Net Neutrality Battle Returns to the U.S. Senate
CNet (04/22/08) Broache, Anne
At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Tuesday titled "The Future of
the Internet," Democratic lawmakers argued for a bill that would prohibit
broadband operators from creating a "fast lane" for certain types of
Internet content and applications. The proposal was criticized by the
cable industry, Republican politicians, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who
argued that there is no demonstrated need for such action at this point.
Much of the discussion at the hearing focused on whether the FCC already
has sufficient authority to take action against network operators that
interfere unreasonably with their customers' Internet use. Comcast argued
that the federal agency does not, while Democrats said their legislation is
necessary to clarify the FCC's enforcement role. "To whatever degree
people were alleging that this was a solution in search of a problem, it
has found its problem," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). "We have an
obligation to try and guarantee that the same freedom and the same
creativity that was able to bring us to where we are today continues, going
forward." Martin said the FCC does not need to write new regulations
because it already has the authority to enforce its existing broadband
connectivity principles, which say consumers have the right to access the
lawful Internet content and applications of their choice.
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FBI Organizes Defense Against Cyber-Attacks
United Press International (04/21/08) Waterman, Shaun
Last summer, the FBI quietly assembled the National Cyber Investigative
Joint Task Force, a group that includes intelligence, law-enforcement, and
U.S. government agencies charged with detecting and fighting cyberthreats
against the United States. "A network can be attacked by a terrorist
group, a foreign power, or a hacker kid from Oklahoma City," says Shawn
Henry, the FBI's deputy assistant director of its cyberdivision. "Networks
need to be protected from all threats because once [sensitive] data has
been stolen, it can be transferred anywhere." The group operates out of an
undisclosed location in the Washington, D.C. area. The Department of
Homeland Security released documents in early April that indicated that
members of the Secret Service and several other agencies would be added to
the task force as well. The FBI also asked for another 70 agents and over
100 support personnel to be assigned to its cyberdivision next year.
"We're sharing investigative and threat information," Henry says. "Looking
at the attacks [each agency is] seeing and the methodologies being used."
He says the group looks at all cyberthreats, but is focused on those that
threaten U.S. infrastructure. Moreover, despite recent Congressional
testimony by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, which
identified Russia and China as the U.S.'s chief cyber-adversaries, Henry
says the task force is "adversary neutral."
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Renaissance and Computer-Human Interaction Meet at CHI
'08 in Italy
Ergonomics Today (04/21/08) Anderson, Jennifer
Specialists in computer-human interaction from around the world gathered
in Florence, Italy, from April 5-10, 2008 for CHI 2008, sponsored by ACM's
Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. During the
conference, key issues in ergonomics were addressed, including the balance
between art and science, design and research, and practical motivation.
For Glasgow School of Art professor Irene McAra-McWilliam, computer
products are useful objects that also mediate relationships and particular
cultural codes. Design is capable of reinterpreting and refreshing current
practice, she says. "With the design of networked products such as iPods
and mobile telephones it has become crucially important for designers to
consider the dynamic of the relational sensibility as well as the
aesthetics of three-dimensional form," McAra-McWilliam says. Meanwhile,
Microsoft Research researcher Bill Buxton says great design is about
providing the product's user with a great experience. Every person in the
food chain who has a hand in producing a product should be involved in
design, he says.
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UCSC Computer Scientists Develop Solutions for Long-Term
Storage of Digital Data
University of California, Santa Cruz (04/21/08) Stephens, Tim
University of California, Santa Cruz researchers led by professor Ethan
Miller have developed a new approach to long-term data storage that uses
hard drives to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. The
archiving system, dubbed Pergamum, is a distributed network of intelligent,
disk-based storage devices designed to store vast quantities of digital
data. "The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to
last 50 to 100 years," Miller says. Pergamum was designed to provide
reliable, energy-efficient data storage using off-the-shelf components, and
to evolve over time as new storage technologies are developed. Miller says
the objective is to avoid "forklift upgrades" that involve completely
abandoning old systems and transferring every piece of data to an entirely
new system. Pergamum is built from individual blocks including a hard
drive, a small, low-power processor, a flash memory card, and an Ethernet
port. The units, or tomes, have very low power demands, and power can be
delivered over the network using Power over Ethernet technology. Pergamum
has two levels of redundancy to protect against disk failures and errors in
data writing, and tomes can be added to expand the system, replace faulty
disks, or upgrade to new technology. As computer users increasingly rely
on digital technologies for storing all of their personal data, "there is a
risk that an entire generation's cultural history could be lost if people
aren't able to retrieve that data," says UCSC graduate student Mark Storer.
