Alloy Holds Out Promise of Speedier Memory Chip
New York Times (12/11/06) P. C4; Markoff, John
IBM scientists and partners Qimonda and Macronix today will describe a new
semiconductor material at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San
Francisco that they say could lead to new super high-density memory chips.
The material, referred to as GS, an alloy composed of germanium and
antimony, has been used to create a prototype switch that is 3 nm high and
20 nm wide and is potentially 500 times faster than current flash chips.
The project aims to replace the nonvolatile memory chips used to store
digital music, pictures, and video, which is currently an $18.6 billion
industry. Samsung and Intel are also working on flash memory alternatives,
but IBM says the GS material offer performance advantages over others in
development and also offers the potential to scale downward. University of
California, Berkeley electrical engineering professor Vivek Subramanian,
who has read the technical paper, says, "Everybody recognizes that scaling
flash is going to be a problem in the long run. This looks like a really
attractive technology that is both scaleable and consumes little power."
IBM says the technology could also be used in its PowerPC chips for
corporate computing applications. Envisioneering President Richard Doherty
describes the innovation as "a Christmas present for the industry because
it shatters so many things at once. This could change the basic equation
between processors, local storage, and communications."
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Traveler Data Program Defied Ban, Critics Say
Washington Post (12/09/06) P. A2; Hsu, Spencer S.; Nakashima, Ellen
The Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System (ATS) has
come under fire from key members of Congress and privacy advocates who
claim it was developed and carried out without proper disclosure, and thus
violates a congressional funding ban. The ATS, which was stepped up after
9/11 to create risk assessments of travelers crossing U.S. borders that are
retained for up to 40 years, was first disclosed in some detail in a
November 2 Federal Register notice, which DHS claims was an attempt to be
more clear about what they planned to do. Travelers do not have access to
their risk assessments, and would have to file Freedom of Information Act
requests just to see the records on which the assessments are based. The
Center for Democracy and Technology claims that the ATS is in violation of
the 1974 Privacy Act, noting that information on travelers is shared
between agencies with no notice given to the public. The DHS has stated
that the funding ban only applies to programs stemming from its failed 2004
attempt to assign risk ratings to passengers on domestic flights using
commercial databases, not preexisting programs such as ATS, and stands by
its use of data to "detect anomalies and 'red flags.'" "Otherwise, why are
we collecting the data?" asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff. Recent DHS correspondence has explained that ATS uses
data-mining and computer algorithms to search for "potential matches" of
travelers with "connections to terrorist risk factors."
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Researchers Crafting Intelligent, Scaleable WLAN Defense
Through DARPA
Network World (12/07/06) Cox, John
A research project at Dartmouth College has been developing a system of
algorithms and software architecture that analyzes WLAN traffic to detect
and react to attacks. Though intrusion-detection systems (IDS) are
currently available, Project MAP (measure analyze and protect), sponsored
by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Aruba
Networks, is able to monitor the interaction of thousands of access points
and clients as well as the measurement data it creates itself. Aruba
security researcher Josh Wright says, "Attackers are using evasion
techniques, and these are not being addressed by today's [IDS] products."
The project must achieve scalability so RF sensors can perpetually track,
gather, and combine large amounts of real-time information concerning a
site's radio environment. Using many Aruba RF sniffers, MAP software
combines that data to form an accurate image of what is going on in the
air, and searches for evidence of attacks. Where other IDS systems monitor
every frame to check for matches with attack signatures, MAP looks at
higher-level statistics to detect patterns indicating malicious activity.
Ideally, the system would develop into a dynamic WLAN security application
able to watch for and adapt to attacks that are constantly being
altered.
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Hewlett-Packard Labs Gets Big Victories on 1 or 2 Out of
10 Projects
Investor's Business Daily (12/11/06) P. A5; Deagon, Brian
HP Labs has been around since 1966 and has been responsible for such
innovations as the pocket calculator, light-emitting diodes, and the pocket
PC. VP and associate director Howard Taub estimates that one or two out of
every 10 projects the lab begins "makes it big," which he thinks is a
pretty good rate. Taub explains that "We have to do things far in advance
before the market is ready for it or the company is ready for it," and that
metrics are hard to apply to such research: "You have to make an
investment and you have to believe that research will do good things for
you...it can't be micromanaged." Some of the projects HP Labs is working
on include a videoconferencing system that has eliminated the delays that
used to make videoconferencing seem "artificial," according to Taub, who
says the new videoconferencing technology allows users to "no longer think
about the technology." In another project, a wearable camera is being
developed that could conceivably allow someone to record their entire life.
