
The Jerk-O-Meter is a software program for cell phones that can rate a speaker's level of engagement on a scale of 0 percent to 100 percent via analysis of speech patterns and voice tones. The software is being developed by MIT researchers under the direction of Anmol Madan, who ...
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Next Year's H-1B Visa Quota Almost Filled
Immigration official Chris Bentley expects the H-1B visa cap to be reached about two months before the beginning of fiscal year 2006, according to a Monday announcement. As of Aug. 4 there were close to 52,000 applications for visas, with 22,383 visas granted and 29,556 pending. H-1Bs are granted ...
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Envisioning a Wireless Future
As Qualcomm recently celebrated its 20th anniversary by looking back at the state of wireless communications in 1985, David Mock, author of "The Qualcomm Equation," looks forward and imagines a world where communications are governed by hands-free devices and augmented reality. With the ...
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Robotics: How to Have Fun and Learn a Lot Doing It
Mysterious Robo Lab is a program that teaches children between 10 and 14 years of age how to build robots through teamwork while also introducing them to fundamental computer programming and physics. The project was conducted by Timothy Huff, an instructor with the Regional Access for ...
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East Bay Lab's Problem Solver Tackles Terrorism
Edmond Chow is leader of the Complex Networks project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Center for Applied Scientific Computing, where he is helping the U.S. Department of Homeland Security mine massive databases of information as part of a counter-terrorism effort, among other things. ...
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LinuxWorld SF: OSDL Announces Patent Commons Project
The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in concerned that software patents are having a detrimental effect on open-source collaboration, and mitigating that threat is the goal behind the Patent Commons initiative the organization announced on Aug. 9. The effort will involve the collection ...
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PluggedIn: Wireless Networks--Easy Hacker Pickings
Wireless networks are highly vulnerable to exploitation, so much so that hackers regularly compete to find open Wi-Fi connections. Mapping out wireless access points, a practice known as wardriving, is very popular, as demonstrated by wardriving contests hosted at the recent Defcon hacker ...
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E-Voting Vendors Hit With New Rule
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson recently announced a new rule requiring e-voting machine manufacturers to certify that their products comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to guarantee that voters will not end up with unreliable systems as technology and ...
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IA Roadmap
The National Security Agency (NSA) is working on an information assurance (IA) roadmap for the Department of Defense's Global Information Grid (GIG) effort, with the protection of information throughout the entire grid being an overarching priority. Basic elements of the IA roadmap include the ...
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Professor Develops Software to Help Grade Essays
Qualrus is a computer program developed by University of Missouri at Columbia sociology professor Ed Brent that can grade students' essays and provide feedback on how their work can be improved. The software searches for key words and terms to assess how well the paper covers the assigned ...
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Looking Back to See the Future
Through a partnership with Stanford University and NASA, Silicon Graphics has developed a sophisticated, high-resolution digital imaging simulation. At a recent press conference, scientists displayed 60,000 two-dimensional images of a 2,000-year-old mummy that form composite three-dimensional ...
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The "Terrorism" Information Awareness Initiative
Evergreen Interactive Systems President and author Chris Peters writes that the U.S. government's attempt to prevent terrorism through the Information Awareness Office's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) initiative is fraught with controversy, particularly in its ambition to identify ...
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The Interplanetary Internet
Ambitious plans for future space exploration cannot be realized without an effective communications network to link Earth with its far-flung explorers, and all of NASA is in agreement that the ideal scheme would be an Internet that spans between planets. But the space agency is split over ...
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