Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free
Software
New York Times (08/14/08) P. C7; Markoff, John
In a major victory for the open source software movement, the federal
appeals court in Washington, D.C., has ruled that simply because a software
programmer may give his work away for free does not mean that the software
cannot be protected. The decision legitimizes the use of commercial
contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic
works for the public good. The ruling also boosts the open source movement
by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free
software from developers who contributed to the effort without pay. The
ruling will also have implications for the Creative Common license, which
is used by organizations such as Wikipedia and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology for distributing courseware and other materials. Creative
Commons CEO Joichi Ito says the ambiguity facing open source licensing has
been one of the obstacles hindering the movement. The appeals court
decision reversed a San Francisco federal court ruling over the
misappropriation of a software program by Kam Industries, a company that
publishes model train hobbyist software. Kam Industries owner Matthew A.
Katzer had sued free software developers for patent infringement while the
free software community argued that Katzer failed to disclose earlier
technology, or prior art, in his patent filings. In March 2006, University
of California, Berkeley professor Robert G. Jacobsen filed a lawsuit
against Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial
software program that used code from the Java Model Railroad Interface
project, and was redistributing the program without the credits required as
part of the open source license it was originally distributed under. The
lower court ruled that the terms of the open source contract were overly
broad.
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Judge Refuses to Lift Gag Order on MIT Students in Boston
Subway-Hack Case
Computerworld (08/14/08) Vijayan, Jaikumar
A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students discovered
several security vulnerabilities in the electronic ticketing system used by
Boston's mass transit authority, but they are not allowed to publicly
discuss these vulnerabilities because of a temporary restraining order that
U.S. District Judge George O'Toole refused to lift at the latest hearing on
Aug. 14. The gag order will remain in effect until at least Aug. 19, when
O'Toole is scheduled to hold another hearing on the case. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) says O'Toole asked the students to submit a copy
of a class paper in which they detailed the vulnerabilities, along with
copies of the programming code that they included in a planned presentation
to demonstrate how the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's
(MBTA's) e-ticketing system could be hacked. The gag order was granted
when the MBTA filed suit to prevent the disclosure of the vulnerabilities,
arguing that it was forced to seek court intercession because neither MIT
nor the students had provided it with sufficient information to evaluate
the vulnerabilities that were about to be publicly revealed at the Defcon
hacker convention. The EFF filed a motion in court requesting that O'Toole
lift the order, contending that it constitutes a violation of the students'
First Amendment rights as well as a prior restraint on free speech. The
decision to issue the restraining order was sharply criticized by Carnegie
Mellon University professor David Farber, who says he found the move
especially deplorable in view of the fact that the students' paper was
vetted by MIT professor Ron Rivest.
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University of Massachusetts Professor Honored for
Contributions to Computer Networking
AScribe Newswire (08/13/08)
ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) has named
University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Don Towsley the winner of its
highest honor. ACM says that Towsley's contributions to modeling,
analyzing, and controlling communication networks has influenced an era of
networking research and practice built upon a more scientific foundation.
His work has helped give computer scientists and engineers a better
understanding of computer networks, network protocols, and networked
applications. The distinguished professor of computer science collaborated
with experts in other scientific disciplines for many of his nearly 200
journal papers. Towsley is a fellow of ACM and IEEE, and is currently the
editor-in-chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He is the winner
of the 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award from ACM's Special Interest
Groups on Measurement and Evaluation. Towsley will receive the award at
the upcoming ACM SIGCOMM annual conference in Seattle, Wash., and he is
also scheduled to deliver the keynote address on Aug. 19.
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Experts Accuse Bush Administration of Foot-Dragging on
DNS Security Hole
Wired News (08/13/08) Singel, Ryan
Security experts charge that bureaucratic lassitude at the U.S. Department
of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration
(NTIA) is responsible for a major, lingering security hole in the
Internet's domain name system (DNS). Experts and the NTIA concur that
DNSSEC, a series of security extensions for name servers, is the only
solution for a flaw that allows hackers to redirect Web traffic at will by
feeding fake information into DNS listings. DNS servers function in a
massive hierarchy, which means that the successful deployment of DNSSEC
requires having a trustworthy party sign the root file with a
public-private key. "The biggest difference is that once the root is
signed and the public key is out, it will be put in every operating system
and will be on all CDs from Apple, Microsoft, SUSE, Freebsd, etc," says
Sparta's Russ Mundy. NTIA's refusal to implement DNSSEC is a purely
political move, as the technical difficulties of implementation have been
addressed, says Packet Clearing House research director Bill Woodcock.
