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March 15, 2006

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Welcome to the March 15, 2006 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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Study Says Chips in ID Tags Are Vulnerable to Viruses
New York Times (03/15/06) P. C3; Markoff, John

A team of European security researchers has shown that radio frequency identification (RFID) tags contain a vulnerability that a hacker could exploit to transmit a software virus by infecting even a small portion of the chip's memory. The researchers, associated with the computer science department at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, warn that in addition to the host of privacy concerns raised by the widespread use of RFID tags, the newly discovered vulnerability could enable terrorists or smugglers to pass through RFID luggage scanning systems at airports. The researchers tested software intended to replicate the commercial software in RFID tags, and noted that while they did not have a specific flaw to report, they believe that commercial RFID software contains the same potential vulnerabilities that can be found in the rest of the computer industry. The group's leader, American computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum, warned specifically of the dangers of buffer overflow, a common programming error throughout the software industry where developers fail to verify all of their input data. The low cost of RFID tags, the critical feature that enables their widespread deployment in tracking cargo, merchandise, and even livestock and pets, is also a security concern, according to SRI International's Peter Neumann, co-author of a forthcoming article in the May issue of the Communications of the ACM. "It shouldn't surprise you that a system that is designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no security constraints whatsoever," Neumann said, citing the potential to counterfeit or deactivate tags, insufficient user identification, and the poor encryption of the U.S. passport-tracking system under development, though he had not previously considered the possibility of viruses or malware.
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Off-Shoring Study Disputes Job Exportation Assumptions
New Mexico Business Weekly (03/13/06) Wachdorf, Haley

A recent ACM study has found that the rise of offshoring indicates that the technology industry is getting stronger, rather than evidence of an ailing economy marked by the wholesale exporting of U.S. jobs, as has been widely reported in the media. Rolia Varma, a professor at the University of New Mexico's School of Public Administration, argues that the media has only become concerned about offshoring now that it affects high-tech and professional jobs, while manufacturing work has been exported for years. "Nobody was paying attention when blue-collar jobs were being outsourced, but when it began to happen with white-collar jobs, suddenly people started to notice," said Varma, who served as one of 30 researchers on the task force for ACM's study. The ACM report, "Globalization and Offshoring Software," argues that the migration of technology jobs to developing countries such as India signifies the computing industry's growth worldwide. The study also found that consistent employment growth in the U.S. tech sector in recent years, as the number technology jobs increased 17 percent from 1999 to 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the report warns that the widely held perception that it is a declining industry could choke off the prospects for its own future by discouraging students from studying computer science in school. Varma notes that while some jobs are being exported, IT remains a strong industry due to its innovative character and the universal demand that it enjoys across the business world. "Because of that, the outlook for IT is fairly nice. So what the study is saying is that we need to invest in education," Varma concludes. To view the complete report "Globalization and Offshoring Software--A Report of the ACM Job Migration Task Force," please visit http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport
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Judge Says Google Must Hand Over Search Records
Washington Post (03/15/06) P. D1; Noguchi, Yuki

U.S. District Judge James Ware yesterday ordered Google to turn over thousands of Web search records to the Justice Department, which marks a turning point in a case where Google refused to release such information in accordance with a federal subpoena on the grounds that it would expose its trade secrets and jeopardize Google's protection of users' privacy. Ware felt Google faced less of a burden since the government has narrowed the scope of the original subpoena from a random sampling of 1 million Web sites and a week's worth of search queries to only 50,000 sites and 5,000 queries, and is willing to reimburse Google engineers for the work such a request entails. Google general counsel Nicole Wong stated that Ware's comments "reflected our concerns about user privacy and the scope of the government's subpoena request. At a minimum, we've come a long way from the initial subpoena request." The Justice Department wants the information it requested from Google and other online search services to build a case that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutional, and prove that filtering software cannot effectively limit minors' access to Internet pornography. The government insisted that it is not looking for personally identifiable data about Internet users, but privacy proponents are concerned that the government might go too far in tracking online activities. "It's really about the outsourcing of surveillance to these private companies, and the question is: How legitimate is that?," notes Seton Hall University School of Law professor Frank Pasquale. Still, a new Ponemon Institute poll finds that Americans are more worried about government surveillance of their phone conversations than email surveillance, or video surveillance in public restrooms or department-store dressing rooms.
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Debate Heats Up Over Net Neutrality
CNet (03/15/06) Reardon, Marguerite

