Researchers See Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit
Cards
New York Times (10/23/06) P. C1; Schwartz, John
A recent paper spells out potential security risks involved with the radio
frequency identification (RFID) technology being implemented in a new
generation of contactless credit cards. As part of a consortium of
industry and academic researchers financed by the National Science
Foundation (NSF), Tom Heydt-Benjamin, a computer science graduate student
at the University of Massachusetts, and Kevin Fu, a computer science
professor at the University of Massachusetts, attempted and were successful
in retrieving unencrypted information, including the cardholder's name,
stored on 20 different RFID credit cards using a device they constructed
themselves for $150. American Express claims that its cards use 128-bit
encryption, and J.P. Morgan Chase says that they "use the highest level of
encryption allowed by the U.S. government." Visa's Brian Tripplet says,
"This is an interesting exercise, but as a real threat to a consumer--that
threat doesn't really exist." The companies claim that every RFID
transaction is unique, making it impossible to just read information off a
card and use this to make purchases. However, the researchers found some
cards that used the same information for every transaction, and they were
actually able to make a purchase online using information scanned off of a
credit card. The credit card companies point to fraud detection and the
blocking of suspicious purchases, to assure that customers will not be
liable for fraudulent activity. The chips used in such cards are capable
of airtight encryption, but enabling this function causes slower
transactions and greater costs, and companies such as Exxon have come under
fire for lax security measures. Aviel D. Rubin, professor of computer
security at Johns Hopkins University, says, "There is a certain amount of
privacy that consumers expect, and I believe that the credit card companies
have crossed the line." Tens of millions of RFID cards have been issued to
this point, and credit card companies are currently in the process of
removing card holder names from the data transmitted by their RFID
cards.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Robot Race Winners No Longer Cashing In
Associated Press (10/21/06) Chang, Alice
A recent defense spending bill signed into law this week forbids DARPA
from awarding the planned $2.7 million prize for the research team whose
smart vehicle wins a 2007 contest that involves management of simulated
traffic. The absence of a such a prize has forced some teams to change
their strategy and others to simply quit. There is a fear that a lack of
prize money would make attracting corporate sponsors much more difficult
and hurt media coverage of the race, which has drawn many reporters in the
past, as well as being the subject of a PBS documentary. "The icing on the
cake is gone," says Ivar Schoenmyer, the leader of Team CyberRider. Last
year 195 teams entering the competition, a race through the desert, had to
raise their own money. This year, of the 89 teams that entered, 11 were
given seed money by DARPA, a decision made independently of the ban on
prize money. Some dropped out after not receiving any seed money, and
tried to sell off the technology they had developed to other teams. "When
you're trying hard to scrape money together just to buy a sensor and
another team can just drop money to buy the same thing, it's hard to be
competitive," says Michael Vest, a team leader. Others, such as Stanford
team leader Sebastian Thrun, are not discouraged. "Having prize money is a
great additional motivator...I'm sad to see that lost, but that's not going
to affect my willingness to compete." Team CyberRider, an all-volunteer
team, has decided to invite programmers from all over the world to share
algorithms, and has turned to Wiki software to encourage collaboration, in
order to conserve time and money. "I'm not saying it will be successful,
but it's the only way we can participate." William "Red" Whittaker of
Carnegie Mellon, whose teams placed both second and third in the desert
race, says, "No one is dreaming of big bank accounts or struck by lottery
fever. People are out there to innovate."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Microsoft Research Asia in ACM Multimedia
Spotlight
Microsoft Research (10/20/06) Knies, Rob
Microsoft Research Asia accounts for 10.4 percent of the 48 papers
accepted for the ACM's Multimedia 2006 conference to be held in Santa
Barbara, Calif., from October 23-27, 2006. "This is the top conference in
the field of multimedia...Most experts in this field attend this meeting,"
says Xian-Sheng Hua, who will present the paper submitted by his Microsoft
Research Asia team from Beijing. His excitement over the importance of the
conference trumps even the prestige he feels for his paper being accepted.