"But we've never demonstrated that digital data can be reliably preserved
for a long time."
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Congressman to Press on With Paper-Ballot Emergency
Voting Bill
Computerworld (04/18/08) Weiss, Todd R.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) says the House's recent failure to pass the
Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act will not slow his efforts to
get the bill passed. Holt says the bill will make the nation's elections
more accurate and secure by helping states transition from direct recording
electronic (DRE) machines to systems with paper ballots. "I'm still
hopeful that it's possible to get some of this done before this year's
November elections," Holt says. "Anything we can do to reduce the
unresolved questions and disputes this November we should do." The bill
would provide federal funding to states and municipalities to switch from
DRE machines to paper-based systems. Holt says the bill is an optional
program that would reimburse districts for switching to paper-ballot
systems. The White House issued a statement saying the administration
"strongly opposes" the bill because it would create a program that is
largely redundant with existing law. Holt says there is still some support
for such a measure in the Senate, which could allow the House to revisit
the issue. "I wouldn't say it's dead for this year, but unfortunately, the
window is open only a crack," Holt says. For information on ACM's
acitivities involving e-voting, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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A Supercomputer Takes Humanities Scholars Into the 21st
Century
Chronicle of Higher Education (04/22/08) Fischman, Josh
The National Endowment for the Humanities is offering 1 million hours of
high-performance computing time, distributed in pieces of 100,000 to
500,000 CPU hours, that can be used for humanities-based research efforts.
The grants will be administered through the Humanities High Performance
Computing Program. All of the computing will be done at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center, which has a Cray supercomputer that can reach speeds of
101.5 teraflops per second, as well as four other supercomputers. In
addition to actual supercomputer time, the humanities scholars will have
the opportunity to train using the machines. Endowment chair Bruce Cole
says the supercomputers can help humanities researchers find patterns in
the huge amounts of unstructured data that they work with. "That's where
we think this can help," Cole says. "It's a subset of a lot of other stuff
we are doing, such as the National Digital Newspaper Program, which is
taking 30 million pages of microfilm, the first great draft of history, and
digitizing them." Vernon Burton, a historian and director of the Institute
for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, says it is an exciting opportunity. "I think
it has the potential to move forward the basic boundaries of human
knowledge," Burton says.
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Students Get Taste of Real-Life Cyber Defense in National
Championship
Campus Technology (04/22/08) Schaffhauser, Dian
Baker College in Flint, Mich., won the National Collegiate Cyber Defense
Competition (NCCDC) this weekend by defeating defending champion Texas A&M
University. The competition required participants to manage and protect
network infrastructure from live, hostile activity. The teams had to
correct problems on their networks, perform normal business tasks, and
defend the network from a red team. Fifty-six schools competed in the
third-annual NCCDC, up from five in 2005. In addition to Baker and Texas
A&M, teams from the Community College of Baltimore County, Mt. San Antonio
College of Los Angeles County, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the
University of Louisville emerged from the regional competitions. "We had
many visiting faculty members benefit from last year's national competition
as they experienced first-hand what it would be like to have to protect a
company's infrastructure in a hostile Internet environment," says Greg
White, director of the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at
the University of Texas at San Antonio, the host of the event. "Some of
the faculty even changed their instructional programs as a result of
lessons learned from the competition."