Taub says the project brings up interesting privacy issues, but notes that
in a world where we are all recorded several times a day, it is becoming an
individual's responsibility to prevent themselves from being recorded if
they do not wish to be, using sensors or other devices.
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Informatics Scientists' 'Active Cookies' Put Bite on
Cyber Crooks
Indiana University (12/07/06)
Active cookies could be a solution to fighting identity theft and other
kinds of cyber attacks, according to researchers at Indiana University
School of Informatics and RSA Laboratories in Massachusetts. Active
cookies prevent hackers from interfering with the Domain Name System
translation in an attempt to steal the coded pieces of information stored
on a user's computer. "The reason is simple: Active cookies use one step
that requires no translation," explains informatics associate professor
Markus Jakobsson. Attackers can steal regular cookies stored on a computer
and gain access to accounts with hopes of obtaining personal information
that will allow them to impersonate the users, but they cannot take
advantage of active cookies unless they steal the personal computer where
the coded pieces of information are stored. A bank would be able to place
active cookies on the home and work computers of a customer to protect the
individual from phishing attacks. "And you can still log in if you travel,
you might have to provide some additional identifying information then, or
your bank can compare your login location with the location of your last
ATM withdrawal," Jakobsson says. Jakobsson and research partners Sid
Stamm, a computer science doctoral student at IU, and Ariel Juels of RSA
will present their work at the 14th Annual Network & Distributed System
Security Symposium in San Diego in February.
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DARPA Raises Stakes for Urban Robot Race
CNet (12/08/06) Olsen, Stephanie
After much protest from contestants, DARPA has once again been granted
over $3 million to award its best performers, having earlier been denied
any prize money for top-finishers in its 2007 Urban Challenge. First place
will receive $2 million, second place $1 million, and third place $500,000,
thanks to approval by Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition,
Technology, and Logistics Kenneth Krieg. In addition, "track B" teams,
those not receiving government funding, will now compete for the main prize
money, rather than supplemental prize money of up to $150,000 as was
previously announced Ninety teams will compete in the race, scheduled
for November 3, 2007, that will take place in a yet-to-be-announced
location in the Western U.S. The 60-mile course will present contestants
with traffic laws, busy intersections, moving traffic, traffic circles, and
many obstacles for their automated vehicles to negotiate. The DARPA
competition is part of a government initiative requiring that 30 percent of
Army vehicles be automated by 2015 in order to lessen human casualties.
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Finding Better Ways to Sleuth Software Holes
Spokane Journal of Business (12/07/06)
A logistic model that predicts when software patches would be needed in
the future has been developed by Colorado State University computer science
professor Yashwant K. Malaiya and doctoral candidate Omar Alhazmi. They
say the initial results reveal that the approach works, considering it
predicted a significant increase in defects in 2005 for Windows XP, which
has seen its vulnerabilities rise from 88 that year to 173 at last count.
The researchers' work also includes a comprehensive study of the process of
discovering vulnerabilities in software. The U.S. Department of Homeland
Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), which says about 5,200
new vulnerabilities were reported last year, has shown some interest in the
project. Malaiya and Alhazmi make use of a logistic model to model the
rate for detecting a vulnerability, and predict the number of defects per
1,000 lines of computer code. The logistic model could let software
companies know in advance when they need to focus more on developing and
releasing a new patch. "The hope is that a vulnerability gets patched
before it gets exploited," says Malaiya.