NTIA's Bart Forbes says the administration has a responsibility to explore
all possible solutions with all stakeholders before committing to DNSSEC,
while even the most committed DNSSEC advocates acknowledge that
Internet-wide installations of the extensions will consume a lot of time
and money. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority has spent the last year
prototyping a system to sign the root-zone file, but it requires approval
from the Commerce Department to do the same for the top Internet servers,
at which point the issue becomes politically charged "because there seems
to be the perception that the introduction of a key guardian changes the
current policies," says Dutch networking expert Olaf Kolkman.
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Helping the Deaf to 'See Sound'
BBC News (08/13/08)
Goldsmiths, University of London researcher Mick Grierson has developed
Lumisonic, software that enables the deaf to view a real-time
representation of sound. Lumisonic is designed to respond to
computer-generated noise or sound from a microphone, and translate the
sound waves into circles that radiate on a display. "If I make a sound and
lower the pitch, the rings contract," Grierson says. "I can change the
pitch using a keyboard and see how that appears as I do so." The visual
representation elicits a quick response from the human brain. Deaf
children at one local school played instruments with the London
Philharmonic Orchestra and were able to see the impact of sound on the
circles via a monitor. In another test, a deaf student said Lumisonic
allowed her to relate more to sound. The system also consists of tools for
recording and editing sound.
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Hollywood Hair Is Captured at Last: Details in SIGGRAPH
2008 Paper
Jacobs School of Engineering (UCSD) (08/13/08) Kane, Daniel
Researchers from the University of California at San Diego's (UCSD) Jacobs
School of Engineering, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adobe
Systems are presenting at ACM SIGGRAPH a new technique for accurately
capturing the shape and appearance of a person's hairstyle for
incorporation into video games and animated films. The method involves the
employment of multiple cameras, light sources, and projectors to capture
imagery of real people's hairstyles. Algorithms were then devised to
automatically "fill in the blanks" and produce photo-realistic images of
the hairstyles from new angles and under new lighting conditions. "We want
to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors
and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world," says
SIGGRAPH paper co-author and UCSD professor Matthias Zwicker. About 2,500
real-world images are captured for each hairstyle using 16 cameras, 150
light sources, and three projectors arranged in a dome configuration. The
researchers use this data to ascertain the physical position and
orientation of every visible strand of hair; complex hair models are then
generated by the algorithms. The researchers can realistically calculate
the hairstyle's shininess regardless of what angle the light is coming from
by determining the orientations of individual hairs. One possible
application of this research involves making an animated character's hair
move realistically when blown by wind. "Our method produces strands
attached to the scalp that enable animation," the researchers write. "In
contrast, existing approaches retrieve only the visible hair layer."
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A 'Frankenrobot' With a Biological Brain
Agence France Presse (08/13/08)
University of Reading scientists have developed Gordon, a robot controlled
exclusively by living brain tissue using cultured rat neurons. The
researchers say Gordon, is helping explore the boundary between natural and
artificial intelligence. "The purpose is to figure out how memories are
actually stored in a biological brain," says University of Reading
professor Kevin Warwick, one of the principal architects of Gordon. Gordon
has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons. Their
specialized nerve cells were laid out on a nutrient-rich medium across an
eight-by-eight centimeter array of 60 electrodes. The multi-electrode
array serves as the interface between living tissue and the robot, with the
brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robot, and
receiving impulses from sensors that monitor the environment. The living
tissue must be kept in a special temperature-controlled unit that
communicates with the robot through a Bluetooth radio link. The robot is
given no additional control from a human or a computer, and within about 24
hours the neurons and the robot start sending "feelers" to each other and
make connections, Warwick says. Warwick says the researchers are now
looking at how to teach the robot to behave in certain ways. In some ways,
Gordon learns by itself. For example, when it hits a wall, sensors send a
electrical signal to the brain, and when the robot encounters similar
situations it learns by habit.
