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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, July 27, 2005



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ACM TechNews
July 27, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Bush's High-Tech Report Card
  • Japan Plans Mind-Boggling Number-Cruncher
  • Companies See 'Crisis' in R&D
  • Insecurity at Black Hat
  • Privacy Guru Locks Down VoIP
  • Change in Daylight-Saving Time Could Confuse Some Programs
  • Two Professors Go Fishing for Phishers
  • China Not a Big Tech Innovator, But It's Spending a Lot on R&D
  • The Automated 'Virtual Commentator' for Video Content
  • Dual Roles: The Changing Face of IT
  • Traffic Model Maps Congestion
  • Grid Group Issues Security Requirements
  • The Weird Web and Other Safety Concerns
  • Making Purchases at Your Fingers' Ends
  • Co-opting the Creative Revolution
  • Buggy Software: Up From a Low-Quality Quagmire
  • Seamless Communications Closer as 3G, LAN Fuse
  • Voting Machine Standards Move Forward
  • 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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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, ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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., ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


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