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American Divided on Whether Colleges Should Beef Up
Science Requirements, Poll Finds
Chronicle of Higher Education (12/07/06) Brainard, Jeffrey
A survey conducted by the American Council on Education (ACE) has found
that respondents were divided over whether or not more students should
study math and science to ensure the future of America's global
competitiveness. Of the 1,000 registered voters surveyed, 46 percent
answered that colleges and universities should require that all students
take some math and science, while another 46 percent answered that these
courses should not be a requirement. ACE President David Ward says that
colleges as well as the council itself must improve efforts to persuade
students to enroll in math and science courses and encourage schools to
strive for more effective teaching techniques. He says the public has not
been made aware of the critical importance of these disciplines to
America's economic future, and claims that all jobs will require an
increasing amount of this type of knowledge: "We've not done enough." he
says. "And I do feel bad that we've not held ourselves more accountable to
this issue."
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Beyond Silicon: MIT Demonstrates New Transistor
Technology
EurekAlert (12/08/06) Thomson, Elizabeth
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a
prototype for transistors that are 60 nm long, and can carry 2.5 times more
current than today's most capable silicon devices. The gallium-arsenide
technology, known as the InGaAs quantum-well transistor, could be the
future of very small transistors capable of switching and processing data
at great speeds. MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer
science and member of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL), Jesus
del Alamo, who runs the lab that produced the prototype, says that, "Unless
we do something very radical soon, the microelectronics revolution that has
enriched our lives in so many different ways might come to a screeching
halt." While the InGaAs technology is still in its early stages and has
many problems to be worked out, Intel senior fellow and director of
transistor research and nanotechnology Robert Chau says, "The 60-nanometer
InGaAs quantum-well transistor...shows some exciting results at low supply
voltage and is a very important research milestone." The technology will
be presented at this week's International Electron Devices Meeting in San
Francisco.
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Battle of the Network Fabrics
HPC Wire (12/08/06) Vol. 15, No. 48, Feldman, Michael
There are now software stacks with open interconnect and protocol
standards for high-performance computing clusters, data centers, and
storage systems thanks to the support of InfiniBand and iWARP, but the
differences in the technologies' basic architectures are making convergence
difficult. Mellanox Technologies will support both InfiniBand and Ethernet
fabrics with one adapter via its ConnectX multi-protocol technology, and
thus facilitate development by storage and server original equipment
manufacturers of systems enabled for both interconnects on a single piece
of hardware. Mellanox's Thad Omura says iWARP support was not considered
because of design and cost issues related to the multi-chip solution needed
for iWARP's TCP offload, and also because of unanswered scalability
questions. NetEffect, on the other hand, supports iWARP, and NetEffect CEO
Rick Maule thinks that Ethernet is generally accepted as the true network
fabric. "The thing that no one has been able to prove is that Ethernet can
really do clustering fabrics on par with Myrinet or InfiniBand or
whatever--until now," he explains. "Ethernet can now be a true clustering
fabric without any apology." Maule believes adoption of iWARP as a cluster
interconnect will fuel data centers' wider embrace of 10 GbE iWARP, while
the 10 Gbps bandwidth requirement will place strain on Fibre Channel-based
storage.
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Inside Microsoft's Labs
InformationWeek (12/04/06)No. 1117, P. 48; Greenemeier, Larry
Microsoft Research is excited about a number of security-related
technologies that it has in development. Rich Draves, an area manager for
Microsoft's R&D arm, says the Redmond, Wash., lab is developing
GhostBuster, a potential standalone technology that would be used to
analyze and compare system information in order to detect rootkits. In the
Cambridge, England, lab, the Vigilante program is being developed to work
with a network honeypot to search for red flags in data for signs of a worm
attack, and warn the other computers on the network. At the Silicon Valley
lab, researchers are developing XFI to work with control-flow integrity and
software-fault isolation to download applications in a manner that does not
expose users to content carrying malicious payloads. Meanwhile, Sharad
Agarwal and Venkat Padmanabhan have developed SureMail, which notifies
email users when a message has failed to reach their inbox. An
anti-phishing security system, that would have a user's Web browser
identify passwords and key information keyed into HTML forms on Web sites,
is also in the pipeline. Draves says the "shield," a content filter that
runs on a firewall or PC, would have blocked 98 percent of customer
vulnerabilities over the past two years.