Hints by officials at AT&T and Verizon Communications about a tiered-broadband model that would charge content providers for use of their networks has the telecom industry in an uproar and federal lawmakers debating what role if any the government should play in ensuring Internet neutrality. Verizon and AT&T, along with Cisco Systems, which supplies the companies with networking equipment, argue that as the demand for bandwidth-eating video and other data-intensive content increases, the average user who pays more money for broadband should be given some sort of guarantee that he or she will be able to access the content in real time, which may require some sort of prioritization. But companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and PacWest Telecom argue that such a system will give some content providers preference over others and will keep smaller competitors who are unable to pay the fees out of the market. "They shouldn't be able to give preference to their own content over someone else's content," said PacWest's John Sumpter. "The solution is a form of Net neutrality that would not allow them to discriminate against other companies' applications." But the telephone companies say they have no intention to discriminate against content providers since customers would likely not stand for it. "We have no intention of blocking or degrading other services on our network," said Verizon's David Young. "We are giving customers what they want, which is fast pipes at a low cost. Anyone who tries to take that away from consumers will be punished by the market." U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) has introduced a measure that would prevent network operators from blocking or interfering with access to applications, while another bill from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) calls for "equal treatment" of all online content. But this week, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said a proposal to revamp U.S. telecommunications laws would not necessarily entail Net neutrality.
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Intel Offers Peek Into Research Activities
Electronic News (03/13/06) Davis, Jessica

Intel's research division is developing more than 80 projects at its sites around the world, many of which center on multicore and energy-efficient technologies. As the multicore technology has entered a scaling phase, Intel is now exploring how to place up to hundreds of cores onto a single chip. "There is a lot of architecture work to do to release the potential, and we will not bring these products to market until we have good solutions to the programming problem," said Intel CTO Justin Rattner at a company technology briefing last week. Intel is also researching high-bandwidth memory, configurable caches, core I/0, and scalable fabrics, as well as platform-level technologies such as 3D stacked memory, photonics, and virtualization. Software-level projects include transactional memory, work load analysis, compilers, parallel runtime, and auto-threading. Intel is assuming that multicore chips will never realize their full potential until the industry develops a simple method for writing parallel programs. Intel divides its research arm into two groups, with one focusing on short-term projects bound for commercialization, while the other develops more future-minded "off-roadmap" technologies. Rattner notes that exploratory research became a company priority in the mid 1990s, after Intel realized that it had been neglecting disruptive technologies. To support this initiative, Intel partners with numerous universities in its Open Collaborative Agreement, under which researchers at both Intel and the universities can publish their research. Among the off-roadmap technologies that Intel is developing are steerable antennas, virtual MIMO (multiple input multiple output) antennas, and the WISP (wireless identification and sensing platform) project, which is exploring intelligent sensor networks with chips that draw power from radio waves.
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Agile Programming Has Fallen Short, Conference Told
InfoWorld (03/13/06) Krill, Paul

