Visions of VoIP
State Law Would Mandate Following E-Vote Paper Trail
The California Senate voted unanimously on Aug. 29 to pass a bill requiring e-voting systems to include a paper trail, which was conceived by computer scientists as a safeguard against election fraud or voting errors. "People need and deserve to know their votes have been counted accurately, ...
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Universal Software, Universal Appeal
Addressing the inefficiencies of designing software for devices that run on heterogeneous networks is the underlying motivation of the IST-funded DEGAS project, which devised a theory for managing such networks and created tools to write software that can work on a wide spectrum of devices. Demos ...
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Sampling Finds Federal Data Mining Fails to Assure Privacy Protections
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) held a study of five federal agencies that employ data mining and issued a report on Aug. 29 concluding that none of the agencies fully comply with the Privacy Act, federal information security statutes, or government directives concerning the ...
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Don't Fear Software Patents
International Intellectual Property Institute Chairman Bruce Lehman says the concern over software patents is overblown, and sees no evidence that such patents have had a detrimental effect on the U.S. software industry in the 24 years since the landmark Supreme Court decision that legitimized ...
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Hollywood, Microsoft Align on New Windows
As part of Microsoft's promise to Hollywood studios to shield their content from video piracy, the next version of the Windows operating system, called Vista, will feature unprecedented protections. The most fundamental change will be the management of some audio and video in a new "protected ...
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Distance Detection May Help Secure Wi-Fi
At last week's Fall Intel Developer Forum, Intel senior fellow Justin Rattner unveiled a method of user identification that could lead to more secure Wi-Fi networks. The technology, known as precision location, measures the time it takes for packets to travel back and forth from an ...
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Research Uncovers Genetic Instructions to Build Life
The genetic instructions for building mammalian life have been discovered by University of Toronto researchers, who accomplished this breakthrough by feeding biological data into an artificial intelligence program, as detailed in the Aug. 28 issue of Nature Genetics. University of Toronto ...
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Intel Helps UCSD Teach Students About Wireless, Multimedia Embedded Systems
Intel is donating $193,638 worth of microprocessor development kits typically reserved for its own developers or partner companies to the University of California, San Diego. The kits are designed for the creation of embedded systems with multimedia and wireless applications in ...
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Scientists Reignite Open Access Debate
A group of computer scientists that includes World Wide Web inventor and Southampton University professor Tim Berners-Lee yesterday issued a rebuttal to journal publishers' allegations that freely releasing publicly funded research on the Internet will ultimately destroy scientific ...
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Open Source Project Aims at Middleware
Companies' increasing dependence on middleware has led to an open source movement from the Apache Software Foundation, known as Synapse, that could eventually challenge commercial applications such as IBM's WebSphereMQ and Tibco's Rendezvous. Though Synapse is still in its embryonic stages, and ...
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Faster Supercomputers Aiding Weather Forecasts
Accurate weather forecasts can mean the difference between life and death when killer storms and other dangerous meteorological conditions arise, and they also play a critical role in the global economy; for example, up to one-third of the American GDP--$3 trillion worth of goods and services--is ...
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LANL Computers Weather Daily Cyber Assaults
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) runs 25,000 computers that process 850GB of data in 20 million legitimate sessions per day. Up to 15 million malicious sessions occurred during peak traffic between May and mid-August with more than 90% of weekend activity coming from malicious ...
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Google Talk Gives Boost to XMPP
Google's venture into the IM sector will lend considerable support to the emerging protocol on which it is based: the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). XMPP and SIMPLE appeared a few years ago as the two major protocols competing for hegemony in the IM space; XMPP is based ...
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The Future of Computer Worms
Trend Micro research engineer David Sancho outlines possible future attack strategies of bot worms and what steps can be taken to counter them. He says the modular design of bot worms enables them to exploit vulnerabilities faster, which means the interim between the disclosure of a ...
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Senator Coleman Denounces U.N. Internet Governance Report
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) recently decried a U.N. proposal to wrest away governance of the Internet from the United States. The United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) has issued a report suggesting that it supplant the U.S. in overseeing the evolution of the ...
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Fewer CS Majors Not a Big Concern
Chela Education Financing CIO Virginia Robbins argues that most corporations have little use for people with computer science degrees per se. Rather, business-oriented personnel (marketers, accountants, and the like) with computer skills are desired. Robbins does not think the decline ...
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Supernets for Global Research to Shine at iGrid
The iGrid alliance will meet next month to demonstrate global-computing applications of 10Gbps optical networks developed by researchers from 21 countries. The group has been meeting every two years or so since 1998 to prototype the transnational use of existing 10Gbps networks for scientific ...
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New Legal Code
The Brookings Institution guest scholar and author Ben Klemens suggests that software developers can create innovative new products without running afoul of patent-holders by having software covered by copyright law rather than patent protection. Copyrighting inventions has the advantage of ...
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Visions of VoIP
Although the vision of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) continues to outclass the reality, the technology's potential for digital convergence, cost savings, and cool experimentation is spurring experts to predict wide consumer adoption. Since the emergence of Asynchronous Transfer Mode ...
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