Building on the Future of the Web
BBC News (05/22/06) De Roure, Dave
Reflecting on the 12 years since the first World Wide Web conference at
CERN in Switzerland, computer scientist Dave De Roure looks at the progress
the Web has made and the important events the annual conference has hosted.
While 1994's conference brought together developers to hear Web pioneer
Tim Berners-Lee talk about HTML and its uses for cross-referencing
scientific papers, today's Web has become an integral part of daily life
and the conferences now draw all sorts of people. The four-day WWW2006
conference is to be held May 23-26 in Edinburgh, where important decisions
will be made about the Web's future. One key topic will be the "Semantic
Web" project, which aims to make the meanings of the Web's millions of text
pages understandable to computers, not just to humans. The Semantic Web
will allow automatic processing of many different types of information,
from bank statements to diary appointments, and can also transform physical
things, people, and places into information computers can understand, De
Roure writes. "The bridge between the virtual and physical worlds
continues to become narrower with the mobile revolution and the Web's
potential to connect billions of mobile devices across the world," writes
De Roure. A person using a mobile device might search for a retailer
selling a certain type of product, for example, and receive information not
just about the closest such retailer, but about the closest retailer that
is open at that moment and is offering the cheapest such product. Another
key topic at the conference will be how people use and contribute to the
Web, incorporating such trends as the use of blogs and wikis and social
networking. For more information on WWW2006, see
http://www2006.org/
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IBM Researchers Probe Nanometer-Scale Memories
EE Times (05/19/06) Walko, John
IBM researchers are seeking to develop nanometer-scale terabit memories
that the company is referring to as "probe-based storage." This MEMS-based
memory technology remains a high priority at IBM's Zurich research
facility, although the company has not yet decided whether to move
development on to the next stage. Early on, the work was led by physics
Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig along with microfabrications specialist Peter
Vettiger. "While we have working parts and have demonstrated complete data
storage systems, there are still technical issues to solve, and the company
has made no commitments to a product," said Paul Seidler, manager of the
50-year-old IBM Zurich lab's Science and Technology Group. Scaled-down
MEMS techniques are used to locate and melt holds in a polymer on a movable
silicon substrate. The substrate is moved under the desired read/write
head for addressing bit locations; to write data, the head is heated and
melts a hole in the polymer through static tension. The unheated head can
read the data back, and data can be erased by melting the displaced polymer
back into the hole. Massive parallelism can enable high data rates using
these probes.
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Heard the One About the 600,000 Chinese Engineers?
Washington Post (05/21/06) P. B3; Bracey, Gerald W.
Gerald W. Bracey, author of "Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid
Getting Statistically Snookered," says while Americans are inundated with
huge amounts of statistics on a daily basis, a few linger in our memory,
including the recently announced numbers of 600,000, 350,000, and 70,000.
Bracey says these are supposedly the number of engineers manufactured by
China, India, and the United States, respectively, in 2004, and that they
initially drew attention when they appeared in a Fortune magazine story
last July. Bracey adds that these figures got apparently perfect
credibility when they were presented in a press release in October
concerning a new report from the Committee on Science, Engineering and
Public Policy, a joint organization of the National Academy of Sciences,
National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, which, along
with the National Research Council, are overall known as the National
Academies. Wall Street Journal columnist Carl Bialik, dubious of these
numbers, investigated their sources, and found out, among other
discrepancies, that the figure for the number of Chinese engineers was
outdated and that there was no apparent origination for the Indian figures.
Separately, Duke University researchers discovered that the United States
produces 137,437 engineers each year with a minimum of a bachelor's degree
while India manufactures 112,000 and China manufactures 351,537. "That's
more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either nation," Bracey
notes. "Statistics that end up as conventional wisdom even when they're
wrong usually become popular by being presented as fact in a highly visible
and respected source--such as a cover story in Fortune or a National
Academies report," Bracey writes.