In a presentation at the SD West 2006 Conference, Construx Software Builders' Steve McConnell argued that agile software development has not yet lived up to its promise, having been focused more on processes and tools than on people and interactions. "It seems to me that the promise of agile development has fallen short at least so far," said McConnell. In his presentation, McConnell offered his lists of best and worst ideas. McConnell claimed that agile development has been framed on the belief that developers can anticipate every possible requirement before building an architecture, an idea that made his "worst" list. Among McConnell's list of best ideas are the imperative of incremental software development, that fixing glitches decreases costs, and that software estimation abilities can be improved over time. McConnell also lauded the notion that full reuse is the most powerful form of reuse, and that intellectual flow guides software projects. Making McConnell's worst list are the ideas that the only software models are fully iterated or completely non-iterated, defect cost increase dynamics do not affect agile development projects, and that there is such a thing as a one-size-fits-all development approach.
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Software Notebook: Helping PCs Peer Into the Minds of Users
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (03/13/06) Bishop, Todd

Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that gives computers the ability to formulate a rough idea of the state of a user's brain using sensors that analyze the brain's cognitive state through impulses the sensors collect. This method can determine, for instance, if a person is relaxed, processing numbers, or in a state of imagination at a given moment. In a practical sense, the technology could be used to choose the appropriate medium for delivering an email alert, opting for an audible notification if it senses that the screen is cluttered with applications. Still in its early stages, Microsoft's brain computer interface project is not designed for a specific product, but rather to "allow the user to increase the number of things they can effectively do," said Desney Tan, who is leading the project. The researchers tested their application on video gamers playing "Halo," and found that it could determine with 95 percent accuracy whether the subject was watching the game, playing casually, or engaged in a full-scale battle. Tan and Microsoft's Ed Cutrell, a cognitive neuroscientist assigned to the project, presented the technology at the recent Microsoft TechFest. A prototype has the sensors contained in a white headband, though Tan says that they could be embedded in headphones, headsets, or on the back of a chair. Microsoft's research differs from many brain computer interface projects in that it does not seek to control the computer directly through brain waves, but rather to create an economical technology that could eventually see widespread use in mainstream settings, rather than in controlled lab environments. Tan notes that the system could also be used to analyze computer systems to determine which demand greater levels of thought from their user.
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Pushing the Internet Into Space
Wired News (03/14/06) Glasner, Joanna

For six years, NASA's Adrian Hooke and Google's Vint Cerf have been at work on the interplanetary Internet project to form a standard to facilitate communication in environments where it is impossible to carry on an uninterrupted dialogue. Noting that data relay from Mars to a NASA scientist can take up to 40 minutes, Hooke believes that communication patterned after the Internet model can speed the transmission. Hooke and Cerf are working to apply the technique of delay-tolerant networking to communications in remote areas, such as outer space and deep beneath the ocean surface. The researchers have developed a delay-tolerant networking framework centered around a bundling protocol to store large volumes of data within a single unit, as opposed to the Internet's packet-switching technique that breaks information into smaller pieces for transmission. While the technology is in its early stages, Hooke said that a recent communication relayed from the Mars rover Spirit to the European Space Agency's Mars Express, which then sent the message on to Earth, offers a glimpse into the interplanetary Internet. The Deep Impact Mercury probe used another interplanetary Internet application, the Coherent File Distribution Protocol (CFDP) standard. Instruments using CFDP can record and transmit an observation in a file irrespective of the physical possibility of transmission at that time, according to the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.
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Firms and Universities Join Forces to Satisfy IT Boom
St. Petersburg Times (Russia) (03/06) Dranitsyna, Yekaterina

As Russia's 25 percent to 30 percent annual increase in demand for skilled IT workers outpaces the state education system's ability to produce qualified graduates, software companies are partnering with universities to fill the void. RUSSOFT President Valentin Makarov notes that the two worthwhile forms of university education either partner closely with software developers or provide continuing education or retraining. "In both cases qualified programmers are trained by teachers who have experience in commercial programming and scientific research," said Makarov. Program engineering suffers from a lack of unified standards, and typically fails to prepare students adequately for risk assessment, project management, and other practical matters, according to Andrei Terekhov, the head of system programming at the department of mathematics and mechanics at St. Petersburg State University, who adds that young specialists typically require six months of further training after being hired. In developing the collaborative education program, software companies and universities are teaching students about new technologies and management practices, bringing an industry-oriented focus to an environment that Terekhov describes as overly academic. The program is also training students to present projects and develop budgets. While the partnership between industry and academia has a focus on practical skills, it is also important to develop general problem-solving skills. Yet the demand for specialists is growing, says StarSoft Labs Director Nikolai Puntikov. "We have more and more projects that while far from 'rocket science,' still demand important professional skills," Puntikov said. "It is time to educate specialists in narrow fields within the framework of secondary specialized education."
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From Vision to Reality for Context-Aware Services
IST Results (03/13/06)