"The conference is mainly for communication, actually," he says. "We need
to keep our research close to the trends of the field. We will present our
works and also listen to others' works and talk together to see what we may
do in the future. Sometimes we need to talk to other researchers in the
world to discuss directions, what may be promising to solve very difficult
problems." Researchers from around the globe will be brought together to
discuss multimedia content analysis; processing and retrieval; multimedia
networking tools, end systems and applications; and foundational science of
multimedia. Microsoft Research Asia has contributed a great deal to the
conference in past years, presenting posters and papers, taking part in
panel discussions, providing demos, giving tutorials, and serving on many
different committees. This year they will present five papers in four
different sessions. "We will focus on the very hottest research topics,"
says Hua.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Computer Educators Get Their Game On
Investor's Business Daily (10/23/06) P. A4; Vallone, Julie
As the U.S. continues to struggle producing graduates in technology-based
fields, Carnegie Mellon University has developed Alice, a program intended
to spur interest in computer programming in young children. Alice is a 3D
learning tool in which children make miniature movies using a cut and paste
programming language that they can understand, similar to the refrigerator
word magnets that can be rearranged to form sentences. Teaching computer
programming to children would usually be nearly impossible, because "you
have to type in everything accurately, you can't make syntax errors and you
can't see the results of your work until much later," says Randy Pausch,
director of the Alice program. "We've found that making movies is highly
compelling to students." The NSF reports that the use of Alice increases
retention of college students from Computer Science 1 (first semester
freshman year) to Computer Science 2 (second semester freshman year) from
47 percent to 88 percent, with students getting better grades. Electronic
Arts, a video game manufacturer, has approached CMU to develop a version of
Alice using their popular Sims platform. The plan is to produce a
high-quality, more intricate Sims game in two years. Another strategy
being implemented are workshops known as Teacher Enhancement in Computer
Science (TECS), that are being used to give teachers the necessary skills
to interest students in computer science. Both TECS and the synthesis of
Alice/Sims aim to attract a greater percentage of females to the field of
computer science. From now until 2012, demand for IT professionals will
grow 50 percent, according to a recent study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
Other research shows that the US won't be able to meet such a demand. UCLA
recently reported a 60 percent drop in the number of computer science
majors across the U.S.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Meetings of Minds -- How technology Can Help
IST Results (10/20/06)
An IST project known as Augmented Multi-party Interaction (AMI) has taken
on the task of deriving the highest degree of utility from the business
meeting. The system built by the project records meeting content and makes
it navigable for later review. "We developed a special meetings browser,
so that the archived audio and video data can be navigated in terms of
topic, and summary and skim-through versions can be viewed," says AMI
project leader Steve Renals, of Edinburgh University in the UK. Since
2004, when the project began, digital pens, cameras, and recorders have
been used to "capture everything that happens when a number of people
interact," says Renals. Scenario meetings have been used to develop and
test the technology, and those involved have responded well. The end date
for the project is December 2006, so the new challenge is to implement the
technology into meetings in real time. To meet this demand, the Augmented
Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access (AMIDA) project, which will run
until September 2009, has been developed with the aim of creating a new
generation of real-time video conferencing. Conference calls over the
telephone make communication difficult because body language is not
available to aid understanding, "so with AMIDA, we're looking at ways of
using information from audio and visual sources to compensate for
this--something that could inform people when participants look bored with
a certain topic, for example," explains Renal.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Machine Nation
Pittsburgh City Paper (10/19/06) Levine, Marty
The debate about the reliability and security of electronic voting systems
is still raging, and it does not show any signs of abating as the November
elections approach. Studies of Diebold e-voting machines found
vulnerabilities to tampering and malware that could be exploited to commit
electoral fraud; indeed, some people think a race in Pennsylvania's recent
primary election was affected by such problems. "[V]oters have no real
assurance that their votes were counted," says Carnegie Mellon University
computer science professor David Eckhardt. He notes that voting machine
companies are often unwilling to allow third parties to examine their
software, which fuels doubts about reliability. Experts believe paper
ballots should be included in direct recording electronic systems (DREs),
but in Pennsylvania such measures have been stymied by privacy issues.