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Voice Encryption May Draw U.S. Scrutiny
New York Times (05/22/06) P. C11; Markoff, John
The FCC, in trying to force Internet and VoIP service providers to adopt
technology that will enable law enforcement to monitor phone calls, has
left a backdoor open--encryption programs that operate directly between
computers and not through a hub. Walking through that door is Philip
Zimmermann, creator in 1991 of Pretty Good Privacy, software used to
encrypt and decrypt email that drew government scrutiny for possible
violations of export restrictions on cryptography technology, and more
recently Zfone, which encrypts computer-to-computer phone conversations.
Unlike similar technology, Zfone performs decryption within the digital
voice channel as the call is set up rather than leaving the decryption key
residing on a network of computers. For now, the technology does not
violate any U.S. regulations due to this difference, but in England, where
the government wants to give law enforcement the power to force businesses
and individuals to disclose encryption keys, the issue is not so clear.
Zfone works on free VoIP software programs such as X-Lite and Gizmo but not
on Skype calls, which German officials recently announced they can now
intercept and decrypt. Zimmerman's software is downloadable for free for
now though its creator hopes one day to license it to VoIP software and
hardware developers.
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Researchers: Spend to Protect Against One Attack, Not
Many
IDG News Service (05/19/06) Kirk, Jeremy
In a scholarly paper to be presented in June at England's University of
Cambridge, a research team from Florida Atlantic University will make a
strong and somewhat unusual mathematical case for how companies should
spend their IT budgets. The researchers studied how firms can assess their
vulnerabilities, determine the risk, and figure out the damage potential.
The paper places threats into two categories: distributed attacks, which
appear in the form of viruses, spyware, and spam, and focused attacks by a
hacker. What the researchers determined, through risk analysis and
equations, goes against apparently intuitive computer security efforts.
Instead of spending evenly to protect against all attacks, it is not
automatically the correct approach if one type of breach could create
numerous times more harm than another type. While the "eggs in one basket"
effort may worry IT administrators, the research paper reveals that with
restricted budgets, compiling defenses against one attack may be the
smartest way, as focused attacks have typically proven to create more
economic damage than distributed attacks. "We're proposing that companies
should look at vulnerabilities of a system, and if they are in
high-vulnerability and high-loss scenario, they really, really should spend
the most money on targeted attacks trying to prevent hackers," professor
Qing Hu said.
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Net Neutrality Field in Congress Gets Crowded
CNet (05/19/06) Broache, Anne
Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (R-N.D.) on Friday
introduced the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act," a bill that represents
Congress' sixth attempt to legislate net neutrality principles this year.
Specifically, the bill would forbid broadband service providers from
blocking, interfering with, discriminating against, impairing, or degrading
access to content or preventing users from attaching devices of their
choosing to the network. In addition, network providers would be forbidden
from making special deals with content providers to ensure faster delivery
or improved quality of service and would be required to offer all Internet
material on an "equivalent" basis. The bill was immediately praised by net
neutrality advocates such as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Microsoft, who
said the measure will "allow innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors who
rely on the certainty of that open marketplace to continue to fuel the
engine of our nation's economy and our global leadership in Internet
technology and services." Meanwhile, the U.S. Telecom Association--which
represents large and small telephone companies--called the bill a "harmful,
anti-consumer" regulation and said that if it were ever enacted into law it
would drive up the cost of broadband and "deny Americans the new,
competitive video services they have come to expect." Snowe and Dorgan's
bill is likely to be the subject of debate at a hearing on May 25 about the
net neutrality provisions--or as critics charge, lack thereof--in a
sweeping telecommunications bill currently under consideration by the
Senate Commerce Committee. The current language of that bill would
instruct the FCC to be on the lookout for any incidents that could be
considered violations of net neutrality and report its findings to
Congress.