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Disney Launches Global Research & Development Labs With
Carnegie Mellon and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Carnegie Mellon News (08/11/08) Spice, Byron
Disney, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) will work together on a research and
development initiative that will establish collaborative labs in Pittsburgh
and Zurich. "Creating the next generation of sophisticated technologies
requires long-term vision and collaboration with world-class innovators,"
said Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president's Ed Catmull at ACM
SIGGRAPH. The labs will conduct research and development on computer
animation, computational cinematography, autonomous interactive characters,
robotics, data mining, user interfaces, and other initiatives. Each lab
represents a five-year commitment from Disney to fund a director and seven
to eight principal investigators. "The access Disney provides to
real-world problems and data will enable us to do research with greater
impact than is typically possible within a purely academic environment,"
says Jessica Hodgins, a professor of professor of computer science and
robotics and director of Disney Research, Pittsburgh. Hodgins expects
projects to include research into autonomous animated characters,
databases, machine learning, and visualization. Markus Gross, head of ETH
Zurich's Computer Graphics Laboratory, says the collaboration with Disney
is on the "cusp of the cutting edge," and that the partnership will create
synergies that will open up a variety of different fields in entertainment
technology. "Our research will explore novel algorithms to bring both
traditional animation and 3D computer animation to the next level of
perfection," Gross says.
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'Virtuality' Gets Real
ICT Results (08/12/08)
The European Union-funded IMPROVE project has developed a series of
hardware and software innovations that combined provide a complete platform
for virtual and augmented reality. "We worked on head-mounted displays
[HMDs], improved tiled displays, rendering and streaming software, color
calibration techniques, collaboration and networking, and novel interaction
systems," says IMPROVE coordinator Pedro Santos. The initiative produced
three prototype HMDs offering good resolution, including a handheld model
to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH that Santos says can obstruct daylight so
that sunlight does not wash out the image. The platform's rendering
software uses images from high-dynamic range cameras to calculate realistic
shadows, reflections, and light-intensity levels so that a model can be
accurately visualized from any direction in real time. IMPROVE's
video-streaming technology enables high-quality stereoscopic streaming
across a mobile network, while the project's marker and marker-less
tracking systems are another notable breakthrough. The marker tracking
system utilizes reflective markers to compute the position of real objects
in a fixed reference frame, allowing the system to precisely plot an
object's shape. Santos says the marker-less tracking system involves the
detection of feature points in real scenes and the comparison of current
images from a camera to calibrated reference images of the same scene in
order to calculate a user's present position. Other IMPROVE innovations
include interaction systems that support collaborative design and
multi-modal, multi-user interaction, and a color-calibration method to
ensure the faithful rendering of colors by tiled banks of high-definition
screens.
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MIT Developing Super-Realistic Image System
MIT News (08/07/08) Chandler, David
MIT Media Lab professor Ramesh Raskar has developed realistic pictures
using "6-D" images that have a full three-dimensional (3D) appearance and
respond to their environment and produce natural shadows and highlights.
The process can be used to create images that change over time as the
illumination changes, creating animated pictures that move as the sun
changes positions. Raskar calls it the "ultimate synthetic display," and
notes that it is based entirely on an arrangement of lenses and screens.
The new technology is on display at this year's SIGGRAPH conference. The
new MIT process is similar to inexpensive 3D displays that use an overlay
of plastic with a series of parallel linear lenses that create a visible
set of vertical lines over the image. By using an array of tiny square
lenses instead of linear ones, the displays can be made to change as the
viewing angle changes vertically, in addition to changing horizontally as
in the traditional images, creating a four-dimensional image. The new
lighting-aware system adds additional layers of lenses and screens to add
two more dimensions of change. The new system is still a low-resolution
laboratory proof-of-concept, but it could be applied to pictures used for
training purposes. Raskar says the main applications likely will be for
entertainment and advertising, but he says the technology could also be
developed for use in computer displays and movies.
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Medicine on Verge of Software Revolution
Stuff (NZ) (08/11/08) Pullar-Strecker, Tom
The health care industry will soon be revolutionized by computerized
clinical decision support tools capable of advising doctors and patients on
diagnoses and treatments, predicts a new Datamonitor report. Datamonitor
says the culture of the medical profession is the largest hurdle hindering
the adoption of new technology, and the concept that a computer could be
more accurate than a physician is difficult for providers to accept,
despite numerous studies that have shown that algorithms and computers
outperform most doctors on some tasks. "Critics of clinical decision
support maintain a computer cannot understand the nuances of medicine even
when the technologies have been shown to improve efficiencies and
outcomes," says Datamonitor's Christine Chang. "While a fundamental shift
in culture is not impossible, it will take time as well as an increase in
provider education and pressure from patients, payers, and 'C-level'
hospital executives." Datamonitor says such tools are being included as
add-ons to electronic health record software, which has gained widespread
adoption. However, Chang says that without clinical decision support,
electronic health records are little more than a compilation of paper
records in an electronic format. The software can include tools used to
make reference materials available online, programs that uses data-mining
tools and artificial intelligence to analyze patient information, and tools
that recommend particular treatments or issue alerts.