Other suggestions being made include parallel testing, in which a number of
machines are randomly pulled from service on Election Day by an independent
testing body that feeds them a pre-scripted set of votes to determine
whether the machines properly recorded and tabulated their choices.
Software auditing, meanwhile, could be used to address any concerns that
the systems' workings are operating accordingly. Carnegie Mellon
University School of Computer Science professor Michael Shamos defends the
security and accuracy of computer balloting, but ACM's Barbara Simons
doubts his argument that someone wishing to rig an election must know each
voting district; she agrees with Johns Hopkins University computer science
professor Avi Rubin that neither parallel testing nor software auditing is
the answer. Simons says, "What do you do if you find a problem? The
election's over. Holding a new election is very hard to do. Our laws are
not designed to deal with electronic voting." For more about ACM's
e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
WISP Kicks Off Year With Orientation Programming
Dartmouth Online (NH) (10/20/06) Sosner, Naomi
An initiative at Dartmouth College that hopes to smooth the transition of
female science, math, and engineering students to the workforce held its
orientation session this week. The Women in Science Project (WISP)
provides female students access to a network of professionals in science,
math, and engineering who can continue to encourage and inspire them and
provide them with work opportunities. Female students participating in
WISP's Peer Mentoring Program (PMP) met their new mentors, and heard a
faculty panel discuss their experiences in science. PMP matches first-year
students with upperclassmen who share a similar major, academic interests,
and extracurricular activities, as a way to assist the new students
academically and socially. Another WISP initiative is the First-Year
Research Internship, which allows freshman to interview for paid lab
research internships for the Winter and Spring semesters. "The whole issue
is that women don't perceive their ability the same way men do," says Kathy
Scott Weaver, director of WISP. Nonetheless, these days more females are
studying math and science compared with decades ago. "Things were a lot
more challenging in those times, not having role models or mentors in my
field," says WISP faculty adviser and biology professor Sharon Bickel.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Robot Swarm Works Together to Shift Heavy Objects
New Scientist (10/17/06) Simonite, Tom
Marco Dorigo from the Free University in Brussels, Belgium, is heading a
project to develop a swarm of robots that would be able to work together in
a human environment. Dorigo, with help from other robotics researchers at
the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy and the
Autonomous Systems Laboratory and the Dalle Molle Institute for the Study
of Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, has already demonstrated six
robots working as a group to drag an object across the floor of a room. At
19 centimeters high, the Swarm-bots only act on what they see, and while
they do not communicate they are able to carry out complex tasks based on
the simple rules of their software. The robots have a rotating turret and
a claw-like gripper, move using caterpillar tracks and wheels, and use a
basic computer preloaded with the rules that "evolve" for task genetic
algorithms and a detailed 3D simulation. "In the future we might have
robots that actively seek help from others when they come up with a problem
they can't solve alone," says Dorigo. "For example if a robot can't climb
an obstacle without tipping over it might go back and get others to climb
over as a group." Swarmanoid is the name of the new project, and will
feature Swarm-bots that climb, crawl, or fly.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
High Performance Woman
HPC Wire (10/20/06) Vol. 15, No. 42,
Maria Eleftheriou, a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, is
the only female on her research team. She has contributed in many areas,
including programming models, parallel algorithms, parallel architecture,
and analyzing the performance of parallel scientific applications for the
Blue Gene/L architecture. Eleftheriou is also working in collaboration
with others on large scale simulation studies of various biochemical
mechanisms. Her favorite aspect of her work is the prospect of her
research projects being "incorporated into applications." Although trained
in theoretical physical chemistry, she began work in high-performance
computing as an opportunity to "broaden [her] technical skills and to learn
new tools needed to tackle scientific problems using HPC." Eleftheriou is
on the Watson Women's Network committee at IBM research, where she helps
with activities that "promote opportunities for women in the workplace."