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Sun's McNealy Urges Developers to Change the World
InfoWorld (05/19/06) Krill, Paul
Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy, who resigned as the
conglomerate's CEO in April, presented a call to developers on May 19 to
help out in bridging the global digital gap. In a morning keynote address
and press conference, McNealy noted that 75 percent of the world's
individuals are not on the Internet, something he called an "enormous
tragedy" and a "huge economic opportunity." He said the industry must
eradicate this divide through development of technologies that are
Java-enabled. To do this, McNealy said, developers may have to work a
little longer into the night "because you're kind of cursed with the
opportunity" to change the world. He said, "We're going to solve [the
digital divide] through Web services, through thin clients, through network
computing, and we're going to do that without torching the planet."
McNealy also emphasized the crucial mass of Java, which he pointed out adds
3 million users per week. McNealy supported plans to provide Java through
open source, which would allow the sharing of the technology and would
reduce the barrier to entry and exit and leverage the community at-large's
contributions.
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U.S. Renews Contract for Oversight Of Internet
Washington Post (05/20/06) P. D1; Mohammed, Arshad
The Bush administration revealed on a federal government contracting Web
site on Thursday that it will renew its sole-source contract with ICANN,
giving the group exclusive control of managing the Internet. Under the
terms of the contract, which would run for one year with four one-year
options, ICANN would keep managing the Internet's domain name system by
overseeing the master DNS list. "We continue to believe ICANN is uniquely
qualified to perform the services," says Ranjit de Silva with the Commerce
Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil are critical of the role
the Commerce Department plays in overseeing ICANN. The Bush administration
is now caught in a battle between U.S. lawmakers that want the United
States to keep its oversight, and other countries that want to be involved.
The Commerce Department says that other groups have until June 17 to let
it be known that they are capable of meeting the contract's technical
guidelines and prevailing over the agency's presumption that ICANN is the
best choice to continue managing the Internet's address system. The Center
for Democracy & Technology's David McGuire says, "Most people in the
Internet space believe that despite its flaws, ICANN is the only
organization that could conceivably fill its role in the Internet
management space."
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Local Access Networks for Low-Cost Broadband
Services
IST Results (05/19/06)
IST is behind a project in Europe to develop a network architecture that
will facilitate the delivery of low-cost broadband services to users. "At
the end of the first phase [February 2006], we have been able to reach a
consensus on the access architecture, and to give input to the standards
bodies, in particular to ETSI, the DSL Forum, and the Home Gateway
Initiative," says MUSE project coordinator Peter Vetter of Alcatel Research
& Innovations in Belgium. The use of Ethernet protocols will help ensure
access to a wider market at a lower cost. Video telephony and
conferencing, video-on-demand, IP telephony and high-speed Internet
services, and time-shift TV have all been the focus of tests during the
MUSE project. The next phase focuses on embedding new service enablers
into access network elements, providing fixed-access architecture support
for fixed/mobile convergence, studying distributed architectures, and
extending the access network. The new embedded service enabler technology
is the key to the type of service the MUSE project envisions. "Imagine
being able to maintain a single video connection, continuously and without
a break, from when you start inside your home in the morning, to your
journey on the bus or train [at lower quality], to when you arrive inside
your office [at higher quality]," says Vetter.
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2010: The Year of the Techie
ZDNet UK (05/17/06) Donoghue, Andrew
The "Eye to the Future -- How Technology, Media and Telecommunications
Advances Could Change the Way We Live in 2010" report published by Deloitte
says that technology will continue to play a vital role in the evolution of
the workplace in the direction of mobility and in determining personal
success within that shift but warned that unless steps are taken now, the
world will suffer from an skilled IT workforce shortage by the close of the
decade. "More and more, the ability to get things done is expected to
depend on the ability to understand and use increasingly complex
technology," said the report. "Those with a greater degree of
technological literacy may find themselves moving up the corporate
hierarchy more quickly than those without." The automobile industry
especially will see advancements in technology, the report says. "By 2010
workers may select their car partly on the basis of the range of work tools
provided. Desired features may include technology that can read out
incoming emails to the driver; allow the driver to dictate responses;
permit the driver to set up meetings, update 'to-do' lists and write short
memos." But unless private industry and governments worldwide begin
investing more in skills training, a global IT workforce shortage will
hinder progress. Despite the advent of mobility, PCs will continue to be
the computing device of choice among workers, the report says, with 150
million new PCs expected in developed markets between now and 2010 and 566
million in the developing world. The report estimates that 41 million
employees around the globe will spend at least one day each week
teleworking by 2008 thanks to technology's growing reach.