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Laptops as Earthquake Sensors
Technology Review (04/22/08) Davison, Anna
Earthquake researchers in California will use the motion sensors built
into laptops to provide an earthquake-sensing network that will collect
information on major quakes and possibly provide an early warning system.
The Quake Catcher Network is beta testing a distributed computing network
of several hundred laptops. Initially, the network will focus on the
quake-prone San Francisco Bay and Greater Los Angeles Basin areas of
California. Stanford earthquake seismologist and project participant Jesse
Lawrence says the goal is not to predict earthquakes, but to measure them
very quickly and get the information out before any damage is done.
California already has hundreds of sophisticated seismometers placed
throughout the state, but they are spaced relatively far apart. University
of California, Los Angeles professor Paul Davis says the distributed
network is not intended to replace those seismometers, but it will "fill in
the gaps." The researchers have developed software that uses Macintosh
laptops to record seismic activity and display seismic data on a
screensaver. All Apple laptops manufactured since 2005 are outfitted with
accelerometers, as are many IBM, Acer, and Hewlett-Packard laptops, to
detect sudden acceleration to protect the hard drive. Lawrence says
desktops also can easily be outfitted with inexpensive USB shake
sensors.
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Universal 'Babelfish' Could Translate Alien
Tongues
New Scientist (04/18/08) Reilly, Michael
A linguist and anthropologist in the United States believes it is possible
to build a universal translator that would enable humans to communicate
with intelligent aliens, if contact was ever made. University of
California, Berkeley's Terrence Deacon believes language develops from the
need to describe the physical world, which would restrict the construction
of a language. Even if an alien race used scents to communicate, the
language would still have an underlying universal code that could be
deciphered, as in mathematics. Words serve as symbols, and no matter how
abstract they are, their reference to a physical object limits their
relationship to other symbol words, which would define the grammatical
structure that emerges from putting words together. As a result,
researchers one day might be able to develop devices that use sophisticated
software to translate alien language on the spot. Florida Atlantic
University's Denise Herzing believes the theory can be tested by studying
dolphins.
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DARPA Pushes Machine Learning With Legged LittleDog
Robot
Scientific American (04/15/08) Greenemeier, Larry
DARPA's LittleDog project is an effort to build an autonomous legged robot
that is aware of its environment and capable of deliberately placing its
feet to avoid falling. The software used in LittleDog determines the
robot's route and its cameras and leg sensors help it detect obstacles to
avoid missteps. DAPRA wants LittleDog, a follow-up to its BigDog project,
to be able to move across progressively more difficult terrain at increased
speeds. "BigDog and LittleDog are related in that they are both focused on
solving the problems that will enable legged robots to accompany war
fighters as they cross complex terrain," says DARPA's Tom Wagner. Phase
three of LittleDog's development process is scheduled to begin this summer.
Phase one challenged six teams of roboticists to improve on the basic
robot platform developed for BigDog. Successful completion of phase one
required each team's LittleDog to move at a rate of at least a half inch
per second over terrain that included obstacles 1.9 inches high.
Successful completion of phase two required being able to more 1.7 inches
per second over obstacles 3.1 inches tall. Phase three calls for LittleDog
to move at a speed of 2.8 inches per second with obstacles 4.3 inches tall.
One of the biggest challenges in LittleDog's development was improving the
original software so the robot could read any map and navigate the map's
terrain. Robotics Institute professor James Kuffner says DARPA's testing
strategy forces the roboticists to write software that works on a variety
of terrains instead of hard coding for certain situations.