The committee also "organiz[es] talks on a spectrum of topics and
organiz[es] roundtable events with executives as well as providing a venue
for business topics of interest to women." She is also involved in
undergraduate education: giving talks and appearing on panels to encourage
students to continue studies in science and engineering into graduate
school. Her view on women in the field of supercomputing is that they "are
a long way away from attaining gender equality...women still represent a
small fraction of the researchers in this field and this is unlikely to
change soon." She says IBM is very involved in discussing the "underlying
issues that present barriers to women who choose scientific or engineering
career paths." Her advice to anyone interested in succeeding in this
field, especially young women, is to "get out of you comfort zone and seek
out new challenges."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Coder Jobs: Painfully Stable
InformationWeek (10/16/06)No. 1110, P. 20; Chabrow, Eric
The job market for computer programmers in the United States has
stabilized over the past three years, after about a 25 percent loss in
coder jobs from 2000 to 2003. However, no growth is expected for computer
programming jobs, according to the Labor Department. Although the
unemployment rate for coders was the same as the overall IT jobless rate of
2.2 percent during the third quarter, the computing programming workforce
has 50,000 fewer people than in 2004. The emergence of offshoring,
off-the-shelf applications, and other factors made coding the hardest hit
IT occupation in the wake of the dot-com bust. Nonetheless, software
vendors still need computer programmers to write new applications, and
coders also remain in demand to update legacy systems and customize
applications. Computer programming is the third-largest IT job category,
with coders accounting for 16 percent of all IT workers. For the quarter,
total IT employment rose 1 percent from a year ago to 3.47 million, with
the number of employed and unemployed IT professionals remaining unchanged
at 3.55 million.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Terrorist Profiling, Version 2.0
National Journal (10/21/06) Vol. 38, No. 42, P. 57; Harris, Shane
The top U.S. intelligence agency is constructing a computerized system
designed to mine large information repositories for indications of
terrorist planning under the Tangram program, but there seem to be no
privacy safeguards. An unclassified government document admits that the
use of data mining for terrorist profiling still has significant
disadvantages. The document notes that up to now the guilt-by-association
model has been the primary template for the derivation of suspicion scores,
and this model has had considerable success in instances where a seed
entity in a unknown group is known; "However, in the absence of a known
seed entity, how do we score a person if nothing is known about their
associates?" the document asks. It describes Tangram as a system that
"takes a systematic view of the [terrorist-detection] process, applying
what is now a set of disjointed, cumbersome-to-configure technologies that
are difficult for nontechnical users to apply, into a self-configuring,
continuously operating intelligence analysis support system." Intelligence
and privacy experts who reviewed the document say that for the Tangram
system to effectively tell the difference between terrorists and innocent
parties, it must have access to Americans' private information. Also
arousing suspicions about Tangram is its oversight by a research and
development unit which also runs component programs of the defunct Total
Information Awareness (TIA) terrorist profiling program. Tim Sparapani,
legislative counsel on privacy for the ACLU, says Tangram is essentially a
practical incarnation of the TIA program. Among the shortcomings of
terrorist profiling the Tangram document cops to is the difficulty of
tracking terrorist behaviors in a constant state of flux, and terrorism
researchers' inability to "readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal
behaviors" either for terrorists or innocents.
Click Here to View Full Article
- Web Link to Publication Homepage
to the top
IPv6 Forum Chief: The New Internet Is Ready for
Consumption
Computerworld Australia (11/18/06) McConnachie, Dahna
Today there is a debate about how to create extra IP address space,
whether to continue using the Network Address Transition (NAT) system or
switch everyone to IPv6, says IPv6 Forum founder Lafif Ladid. When
researchers began working on IPv6 in 1995 to increase the amount of
Internet addresses available to world citizens, NAT was designed as a
temporary fix to provide extra room for Internet addresses through Internet
Service Providers (ISPs). NAT does provide additional address space, but
only through ISPs and telecoms, which empowers these ISPs and telecoms to
act as fee-for-service providers offering VoIP and other offerings. The
Internet is designed originally as a flat system, which can "enable
peer-to-peer and VoIP," says Ladid, and IPv6 will return the Internet to
this structure. Today, 72 percent of Internet traffic is peer-to-peer.