The IST-funded CONTEXT program is creating the technological infrastructure that could give rise to a host of context-aware, self-updating programs that would be commercially viable, capable of reconfiguring emergency networks during a spike in calling, locating a restaurant, or providing secure access to a remote location through a mobile device, among other features. The CONTEXT project developed a flexible platform to create, deliver, and manage on-the-fly context-aware services. Another notable accomplishment of the project was the integration of existing routers into the system through incremental network equipment deployment. With its generic infrastructure, the CONTEXT program can develop new definitions based on old ones, and is broad enough to apply to any service that relies on a network, notes project manager Arto Juhola. The CONTEXT system uses Active Context Middleware to manage and distribute its services, drawing power from programmable networks, and individual operators can adapt the system for their own purposes. "This is very important because network operators have traditionally been nervous about applying new systems out of fear that they will affect network reliability," said Juhola. Contextual information could be used to improve business processes or automate routine tasks, drawing on data collected from across the network. In the Supermother experiment, the CONTEXT project enabled a mother to send an important report to her office while at the hospital with her child through the Context-aware Wireless Data Service, which allowed her to switch from a low-bandwidth WLAN connection to a more secure, high-bandwidth link.
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Open Source Comes of Age
ZDNet UK (03/13/06) Broersma, Matthew

It was the fear that proprietary software could one day cause a major disruption in people's lives that motivated Richard Stallman to establish the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985. Stallman is generally credited as the ideological father of open source. Stallman's deeply held belief that source code should be universally available for viewing, modification, and distribution to protect the rights of all users, a concept known as copyleft, formed the philosophical basis for the GNU General Public License. Free software exists without supporting copyleft through licenses such as MIT for BSD, but Stallman remains committed to his crusading ideal of safeguarding the liberty of computer users. The notion of free software has become politically charged, and many popular software movements have taken exception to the methods of the FSF and the stipulations of the GPL. Foremost among these is Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who embodies the pragmatic spirit of the open-source community through his willingness to make concessions to proprietary applications, such as BitKeeper, insofar as it helps the kernel. In addition to the thorny issue of software patents, DRM poses another challenge to the open-source movement. Apple has sold more than 1 billion songs through its iTunes store, but each is wrapped in its copy-restriction technology. DRM technology is inherently incompatible with open source, meaning that Linux systems generally cannot play DVDs or any other item in a growing body of protected online content.
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Avoiding Anti-Patterns at Work Can Help You Sleep at Night
Centre Daily Times (PA) (03/13/06) Laplante, Phillip; Neill, Colin

Many managers focus on adopting the latest set of best practices from a successful competitor, but they do not place as much emphasis on eliminating the misguided philosophies that are hurting their organizations, according to Phillip Laplante and Colin Neill, associate professors of software engineering at Penn State Great Valley graduate school. Books about bad practices that have created stifling work environments are not as likely to become best-sellers, according to Laplante and Neill, authors of the recently published book, "Antipatterns: Identification, Refactoring and Management." Anti-patterns are ways of working, communicating, or managing that produce more problems than solutions. In their research, they have identified 48 different anti-patterns, which can be divided into two categories: Management and environmental. For example, a manager who imposes his own values and win conditions on others is exhibiting the "All You Have Is a Hammer" anti-pattern. Other anti-patterns include subtle changes that eventually lead to rebellions, resignations, or deaths, which is the "Boiling Frog Syndrome," and a culture that allows workers to step on each other to get to the top, which is "Mediocracy." Organizations much acknowledge that they have anti-patterns and move to counteract them. Employees can learn some strategies for dealing with their work environment, or do more by serving as an agent of change, and even leave if it becomes unbearable.
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Vandy Team Wins Department of Defense Grant
Nashville Business Journal (03/10/06) Lawley, Erin