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Serious About Games
Baltimore Sun (04/20/08) P. 1A; Emery, Chris
Nearly 400 U.S. colleges and universities, including MIT and Carnegie
Mellon, now offer formal training in game development, ranging from
elective courses to full degree programs. The increasing complexity of
computers and game systems requires teams of dozens of artists, producers,
and programmers to create a game. "Twenty years ago, a game was made by
one guy, or two or three people," says International Game Developers
Association executive director Jason Della Rocca. "The games you see now
take up to 200 people to make. You need a more institutionalized pipeline
of training developers." Vocational schools have a lead in issuing
certificates in game development, but universities are catching up as more
students demand full degree programs. The University of Maryland Baltimore
County's program provides broad-based training in visual arts and computer
science. UMBC computer science professor Marc Olano says the school's
gaming classes are designed to give students a solid education that will
make them employable outside of the game industry. However, there are
plenty of jobs for gaming majors. The average developer's salary was
$73,000 last year, according to Game Developer magazine, while computer and
video game sales have tripled since 1996. "Students are demanding these
types of programs, and schools are listening," Della Rocca says. "These
classes do well in terms of filling classrooms."
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Researchers Tout 'Functional Encryption' That Knows Who's
Who
Network World (04/21/08) Messmer, Ellen
University of California, Los Angeles researchers have developed a new
cryptography method called "functional encryption" that makes use of
elliptic-curve encryption to secure stored data. "The mathematical system
will produce an encrypted record that only people matching the criteria can
decrypt," says UCLA professor Amit Sahai. "To do this, you get a
personalized key that expresses your attributes bound up in one key." A
user's key would be able to decrypt the data because the data, which is
always stored in encrypted form, uses a mathematical process to recognize
anyone with the right key and the appropriate attributes for accessing the
data. Sahai says the user is recognized through the math included in the
message. He says the goal is to improve server-based security to the point
that the server has no idea what it is holding while still enabling
authorized people to obtain the data through the mathematics of the
security system. Sahai says a new version of the security tool will be
available for review so experts can test its efficacy.
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UA Researchers Create Self-Healing Computer Systems for
Spacecraft
University of Arizona (04/18/08)
University of Arizona researchers are developing hybrid hardware/software
systems that could eventually use machine intelligence to allow spacecraft
to fix themselves. Arizona professor Ali Akoglu is using field
programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to build self-healing systems that can be
reconfigured as needed to emulate different types of hardware. Akoglu says
general-purpose computers can run a variety of systems but they are
extremely slow compared to hard-wired systems designed to perform specific
tasks. What is needed, Akoglu says, are systems that combine the speed of
hard-wired systems with the flexibility of general-purpose computers, which
is what he is trying to accomplish using FPGAs. The researchers are
testing five wirelessly-linked hardware units that could represent a
combination of five landers and rovers on Mars. Akoglu says the system
tries to recover from a malfunction in two ways. First, the unit tries to
fix itself at the node level by reprogramming malfunctioning circuits. If
that fails, the unit tries to recover by employing redundant circuitry. If
the unit's onboard resources cannot fix the problem, the network-level
intelligence is alerted and another unit takes over functions that were
done by the broken unit. If two units go down, the three remaining units
divide the tasks. "Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to
using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs,"
he says.
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The Next Step in Robot Development Is Child's Play
ICT Results (04/18/08)
The European Union-funded RobotCub project will send an iCub robot to six
European research labs, where researchers will train iCub to learn and act
independently by learning from its own experiences. The project at
Imperial College London will examine how "mirror neurons," which fire in
humans to trigger memories of previous experiences when humans are trying
to understand the physical actions of others, can be translated into a
digital application. The team at UPMC in Paris will explore the dynamics
needed to achieve full body control for iCub, and the researchers at TUM
Munich will work on developing iCub's manipulation skills. A project team
at the University of Lyons will explore internal simulations techniques,
which occur in our brains when planning actions or trying to understand the
actions of others. In Turkey, a team at METU in Ankara will focus on
language acquisition and the iCub's ability to link objects with verbal
utterances. The iCub robots are about the size of three-year-old children
and are equipped with highly dexterous hands and fully articulated heads
and eyes. The robots have hearing and touch capabilities and are designed
to be able to crawl and to sit up. Researchers expect to enable iCub to
learn by doing, including the ability to track objects visually or by
sound, and to be able to navigate based on landmarks and a sense of its own
position.