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Programming OpenMP on Clusters
HPC Wire (05/19/06) Vol. 15, No. 20,Hoeflinger, Jay; Meadows, Larry
OpenMP programs cost less to program and maintain, but OpenMP's reliance
on a shared memory has kept its use restricted to a single multiprocessor
machine. Cluster OpenMP from Intel addresses this limitation by
facilitating the operation of an OpenMP program across a cluster of
multiprocessors, using a software layer that deploys a distributed shared
memory (DSM). Cluster OpenMP thus offers a cheaper hardware purchase and a
cheaper option for programming. Cluster OpenMP uses as its foundation an
exclusively licensed version of the TreadMarks DSM system, augmented to
accommodate bigger volumes of sharable data, a higher number of processors,
multiple threads per process, and the ability to function on modern cluster
interconnects. A wide swath of applications are naturally well-suited to
Cluster OpenMP, such as those that execute rendering, data-mining, parallel
search, speech and visual recognition, and genetic sequencing. Any
application that utilizes a large volume of read-only sharable data and
only a small amount of read/write sharable data while employing
synchronization lightly is a potentially good Cluster OpenMP candidate.
The identification of sharable data is crucial to adjusting the performance
of OpenMP programs, since it reveals insights into data access properties
that are often concealed because of OpenMP's procedural focus.
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Time to Revise the Teaching of IT
Computing (05/18/06) Glick, Bryan
British schoolchildren will be taking their GCSE and A-Level exams over
the coming few weeks, and a lot will be making final decisions concerning
what degree path to study at college. During the last few years, fewer
students have been including computer science or information technology
among their choices. One reason why such a small number of students are
pursuing these sciences may have to do with how they are taught. Some
schools, however, try to make technical teaching less boring by using
innovative means. During a visit to IBM's Hursley Park research center,
the IT head at Rugby School met top inventor Andy Stanford-Clark, who
volunteered to come to Rugby and speak to the A-Level class.
Stanford-Clark says that students are expected to do classwork, which
typically involves projects such as constructing a library system for
checking books in and out, processing sales orders, or some other boring
information processing job. Stanford-Clark told the class about his home
automation system, with which he can switch lights and electrical equipment
on and off remotely from his smart phone. The students loved the idea, and
Stanford-Clark has since helped them to devise a home automation gateway
product that employs SMS texts, directing the students through surveying
friends and parents to decide mandates for creating a prototype.
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Only in America? Copyright Law Key to Global Free
Software Model
Linux Insider (05/16/06) Meeker, Heather
The free software model is seriously threatened by legal systems that lack
strong enforcement of copyright law in nations where the development of
software is a booming business, writes Greenberg Traurig shareholder
Heather Meeker. She points to the absence of copyright law enforcement in
many emerging nations as a far bigger impediment than the ultimate futility
of crafting an international open source license agreement that serves all
interests. Even countries that may have some form of copyright protection
suffer from lax enforcement policies because of cultural barriers (few
Chinese people fluent enough to read English license agreements),
governmental barriers (the protection of many Russian piracy outfits from
international investigation because they are owned by the military), or
judicial corruption (as in India), to name a few reasons. Such nations
have flaunted open source software as a cheap alternative that will enable
them to adhere to copyright rules while living within their economic means,
but Meeker points out that free software has a catch--copyleft. She
concludes that a lack of voluntary compliance and enforcement will destroy
copyleft, which may cancel its practicality to most of the world.