IPv6 still will require people to use an ISP to connect to the Internet
itself, but it will empower Internet users to do other types of online
interactions beyond peer-to-peer communication without having to go through
third-party providers such as Skype, says Ladid. The Asian countries will
be the first to use IPv6 because they are more focused on Internet
innovation today, while the West has begun focusing on generating Internet
revenue, says Ladid. He expects China to be the first widespread IPv6 user
in the world.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Support Grows for Federal Paper Ballot Mandate
County News (10/16/06) Vol. 38, No. 19, P. 7; McLaughlin, Alysoun
Advocates of requiring electronic voting machines to leave a paper audit
trail debated the issue with opponents during a Sept. 28, 2006, hearing
before the House Administration Committee. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) has
authored the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, and more
than half of the House is now believed to be in support of the legislation.
In addition to requiring a permanent paper record of votes, H.R. 550 would
have the paper serve as the official ballot of record in any recount or
audit. During the hearing, Edward Felten, a professor of Computer Science
and Public Affairs at Princeton University, showed how a hacker could use a
computer virus to taint votes cast on a Diebold electronic voting machine.
States have started to address the issue, with 25 already requiring a paper
trail to verify votes, and 16 regarding the paper record as the official
ballot in a recount. The Help America Vote Act requires counties to invest
in electronic voting machines. Though the Federal Voting Systems
Guidelines were issued last December, most observers agree that better
technology standards and management practices are needed to dispel any
doubts about the integrity of electronic voting. For more about ACM's
e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
What's Cooking at Eclipse
SD Times (10/15/06)No. 160, P. 25; Correia, Edward J.
The rollout of Europa, the next Eclipse simultaneous release, in mid 2007
is expected to be preceded by several projects such as Mylar, a plug-in
that can improve developer productivity through context-based task
management and filtering; Mylar 1.0, which is expected in early December,
allows tasks to be stored in a repository as objects, and can watchdog a
developer's interactions within Eclipse and automatically identify data
relevant to the task at hand. Another project is the Eclipse Process
Framework (EPF), which was set for release on Sept. 30 and was designed to
be a starting point for the generation of development best practices.
Guidance for requirements authoring, library management, and maintenance
and publication of methods and processes are included in EPF, while one of
the framework's main components, the Open Unified Process, is described by
project leader Per Kroll of IBM as "a very light process that covers a
complete life cycle of a project from start to end." Expected to debut
this year are 1.0 versions of several Device Software Development Platform
(DSDP) subprojects. One of those subprojects is embedded RCP (eRCP), a
runtime framework for implementing and managing Java plug-ins on devices
that is seen as a major upgrade over MIDP 2.0; project lead Mark Rogalski
explains that eRCP's Eclipse and OSGi foundation supply the elements of a
plug-in architecture and a widget-based application programming interface.
Target Management (TM), meanwhile, provides Eclipse with an interface for
controlling remote devices and accessing processes through the use of a
remote shell. "It uses whatever services are registered with the framework
[and is] optimized for as little data transfer as possible," says TM
project lead Martin Oberhuber of Wind River.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Sci-Fi Tech
CIO (10/01/06) Vol. 20, No. 1, P. 35; Fitzgerald, Michael
Some futuristic technologies are on the cusp of a transition from science
fiction to reality. Rollable displays--flexible flat-panel screens that
replace glass with plastic or organic semiconductors--may soon make their
commercial debut, and some of these displays are manufactured with
printer-style jet arrays. Holographic hard drives promise far more storage
capacity and much faster data transfer rates than current storage systems,
and InPhase is planning to roll out a holographic storage system before
year's end; the mainstream penetration of holographic storage will depend
on lowering costs to a more affordable level. Wireless networks could
become faster and more reliable with the advent of cognitive radio, which
uses software algorithms to immediately locate open spectrum whenever the
normal frequency is occupied. Krishnamurthy Soumyanath of Intel's
Communications Circuits Laboratory believes power consumption issues will
delay the market premiere of full-fledged cognitive radio until the close
of the decade. Development of neural interfaces that establish a
brain-computer link is proceeding apace: Commercially available cochlear
implants are an early manifestation of this technology, while experimental
advancements such as BrainGate, an implanted neural sensor that allows
paralyzed people to control a mouse cursor, among other things, hint of
even more amazing applications. Magnetoresistance random access memory
(MRAM), which stores data by harnessing the spin state of electrons, offers
fast speed at low power, and retains data when power is severed. IBM
researchers recently claimed to have successfully stored data on a single
molecule by exploiting spin, a breakthrough that should be beneficial when
conventional memory methods lose steam in 15 years.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
My Android Twin
New Scientist (10/14/06) Vol. 192, No. 2573, P. 42; Schaub, Ben
Japan, South Korea, and the United States are racing to produce life-like
robots, driven by recent advances in actuators, materials, and control
algorithms. ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories
scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro has built a remote-control android that
replicates his appearance, and to the best of its ability, his mannerisms
as part of an effort to cross what roboticist Masahiro Mori called the
"uncanny valley," the point at which automatons become so freakishly
human-like as to repel us. "Our brain is designed for recognizing people,
not for recognizing computers or objects," Ishiguro argues. "Therefore I
think androids would be an ideal information medium." The importance of
social mannerisms can be measured by studying people's interaction with
androids, and Ishiguro decided that a more effective approach to this
challenge would be to build a robot that could be more fully controlled by
a person, to make up for the robot's limited artificial intelligence.