Researchers at Vanderbilt University will spend the next three years designing better control systems for space vehicles, airplanes, and unmanned air vehicles for the U.S. military. Research teams from the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Stanford University will aid Janos Sztipanovits and Gabor Karsai in their efforts to develop software that shows that the control systems are reliable. Sztipanovits, the E. Bronson Ingram distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, and Karsai, an associate professor of electrical engineering, will head the project, "Frameworks and Tools for High-Confidence Design of Adaptive, Distributed, Embedded Control Systems." Sztipanovits and Karsai have received a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, and satisfactory progress on the project could extend it another two years and push the total amount of funding to $5 million. The grant is part of $151 million that will be distributed over the next five years for research in basic areas of science and engineering.
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Security Hole Found in Crypto Program GPG
IDG News Service (03/13/06) Niccolai, James

Developers of the open-source GnuPG encryption software say the program has a security flaw that may enable an attacker to sneak malicious code into a signed email message. GnuPG, also known as Gnu Privacy Guard, is an open-source version of the PGP encryption program used for encrypting data and creating digital signatures. The GnuPG team discovered the flaw when they were testing the patch for a previous vulnerability reported last month. "Someone who's able to intercept the message as it's transmitted could inject some data, and then the person who verifies the signature would be told it's a valid, unaltered message," says Secunia CTO Thomas Kristensen. "That's one of the main purposes of the program, so it's quite significant." Secunia ranked the flaw as "moderately critical." It affects all versions of GnuPG prior to 1.4.2.2, and users are being warned to upgrade their systems immediately to that release.
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VM Rootkits: The Next Big Threat?
eWeek (03/10/06) Naraine, Ryan

Researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Michigan have partnered to develop prototypes for virtual machine-based rootkits that significantly push the envelope for concealing malware and that can maintain control of a target operating system. The proof-of-concept rootkit, called SubVirt, exploits known security flaws and drops a virtual machine monitor (VMM) below a Windows or Linux installation. The rootkit is impossible to detect once it is put into a virtual machine because it can not be seen by security software running in the target system. The prototype will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy later this year. It was created by Microsoft's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group, the Redmond, Wash., unit responsible for the Strider GhostBuster anti-rootkit scanner and the Strider HoneyMonkey exploit detection patrol. "We used our proof-of concept [rootkits] to subvert Windows XP and Linux target systems and implemented four example malicious services," the researchers stated in a paper describing the attack scenario. "[We] assume the perspective of the attacker, who is trying to run malicious software and avoid detection. By assuming this perspective, we hope to help defenders understand and defend against the threat posed by a new class of rootkits," says the paper. The SubVirt project implemented VM-based rootkits on two platforms and was able to write malicious service without being noticed, according to the group.
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Welcome to the Open Source Cellphone
New Scientist (03/11/06) Vol. 189, No. 2542, P. 26; Inman, Mason