"Ultimately, this may be a question of whether the open source model--as
opposed to the free software model--works," Meeker contends. "For what is
open source software other than free software without enforcement?"
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DHS Privacy Office Bashes RFID Technology to Track
People
TechWeb (05/18/06) Sullivan, Laurie
The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Privacy Office released a
draft report that heavily criticizes the privacy and security risks of
using radio frequency identification devices (RFID) for human
identification. The technology does not offer a performance benefit for
identification purposes compared with other methods, according to the
Homeland Department, and could eventually turn the government's
identification system into a surveillance system. DHS wants to use RFID to
track and locate people across international borders. The report says it
is not true that RFID improves the speed of identification. "If RFID is
tied to a biometric authentication factor, it can reliably identify human
beings; but tying RFID to a biometric authentication negates the speed
benefit," according to the report. The committee says DHS' request to
track individuals would take away an individual's ability to control when
they are identified. The committee suggests that if DHS wants to use RFID
technology, individuals should be allowed to turn off signals associated
with tracking them or their activities, use of RFID should be limited, and
any RFID databases should not be connected to the Internet.
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Futurist Sees World Changed by Technology
Stanford Daily (05/16/06) Cox, Katherine
Artificial intelligence technology inventor, author, and businessman Ray
Kurzweil recently gave a talk at Stanford University predicting the "Coming
Merger of Human and Machine," as his lecture was partially titled.
Kurzweil believes information technologies will continue to experience
exponential growth. Kurzweil also believes that artificial intelligence
will match levels of human intelligence in the decade of 2020. Overall,
Kurzweil noted that world-changing technological inventions--paradigm
shifts--are happening in quicker succession in the modern and contemporary
ages. Kurzweil says each invention helps make the next one possible at a
quicker rate. For instance, while original computer designers designed
using paper and pen in the 1950s, today computer engineers have computers
themselves to abet and accelerate the design process. He says that
analysts underestimate how fast technology can change, plotting future
progress in constant terms rather than exponentially. He asks, "How can we
make accurate predictions overall when any specific project is completely
unpredictable." Wired magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf, reacting to
the lecture, said, "If you hear about [Kurzweil] second-hand he sounds like
an extremist, but his presentation is so rational and well supported by
evidence that it really makes you question your own conservatism and
caution."
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Media Lab Project Explores Language Acquisition
MIT Tech Talk (05/17/06) Vol. 50, No. 27, P. 4; Wright, Sarah H.
MIT professor Deb Roy, director of MIT Media Lab's Cognitive Machines
research group, is recording and analyzing three years' worth of his new
son's daily activities in order to determine how people naturally acquire
language within the context of their home, an initiative known as the Human
Speechome Project. "Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the
innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome project is an important
first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human
development and learning," reports Media Lab director Frank Moss. The
National Science Foundation has provided seed funding for the project.
Over 300 GB per day of compressed data has already been collected by Roy
and his wife through video and audio recording devices installed throughout
their home; the project involves temporarily storing the data in a 5 TB
disk cache that is then transferred to a petabyte disk storage system at
the Media Lab. "We need to keep all the information online so that we can
do rapid exploration of patterns hidden within the data," explains Roy.
Roy's team will devise machine learning systems that "step into the shoes"
of his child by processing all audio and visual input recorded over three
years, allowing theories about children's learning processes to be tested.
The project has yielded new visualization methods to discover both basic
and complex home-based movement patterns, while an array of speech and
video processing algorithms is being developed to clarify behavioral and
communication patterns residing within the data. Moss says security,
Internet commerce, and many other industries could potentially benefit from
the data storage and mining tools that are being developed for the Human
Speechome Project.