There is hope that the androids Ishiguro and others are working on will be
more readily accepted than current machines as companions and assistants.
This is particularly important in Japan, which faces a burgeoning elderly
population.
Click Here to View Full Article
- Web Link to Publication Homepage
to the top
Does Virtualization Drive the Future?
EDN (09/28/06) Vol. 51, No. 20, P. 124; Wilson, Ron
The simulation of reality by electronic systems--virtualization--adds
intelligence, but it is theorized that it could also make such systems
self-generating. To be virtualized, a system must be isolated from its
environment by a boundary; modeled through the identification by designers
of the inputs and outputs that cross the boundary, as well as the
transforms that generate the outputs; and represented by an electronic
system with a functionally equivalent block. Virtualization can come to
encompass not just physical devices, but also storage, computing resources
in a network, and applications. Systems-on-chips with diverse computing
sites may become viable in real applications via virtualization.
Virtualization could enhance electronic gaming by offering advantages over
conventional animation, which would be a tremendous boon to game
architects. Microsoft's Robotics Studio is developing a virtualized
environment for the programming and ultimate design of robots, hoping to
offer industrial developers a cheap development and testing platform for
programs, and secondary schools an affordable virtual robot to attract U.S.
engineering and mathematics students. Virtualization could perhaps
ultimately lead to electronic systems capable of environmental sensing,
modeling, and prediction.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
The Information Factories
Wired (10/06) Vol. 14, No. 10, P. 178; Gilder, George
The information cloud concept hinges on the creation of massive centers
for data storage distributed throughout the world, using the Internet as a
binding medium. Google is erecting numerous data centers comprising an
estimated 200 petabytes of hard disk storage and 4 petabytes of RAM,
expanding the company's repertoire of Web services beyond its core business
of Web search. Dominating the petascale epoch requires profligate use of
memory and bandwidth, which are abundant, while conserving resources in
short supply, such as users' patience; this is a practice that Google has
mastered. In doing so, writes Randall Sullivan, "Google appears to have
attain one of the holy grails of computer science: a scalable massively
parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software." The
catch is that the energy expenditures are enormous. Boosting the
efficiency of computers is, at present, the best solution for cooling
overheated data centers, but such upgrades may not be physically possible
unless chip design is radically revised. An alternate solution to this
problem is to minimize power consumption through a computer redesign, which
Sun Microsystems' Andy Bechtolsheim is pursuing. Bechtolsheim says, "The
past few years have been disappointing for people who want to accelerate
progress in technology. But now the world is moving again." As technology
evolves, centralized computing's advantages will give way to a new era.
Electronics and optics will converge to compress parallel computing
solutions, and these technologies' incorporation into a wider assortment of
devices will turn the petascale computer into a teleputer. Bell Labs
engineer Andy Kessler says, "It's sure to happen. It always has. Because
all the creativity, customer whims, long tails, and money are at the
network's edge...That's where you can find elastically ascending revenues
and relentlessly declining costs."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top