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Commanding Your Browser
Technology Review (08/12/08) Greene, Kate
Mozilla Labs is about to introduce Ubiquity, a new JavaScript-based
interface for its Firefox Web browser that will allow users to run a
variety of complex tasks by typing instructions, in the form of sentences,
into a box in the browser. Ubiquity could be used to email a paragraph or
picture from an article to a friend by simply selecting the text or image,
opening the input box with a keyboard shortcut, and typing in a command to
email it to the desired recipient. Ubiquity can even determine what person
you are trying to send the email too, if there are multiple listings with
the same name, based on previous emailing patterns. Mozilla Labs' Chris
Beard says the objective is to make it easier to find and share information
on the Web while avoiding complex copy-and-paste methods. Ubiquity also
aims to eliminate the need for multiple browser plug-ins, as well as reduce
unnecessary mouse movements. Ubiquity is being released as a Mozilla Labs
project, which makes both the program and the underlying code available to
people looking to test the interface and contribute design and programming
ideas to improve its functionality. Beard says Ubiquity is also highly
customizable, with built-in instructions in the interface that provide
quick links to different tasks, such as email, Twitter, or Digg.
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Flash, HTML, Ajax: Which Will Win the Web App War?
CNet (08/11/08) Shankland, Stephen
Despite the proliferation and increasing richness of Web applications, a
dominant underlying Web app technology has yet to emerge. Adobe Systems'
Kevin Hoyt anticipates the coexistence of hypertext markup language (HTML),
Adobe's Flash, and JavaScript, but predicts that "you'll continue to see a
high degree of flux for probably the next several years." One of HTML's
biggest advantages is its pervasiveness, and Zimbra engineering director
Kevin Henrikson believes JavaScript will be employed in 10 times the number
of Flash apps that are rolled out. Conversely, Microsoft thinks
programmers would be best served by jettisoning HTML and JavaScript once
Web apps start getting rich. HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax's biggest booster
is possibly Google, which is, among other things, attempting to bolster the
HTML camp through the open-source Gears project. Gears' features include
offline access to Web applications such as Google's Web-based word
processor, improved MySpace search, and faster blog posting via WordPress.
Adoption of Gears by major services could inspire installation and support
by Web site operators, and Google's Sundar Pichai says wide adoption could
be fueled by products such as Gmail. The advantages of Flash and its new
competitor, Silverlight, include support for audio and video streaming, and
Darrin Massena, CTO of startup Picnik, lauds Flash's role in photo editing.
Flash Player Version 10, currently in beta version 2, includes features
such as 3D graphics, special effects, and improved video streaming,
hardware-accelerated graphics, and text control.
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Can Avatars Stop Identity Theft?
Salon.com (08/05/08) Caruso, Denise
Digital avatars like those that inhabit massively multiplayer online
role-playing games such as Second Life may be crucial to restoring people's
control over their digital identities. Businesses currently call the shots
and basically force consumers to disclose whatever personal information
they want so that they can purchase products and services, while a core
element of such virtual worlds is the ability to conduct credible and
anonymous transactions through avatars. Blogger Denise Caruso says virtual
worlds are an excellent testbed for the possibilities of user-centric
identity systems. "Even at their relatively crude stage today, the
technology on which they are based already allows them to interact and
transact anonymously--with varying degrees of intimacy and in relative
security--with millions of other avatars, including those who are hellbent
on causing them some kind of digital harm," she notes. Identity Woman blog
operator Kaliya Hamlin predicted at the 2007 Digital ID World conference
that avatars will eventually demand or be granted other digital rights,
including the legal right to exist in the virtual rather than the physical
domain. Identity professionals are investigating how to construct a less
intrusive network that lets people drive their own identities around the
Internet with a greater degree of safety. "Avatar technology has a long
way to go before it can be truly useful as an identity system, but based on
the trajectory of technology adoption--from enthusiast to professional to
mass adoption--it is probably on the right course," Caruso concludes.
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