Despite the ready availability of inexpensive, feature-rich cell phones, a movement is growing among developers to create the first open-source cell phone in an effort to spur innovation in both the software and the design of mobile devices. Hoping ultimately to produce a stable of free software that leads to a bevy of new cell-phone applications, the movement is capitalizing on the growing demand for wireless products that power machine-to-machine communication. Converting this simplistic wireless module into a functioning cell phone requires a microprocessor, usually powered by Linux, and a battery, keypad, screen, speaker, and a microphone. One cell-phone hobbyist notes that even today building a phone from scratch is not easy, particularly the circuit and software design, and homemade devices are clunky with short battery lives. In spite of these limitations, developers are eager to incorporate new features into their devices, such as RFID tags and GPS units. Developing devices from home is the only viable option for many individuals looking to customize their phones, as most manufacturers exact steep licensing fees and royalties from anyone looking to tweak the hardware or design their own applications. The designers hope that a community will form around cell phone software to create a host of new applications and features, just as developers have flocked to support the open-source Web browser Firefox. Telecommunications engineer Surj Patel has developed an application that links to Amazon's Web site to provide users with ratings and pricing information through a computerized voice reading key. Others look to mobile phones as an affordable vehicle to bring computing to the developing world, and insist that a broad community of developers is the only practical way to achieve that end.
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Reinventing the Internet
Economist Technology Quarterly (03/06) Vol. 378, No. 8468, P. 32

Since the inception of the Internet in its most primitive form in 1969, computer scientists and engineers have tweaked and modified the network in a piecemeal fashion, enhancing its operating capacity to its current state, where it handles the traffic of nearly 1 billion users. Fearful that the minor alterations and upgrades are no longer capable of dealing with rising security threats and accommodating new devices, such as mobile phones and wireless sensors, researchers are looking into building a new network from the ground up. The NSF has launched the Global Networking Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) and the Future Internet Design (FIND) projects. GENI is developing novel protocols and applications and FIND is exploring the best equipment to support the network in the future. "To conceive a vision for what a global communications network will look like in 10 or 15 years," said MIT's David Clark, one of the Internet's original designers, "you have to free yourself from what the world looks like now." While Clark warns that the Internet's sheer ubiquity could cloud engineers' visions of the future, the researchers are certain that the number of devices on the network will grow exponentially. With virtually any household object potentially containing a sensor or a chip, the number of devices will proliferate to the hundreds of billions, and with it, machine-to-machine transmissions could far outnumber the volume of human-generated Internet traffic. One proposal to emerge is trust-modulated transparency, where the traffic-routing structure estimates how trustworthy packets of data are as they pass by, setting aside suspect packets for further screening. Internet indirection infrastructure would add an addressing system over existing IP numbers to support new devices. For his part, Clark calls for an intelligent diagnostic system to identify network failures as they occur.
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Cognitive Radio
Scientific American (03/06) Vol. 294, No. 3, P. 66; Ashley, Steven

New wireless technologies will be free of transmission congestion through their ability to sense and instantly switch to nearby vacant frequencies. Cognitive radios will facilitate the automatic jumping of wireless signals from a band of the spectrum blocked by interference to an available open frequency, allowing more reliable transmissions that could translate into less expensive communications costs. Emergency communication, where transmission reliability is critical, stands to benefit especially from cognitive radio. Future wireless devices will be able to reconfigure their functions to fulfill the requirements of users or communications networks on an as-needed basis through the use of adaptive software. These modifications will be based on the ability to detect and recall such diverse elements as the radio-frequency spectrum, user behavior, or network state of distinct transmission environments at any given time and place, significantly increasing the dependability and convenience of wireless communications. A cognitive radio will be capable of autonomously assessing how its RF environment fluctuates by time and place according to the power emitted by itself and other neighboring transmitters; when combined with software, these data structures will allow a cognitive radio to optimally find and employ surrounding networks while avoiding interference from other radios. Cognitive radios' ability to search for available spectrum will be optimized through information sharing effected by Semantic Web technology, and it is probable that, despite resistance from the cell phone and telecom industry, progress toward cognitive radio will move forward given the fact that the relative disorder and rigidity of unregulated spectrum is avoidable. Cognitive radio could enhance the flexibility of wireless communications to the point where consumers may ultimately be able to make calls through cheaper wireless network paths, a potentially revolutionary step for the communications industry.
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