One Week With the Gurus
Bush's High-Tech Report Card
Silicon Valley executives give the Bush administration's efforts to shore up the U.S. high-tech industry a failing grade, complaining that too many goals remain unrealized. The White House received high marks for prioritizing education, passing class-action lawsuit reforms, and strongly ...
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Japan Plans Mind-Boggling Number-Cruncher
Japan announced plans on July 25 to construct an amazingly powerful supercomputer for modeling climate change, the formation of galaxies, and new drug behavior that will likely cost between $712 million and $890 million and involve the participation of NEC, Hitachi, Kyushu University, ...
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Companies See 'Crisis' in R&D
A lack of leadership in federal cybersecurity research and development funding will have serious long-term consequences for the United States without a quick resolution, according to a Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA) report released on July 25. The organization says cybersecurity has ...
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Insecurity at Black Hat
Issues to be discussed at this week's Black Hat Briefings conference and the subsequent DefCon event include new kinds of hacker exploits and targets, such as weaknesses in antivirus software. Internet Security Systems (ISS) researchers Neel Mehta and Alex Wheeler plan to disclose ...
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Privacy Guru Locks Down VoIP
PGP email creator Phil Zimmermann will present his prototype for encrypting VoIP calls later this week at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas. Zimmermann says VoIP calls are susceptible to eavesdropping, and that hackers can sabotage calls and reroute them to an alternate number; he ...
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Change in Daylight-Saving Time Could Confuse Some Programs
Congress is expected to soon pass the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which proposes a four-week extension of daylight-saving time (DST), an adjustment that could confuse applications and electronic gadgets programmed to re-calibrate their internal clocks according to the "summer schedule" the ...
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Two Professors Go Fishing for Phishers
Stanford computer science professors John Mitchell and Dan Boneh are leading a team developing anti-phishing tools designed to help email users avoid bogus Web sites and prevent crooks from stealing other peoples' passwords. The SpoofGuard software plug-in the team created last year ...
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China Not a Big Tech Innovator, But It's Spending a Lot on R&D
Some experts say China's lack of technology innovation is keeping its economy from joining the ranks of world leaders such as the United States, although the country is spending billions of dollars on research and development. "China is making a lot of progress in technology, but they ...
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The Automated 'Virtual Commentator' for Video Content
A "virtual commentator" algorithm developed by the IST-funded COGVISYS project can automatically create textual descriptions of video streams by assessing specific cues from the video input signal, which are translated into conceptual representations and then converted into natural language ...
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Dual Roles: The Changing Face of IT
The erosion of U.S. computer programming and other low- to mid-level tech jobs as a result of offshoring and outsourcing is causing the IT worker's profile to change, concludes a new report from Forrester Research. Surviving senior-level job holders--CIOs, project managers, vendor managers ...
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Traffic Model Maps Congestion
Researchers at Oxford University in England have modeled networks in an effort to determine the optimum passage of traffic. Their model, a wheel with spokes on the inside, applies with equal validity to the flow of blood, street traffic, and computer networks, because in all those ...
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Grid Group Issues Security Requirements
The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) issued a list of security requirements identifying and addressing vulnerabilities common to grids in the hope of spurring more widespread adoption of grid technology by enterprises, including provisioning and deprovisioning, and the potential weaknesses of ...
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The Weird Web and Other Safety Concerns
Tech visionary Bill Joy, speaking at the recent AlwaysOn Innovation conference, discussed how during his tenure at Sun Microsystems he envisioned the concept of a "Here Web" that is always accessible through mobile devices. He also talked about the as-yet-unrealized "Weird Web," in ...
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Making Purchases at Your Fingers' Ends
Biometrics, the technology that identifies a person through certain physical attributes, is enjoying greater popularity in the consumer retail arena, where some companies are offering a payment option where, by pressing a finger to a screen, a customer's payment information is ...
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Co-opting the Creative Revolution
Digital thinkers say organizations will have to get used to distributed groups of people working together to innovate on content now that more powerful and easy-to-use computing tools are in their hands. At the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Oxford, U.K., ...
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Buggy Software: Up From a Low-Quality Quagmire
CIOs are studying how software bugs are introduced into the application development process and why they seem so resistant to prevention in an effort to stave off the tremendous losses in revenue, production, data, and customer satisfaction such flaws can entail. Experts on bad software blame ...
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Seamless Communications Closer as 3G, LAN Fuse
Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) are working on a next-generation mobile network project that integrates third-generation cellular and wireless LAN technologies, overcoming protocol incompatibilities to combine the ubiquity of the former ...
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Voting Machine Standards Move Forward
The widespread adoption of electronic voting systems in U.S. states and territories necessitates the continuous upgrading of voting machine and voting machine software standards, and the IEEE and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are working on such standards. The IEEE ...
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One Week With the Gurus
The 18th annual Software Development West Conference and Expo was a beehive of discussion about topics ranging from project agility to programming languages to user interface design. Keynote speaker and IBM computing pioneer Jerry Weinberg wryly observed that computing technology's awesome ...
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