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UK IT Sector Losing Women
Ping Wales (Welsh IT News Service) (12/06/06)
The U.K. high-tech industry's recent efforts to recruit and retain more
women continue to be ineffective, suggests a new report from e-skills UK,
the sector skills council for ICT. The new research indicates that the
number of women in the U.K. IT industry has now fallen to 16 percent, after
experiencing steady declines over the past five years. Cultural barriers
have prevented any progress in the U.K. IT sector, says Carrie Hartnell,
private sector program manager at Intellect, the trade association for the
U.K. high-tech industry. Minister for Women and Equality Meg Munn agrees
with Hartnell's assessment, and addressed the issue of cultural attitudes
in the IT industry at last week's Equalitec diversity forum. "Changing
corporate culture is not easy," says Munn. "But it is an essential one if
the U.K. is to develop and sustain a flexible, highly skilled workforce to
cope with the twin challenges of globalization and rapid demographic
change." The United States, Canada, Ireland, Hungary, Sweden, and Finland
all have a greater percentage of women working in their IT industries than
the United Kingdom. The report also indicates that IT women in the United
Kingdom tend to hold lower skilled positions and earn less pay.
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Breakthrough in Magnetic Devices Could Make Computers
More Powerful
University of Bath (12/06/06)
The ability to switch the magnetic fields in thin magnetic films could
lead to the emergence of high density magnetic memory chips that would
prevent computers from ever losing memory. Physicists at the Universities
of Bath, Bristol, and Leeds say the commercial development of their
approach would lead to the manufacture of chips that are able to run faster
and store more data. The research of Simon Bending, Simon Crampin, Atif
Aziz, and Hywel Roberts of Bath, Peter Heard of Bristol, and Chris Marrows
of Leeds appears in a recent edition of the journal Physical Review
Letters, under the title "Angular Dependence of Domain Wall Resistivity in
Artificial Magnetic Domain Structures." "The results are important as they
suggest a new route for developing high density magnetic memory chips which
will not lose information when the power is switched off," says Bending.
"For the first time data will be written and read very fast using only
electrical current." A short pulse of electrical current would be used to
change the direction of the magnetic fields to "up" or "down," which
correspond to "1" or "0."
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Spam Choking the Internet Again
New Scientist (12/08/06)
Two years ago Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicted that the spam
problem would be under control by 2006. However, today, spam is nowhere
near under control. Spam is still a worldwide issue with IronPort Systems
reporting that global spam volumes have gone up from 31 billion messages a
day in October 2005 to 61 billion messages a day in October 2006. A recent
study by Postini found that spam makes up 91 percent of all email messages.
The reason for the massive increase is that spammers have become
sophisticated and now use botnet computers to send out messages. One
million botnets can send 50,000 or more spam messages at once, according to
Postini. "This dramatic rise in spam attacks on corporate networks has the
Internet under a state of siege," says Daniel Druker at Postini. "Spammers
are increasingly aggressive and sophisticated in their techniques, and
protection from spam has become a front-burner issue again." Spammers are
often motivated by financial gain--they can profit by directing users to
phishing sites in an effort to steal financial data or passwords.
Meanwhile, image spam is increasingly being used because it is often
undetected by filtering systems. Image spam made up 25 percent of all spam
this past October.
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Supercomputing Equipment to Advance the Frontiers of
Computational Biology
Rensselaer News (12/07/06)
An IBM Blue Gene Supercomputer has been given to Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute (RPI) for use in simulation technologies that aim to comprehend
biological processes, while also providing enhanced opportunities for a
number of disciplines. "It will allow our faculty and students to take the
lead in research that will enable key nanotechnology innovations in the
fields of energy, biotechnology, arts, and medicine," said RPI President
Shirley Ann Jackson. Simulation technology will allow researchers to study
how proteins, DNA, and other systems behave on the molecular level. The
Shared University Research program, which granted the supercomputer to RPI,
stated that the Blue Gene is intended to aid prototyping of medical devices
using "virtual patients," which requires the most capable computing
equipment available.