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DARPA Seeks Architecture-Aware Compilers
Government Computer News (04/18/08) Jackson, Joab
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has issued a call for
research proposals to design compilers that can dynamically optimize
programs for specific environments. As the Defense Department runs
programs across a wider range of systems, it is facing the lengthy and
manual task of tuning programs to run under different environments, a
process DARPA wants to automate. "The goal of DARPA's envisioned
Architecture-Aware Compiler Environment (AACE) Program is to develop
computationally efficient compilers that incorporate learning and reasoning
methods to drive compiler optimizations for a broad spectrum of computing
system configurations," says DARPA's broad area announcement. The
compilers can be written in the C and Fortran programming languages, but
the BAA encourages work in languages that support techniques for the
parallelization of programs. The quality of the proposals will determine
how much DARPA spends on the project, which will run at least through 2011.
Proposals are due by June 2.
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What Brain Drain?
Computerworld (04/21/08) Vol. 42, No. 17, P. 28; Brandel, Mary
There appears to be little concern among IT managers about the impending
retirement of baby-boomer IT professionals and the apparent loss of
knowledge and expertise this would entail, coupled with a decline of
computer science enrollments. Just 42 percent of 488 companies surveyed by
Buck Consultants in 2006 regarded the aging workforce to be a significant
issue, while 29 percent ascribed little or no significance to the trend.
Peter Cappelli, author of "Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in the Age of
Uncertainty," says the relatively small population of older IT workers is
one reason why the boomers' retirement means so little to IT, while
consultant and author Dave DeLong notes that the impact of a loss of key IT
staff to retirement is hidden, gradual, and indefinite. "Often, management
doesn't know what knowledge is at risk," DeLong points out. Barbara Ring
of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies determined that there needed to
be sufficient time for knowledge transfer, mentoring, and other measures to
maintain the company's intellectual property and prevent a brain drain as
its aging personnel retire over the next five to 10 years. She is working
to identify which Chubb IT professionals will soon reach retirement age, as
well as their years of service, which technologies and applications they
support, and the importance of their knowledge to the company. Edward
Jones CIO Vinny Ferrari says the organizational culture is the ultimate
determiner of how severe a brain drain retirement will cause, and he uses
Edward Jones as an example of a company whose culture encourages informal
knowledge sharing and easy mobility. This guarantees that IT professionals
pass on what they know prior to retiring, Ferrari says.
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Tracing Information Flow on a Global Scale Using Internet
Chain-Letter Data
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (03/25/08) Vol. 105, No.
12, P. 4633; Liben-Nowell, David; Kleinberg, Jon
Carleton College's David Liben-Nowell and Cornell University's Jon
Kleinberg traced the global-scale circulation of information at a
person-by-person level using techniques to recreate the propagation of
Internet chain letters, and discovered that propagation unfolds in a
tree-like configuration rather than as a wide, epidemic-style diffusion.
This suggests that information is disseminated across a network in a more
complex way than previously assumed, and the authors defined a
probabilistic model founded on network clustering and asynchronous response
times that generates trees with this characteristic architecture on
social-network data. Two principles are encapsulated by Liben-Nowell's and
Kleinberg's models--that many recipients may elect not to forward the chain
letter, and only a small number of recipients will decide to post the
letter publicly. The authors write that the accurate reconstruction of the
information's route is a computationally intensive challenge, in view of
the extensive mutations the data experiences. Also, the spreading patterns
of the real chain letters strongly clash with the predictions of less
complicated theoretical models, while simple probabilistic models that
include the speed with which individuals respond to information can yield
synthetic spreading patterns that bear a close resemblance to observed
real-life patterns. "The pattern of the diffusion ... seems initially in
conflict with the small-world nature of the social network in which it is
embedded; but the models discussed here show that such patterns are capable
of arising from natural processes operating in real social networks,"
Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg observe. "In the end, the structure of a small
world, in which most people are connected by short paths, need not be at
odds with a world in which an antiwar appeal, embedded in an email chain
letter, can pass through several hundred intermediaries before arriving in
one's inbox."
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