Embedded App Dev at the Crossroads
'Spear Phishing' Tests Educate People About Online Scams
To raise user awareness of online scams designed to trick them into revealing sensitive information to data thieves and other miscreants, organizations such as the U.S. Military Academy are conducting exercises in which people are sent phony emails disguised as official requests to link ...
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Diving Deep Into the Web
The bulk of the documents comprising the Web cannot be retrieved by most search engines because they reside in databases that are inaccessible to Web crawlers, but Glenbrook Networks claims to have developed a search engine that can successfully mine this "deep Web." Julia Komissarchik, who ...
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New Law May Tighten Power Plant Security
The energy bill that President Bush signed last week authorizes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to establish mandatory standards to shield electric power systems from cyberattacks and other disturbances that could lead to instability or failures. FERC is required to set up an ...
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Drive for Robot Autonomy Key Trend in Global Emerging Robotics Technology
Companies' decision to move robots from indoor to outdoor environments is spurring a global trend to develop machines with greater autonomy so they can arrive at more logical decisions independently. Robotics is a critical element of ground warfare and other defense applications, where autonomy is ...
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Electronic Skin to Give Robots Human-Like Touch
University of Tokyo researchers led by Takao Someya have developed a thin plastic film embedded with sensors that could serve as a flexible electronic skin for robots that imparts human-like tactile sensations. Pressure- and temperature-sensitive transistors are arrayed in a matrix, ...
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Academia's Quest for the Ultimate Search Tool
Many issues that have cropped up in the wake of Internet search's explosive growth are a focus of academic research, and the University of California at Berkeley is launching an interdisciplinary facility for advanced search technologies. The center will involve the participation of approximately ...
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Virtual Facilitator Could Help Teams Solve Problems Faster, Say UMR Researchers
University of Missouri-Rolla professors Ray Luechtefeld and Steve Watkins have developed a virtual facilitator that could improve team performance by encouraging the sharing of ideas and adherence to an agenda. Luechtefeld says a trial involving 100 student teams demonstrated significant ...
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Web Access May Be as Close as an Electrical Outlet
As an alternative to the cable and phone companies, the established network of electrical wires, which reaches virtually every home in the United States, may be the vehicle to achieve universal Internet connectivity. IBM, Google, and other corporate backers have been leading trial projects ...
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Email Authentication: Holy Grail or Lost Cause
Email began innocently enough as a simple tool to send text messages between networked computers; now, like so much else about the Internet, its use has become corrupted by hackers and scammers who seek to use email for their own profit through schemes to steal unsuspecting users' identities. ...
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Electronic U.S. Passports Coming in December
The U.S. State Department recently announced that electronic passports will start being issued in December. Each passport will be outfitted with a chip in its cover: The chip will contain all the information about the bearer held in current paper passports, along with a digital signature and ...
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Becker on Linux, Clustering, Grid
Don Becker, founder and chief scientist of Scyld Software, recently expressed his beliefs that Linux needs improvement at the operating system level, that grids are still only marginally accepted, and that small and large companies need to move toward an embrace of clustering software. ...
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Graduate Enrollment in Science and Engineering Rises Over All, But Drops for Foreign Students
A National Science Foundation report issued on Aug. 10 concludes that graduate enrollment in science and engineering at U.S. colleges rose 4 percent overall between fall 2002 and fall 2003, although there was a notable decrease in foreign student enrollments. Whereas annual foreign ...
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I.T. Staff Shortage Looming
As the perception of careers in IT has been tarnished by the dot-com collapse and widespread offshoring of jobs to India and China, many IT positions at home may go unfilled. The approaching retirement of baby boomers and declining enrollment in IT worry Phil Zweig with the Society ...
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Johns Hopkins-Led Center Will Study, Develop Voting Technologies
The National Science Foundation announced on Aug. 15 that it would pledge $7.5 million over five years to establish A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), a facility for a multidisciplinary effort to make e-voting technology more trustworthy and ...
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User-Process Model Approach to Improve User Interface Usability
Boryung Ju of Louisiana State University's School of Library and Information Science and Myke Gluck of the Virginia Military Institute's department of math and computer science propose a reorganized software menu interface based on users' direct input. Their study yields important ...
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Embedded App Dev at the Crossroads
Commercial and open-source IDEs are emerging as the preferred programming environment for embedded programmers and enterprise codejockeys, two software development groups that are often at odds. Borland Software's Raj Seghal reports that "now [programmers] typically have more resources, in ...
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