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Computing in a Post-Silicon World
CITRIS Newsletter (12/06) Shreve, Jenn
In order for Moore's Law to be upheld past the next two decades,
researchers will most likely have to find an alternative to the traditional
silicon chip. UC Berkeley professor Jeffrey Bokor says the 2005
International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors "has the final node on
their transistors that are as small as six nanometers," and while the new
Roadmap will most likely have even smaller transistors, perhaps four
nanometers, "This is getting pretty close to the absolute limit for
standard conventional transistors as we know them now." Bokor leads the
Western Institute of Nanoelectronics, which focuses on spintronics. The
institute is looking at many different materials for manipulating
electronic spin, including silicon. Silicon is less of a possibility in
the field of quantum computing, because silicon contains isotopes with a
nuclear spin that would cause decoherence, when quantum states revert to
classical systems. Carbon nanotubes, gallium arsenide, superconductors,
and lasers that manipulate ions in the gas phase are all being experimented
with, though none is a clear favorite. While silicon has not been ruled
out, IBM, Intel, and HP have all created programs that will explore other
substrates.
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The Phone of the Future
Economist (12/02/06) Vol. 381, No. 8506, P. 18
Guessing the future development of the phone is impossible without
projecting the future of consumer technology and its personal and social
ramifications. The odds are good that phones in the next 10 or 15 years
will be physically distinctive from their current incarnations, or may be
concealed in other objects, perhaps even within the human body itself.
LocaModa's Stephen Randall thinks the phone's components--the display
screen, earpiece, and keypad--will become separate elements or be
supplanted by totally new technologies. The phone's primary function of
making calls will also change: Onetime science-fiction writer Bruce
Sterling envisions a day when the phone will become "the remote control for
life," serving in numerous capacities that include "remote controls, house
keys, Game Boys, flashlights, maps, compasses, flash drives, health
monitors, microphones, recorders, laser pointers, passports, make-up kits,
burglar alarms, handguns, handcuffs and slave bracelets." There is no
doubt that future phones will have substantial computing power upgrades;
Sony Ericsson CTO Mats Lindoff foresees a time when a phone will have
enough storage capacity to keep a video record of its owner's entire life.
Phones that serve as both mobile and stationary handsets, through the use
of cellular networks when outside and fixed networks when indoors, are also
expected. The use of phones as universal keychains or electronic wallets
could be hindered because of privacy and security concerns, which
illustrates the fundamental difficulty of accurately predicting
technological acceptance without considering social implications. New
phone technologies could usher in changes in the interaction between people
as well as between people and objects.
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Better, Faster, More Secure
Queue (01/07) Vol. 4, No. 10, Carpenter, Brian
IBM Distinguished Engineer and chairman of the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) Brian Carpenter writes that the lack of centralized Internet
control is one of the reasons why it is difficult to predict future
technology trends. He can recall past forecasts he made, predicting
computer-supported collaborative work as a killer app, the integration and
domination of Internet and IPX, and a devaluing of transaction
processing--none of which have come to pass. Carpenter figures that the
online security model must shift from a defensive posture (firewalls,
filters, and virtual private networks) to one that stresses authentication,
authorization, and accounting. Within this area lies the challenges of
defining, authenticating, and maintaining the privacy of identity; creating
trust relationships between arbitrary sets of parties; agreeing on
cryptographic keys among such parties; shielding packet origins against
spoofing at line speed; and continuing to get messages from unknown parties
without receiving undesirable messages. The quality of service (QoS) of
packet delivery remains challenging: Approaches Carpenter recognizes
include competent design and management of a network, bandwidth
overprovision, traffic engineering, and differentiated services, all of
which much be seamlessly integrated by service providers. Fourteen years
ago, two major Internet problems were cited in a request for comments by
the IETF steering group--the depletion of IP address space, which is being
addressed by IPv6 implementation, and the routing table boom, which is
still unresolved. Carpenter lists the fundamental principles upon which
the International Telecommunications Union's Next Generation Networks (NGN)
effort is founded, which include MultiProtocol Label Switching
(MPLS)-facilitated IP packet-based transport, QoS enablement, embedded
service-related functions, user access to rival service providers, and
generalized mobility. The author reports that the standardization of NGN
around these principles is moving forward.
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