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Engineering Research Takes Multidisciplinary Turn
EE Times (05/15/06)No. 1423, P. 18; Goering, Richard
Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles are blending
disciplines such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer science as
they explore new technology platforms. Speakers at the recent research
review session at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering called for the
integration of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology to
develop highly functional, low-power systems. Researchers displayed their
work on topics such as wireless sensors, biometric tissue engineering,
polymer-based pharmaceuticals, and nanoscale materials. The Institute for
Cell Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE) has enlisted mechanical and
aerospace engineering professor Chih-Ming Ho to help copy the adaptive
ability of natural cells in creating complex artificial systems. Ho notes
that both electronic devices and cells have inputs, outputs, and control
algorithms to process data. CMISE researchers study living cells with an
optical nanoscope and manipulate them with optoelectronic tweezers, while a
nano stethoscope monitors the cells' sounds. Meanwhile, the center on
Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics is exploring possible solutions
for the next generation of nanoscale devices once CMOS scaling reaches its
limits. The scaling of IC process nodes could end at around 10 nm as
problems such as power dissipation, variability, and a growing number of
interconnects become unsolvable, according to Kang Wang, professor of
mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA. Wang looks to alternative
technologies to continue to drive performance, such as molecular switches
and spintronics. Researchers are spending more and more time in the field
using embedded wireless sensor networks to observe natural processes and
close the gap between natural and physical sciences, such as a student
project that monitors the levels of arsenic contamination in Bangladesh's
groundwater.
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Q&A: Sun's Perlman on Future of Network Research
Network World (05/15/06) Vol. 23, No. 19, P. 19; Brown, Bob
In a recent interview, Sun Labs distinguished engineer Radia Perlman
discussed her thoughts on network security and her latest projects at Sun.
Perlman says she spends a lot of time moving from group to group looking
for an intriguing problem to solve and introducing different researchers to
each other. Perlman is critical of the amount of research funding spent on
digital rights management solutions, which she believes will not stop the
few malicious users determined to pirate music. She also calls for more
standards and accountability on the part of software vendors, citing the
tendency to blame users for the unexpected malfunctioning of needlessly
complicated software. Perlman acknowledges that most users are not
interested in products based on standards, gravitating instead toward the
least expensive application that works. Perlman is currently developing a
security project that would allow for the seamless recovery of data and the
reinstallation of the file system from scratch in the event of a meltdown
at a data center. The product, known as the ephemerizer, asks for
decryption from an outside agent to unlock a file after a system crashes.
Perlman acknowledges that IP is entrenched as the method for creating
networks, though she believes that DECnet would have been a better
protocol, and that bridged networks are inherently weak and unstable. She
is now looking for zero-configuration solutions within IP that do more than
simply transmit data along her spanning tree. Perlman is frustrated with
the way that schools teach networking today, arguing that TCP/IP should not
be accepted unquestioningly as the only network solution. "The attitude
seems to be that everything about it is perfect, so you just need to get
your students to learn how to use it and write applications to it," she
said.
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How Our Body's Defences Aid Computers in Distress
New Scientist (05/20/06) Vol. 190, No. 2552, P. 32; Graham-Rowe, Duncan
University of Nottingham computer scientist Uwe Aickelin is leading a team
that is developing artificial immune systems for computer networks that
more closely mimic the response of the human body. In the past, such
research has largely focused on developing an application that monitors a
network similar to the way in which white blood cells look out for foreign
molecules. However, Aickelin's teams have taken the anomalies of the human
immune system into consideration, such as the lack of response to proteins
ingested as food or the presence of a fetus. As a result, the researchers
have modeled a system, based on the study of dendritic cells, that is only
designed to fight off foreign molecules that are causing problems. As the
dendritic cells have been found to have a threshold, the software developed
by the team is designed to consider an increase in network traffic or a
substantial amount of error messages to be danger signs. An outside PC
seeking to verify its IP address and check whether it is online would be
viewed as a false alarm, while millions of pings would exceed the threshold
and be considered a denial of service attack. The team of researchers
includes Steve Cayzer, a computational neuroscientist at HP Labs in
Bristol, U.K., and Julie McLeod, an immunologist at the University of the
West of England.
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