Laptop-based security software that adjusts to how an individual utilizes the Internet so that the detection of malicious activity is more dynamic and personalized has been developed by Intel researchers. The software targets corporations that pass out laptops and mobile devices to workers, since IT departments typically install homogeneous security software on all their hardware, which partly explains why security breaches are so profuse, according to Intel Research Berkeley researcher Nina Taft. Most IT departments deploy security software with a component that analyzes the stream of Internet traffic flowing into and out of a computer, and that suggests infection when traffic exceeds a preset limit. However, this method can incorrectly target people who habitually send out large volumes of information while ignoring traffic that falls below the threshold that may harbor malevolent activity without the sender's knowledge. Intel researchers have devised algorithms capable of more subtle evaluations, including one that creates individualized traffic thresholds by monitoring a person's Internet use through standard statistical and machine-learning techniques, and another that assesses how people's Internet usage changes throughout the day. Another set of algorithms uses the same behavioral principles to study communication between laptops and other devices on the Internet to detect the presence of botnets. "I think the basic takeaway is, if you can be really precise in capturing user behavior, you can make the work of the attackers much harder," notes Taft. Georgia Institute of Technology professor Nick Feamster attributes the lack of application of the behavioral security strategy to laptops to the absence of an automated way to develop personalized rules.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Design Automation Conference Announces First 'Best of DAC' Awards
Business Wire (03/17/08)

The Best of DAC Awards is a new event at this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC). The event is designed to give DAC the opportunity to recognize exhibitors for their innovation. Attendees of the 45th DAC will vote on the best exhibitors. "The new Best of DAC Awards competition will allow exhibitors another way to measure their impact on attendees," says Limor Fix, general chair, 45th DAC Executive Committee. "We look forward to an added element of friendly competition on the exhibit floor and what we hope will become a new favorite element of the DAC experience." Categories for the inaugural Best of DAC Awards include best overall new product, best demonstration on exhibit floor, most interesting first-time exhibitor, most interesting veteran exhibitor, best booth, and best booth giveaway. DAC exhibitors will have until May 30 to enter their eligible products and booth product demonstrations for the awards. ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) is a sponsor of the conference, which takes place June 8-13 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif. For more information, or to register, visit http://www.dac.com/45th/index.aspx
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Multicore Boom Needs New Developer Skills
IDG News Service (03/20/08) Kanaracus, Chris

Microsoft research scientist Dan Reed points to a worldwide shortfall of experienced parallel or multicore computing experts, and Microsoft and Intel announced that they will donate $20 million to several American universities to promote advances in multicore programming research. "To gain performance from quad-core processors and prepare for the denser multicore CPUs that will follow, application developers need to write code that can automatically fork multiple simultaneous threads of execution (multithreading) as well as manage thread assignments, synchronize parallel work, and manage shared data to prevent concurrency issues associated with multithreaded code," wrote the authors of a recent Forrester Research study. The report notes that major operating systems and the bulk of middleware products are already prepared for multithreaded operation and for "near term" multicore processors, and that corporate development shops may turn to independent software vendors to address the problem via development tools and platforms that can better accommodate multicore-related chores. However, Reed is convinced that multithreading over time will become "part of the skill set of every professional software developer." Meanwhile, major software vendors and chip makers have been attempting to boost awareness of the challenges and potential of multicore programming. For example, TopCoder and AMD just started a series of contests that emphasize multithreading.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Intel Researchers Stretch Wi-Fi to Cover 60 Miles
Network World (03/20/08) Cox, John

Intel recently demonstrated an 802.11 radio link with a data rate of approximately 6 Mbps and a range exceeding 60 miles. Intel facilitated this rural connectivity platform (RCP) with off-the-shelf hardware and modified the underlying 802.11 media-access-control layer to boost the signal's efficiency. This involved the addition of a method known as time division multiple access (TDMA) that is currently used in GSM cellular networks and which splits the channel into time slots and puts the sending and receiving radios in sync, effectively eliminating waiting for acknowledgments and resending of data. The TDMA technique extends the range by minimizing the wireless overhead and opening up more bandwidth for data transmission. The RCP units can function as endpoints that bookend each link or as relay stations to effect signal-hopping. The RCP software uses an operating system based on the SnapGear embedded Linux distribution. Pilot RCP deployments have been established in India, Vietnam, Panama, and South Africa. RCP, which Intel Research and Intel's Emerging Markets Platform Group has been working on for around two years, is one of several efforts to extend the Internet into rural regions, especially in developing nations, through the employment of low-cost, low-power Wi-Fi radios.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Can We Fix the Web?
InternetNews.com (03/20/08) Kerner, Sean Michael

During a keynote speech at the AjaxWorld conference, Douglas Crockford, creator of JavaScript Object Notation and a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo, said the Web is in serious trouble, and the question is no longer should we fix it, but if we can. Crockford said browsers were not designed to do "all of this Ajax stuff," and Ajax only works because people have found ways to make Ajax work despite its limitations. "The number one problem with the Web is security," Crockford said. "The browser is not a safe programming environment. It is inherently insecure." Part of the problem is what Crockford called the "Turducken problem," or that people are trying to stuff the turkey with the duck. Crockford said the many programming languages on the Web can be built inside of each other, which can lead to problems. Crockford argued that these are not Web 2.0 problems, but were present in Netscape 2.0 in 1995. The security problems are based on three core items, Crockford said: JavaScript, DOM (document object model), and cookies. Crockford says JavaScript's global object is the root cause of all cross-site scripting attacks, while DOM is problematic because all nodes are linked to all other nodes on a network creating an insecure model, and cookies can be misused as tokens for authority. Crockford also blamed browser vendors for introducing new insecure JavaScript features, and said ultimately that JavaScript needs to be replaced with a secure language.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Institute for Advanced Architectures Prepares for ‘Exascale' Computing
Azom.com (03/21/08)

The new Institute for Advanced Architectures, launched by Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories, was established to close the gaps between actual performance and the theoretical peak performance of current supercomputers, says Sandia project leader Sudip Dosanjh. "We believe this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer architectures," he says. One purpose for the institute, Dosanjh says, is to reduce or eliminate the growing mismatch between data movement and processing speeds. Sandia computer architect Doug Doerfler says that a key to scalability is making sure that all processors have something to work on at all times. The ability for designers to split processors into multiple cores on a single die further compounds the problem. Jeff Nichols, who heads the Oak Ridge branch of the institute, says continuing to make progress in running scientific applications at such large scales will require maintaining a balance between hardware and software, and there are huge software programming challenges to solve. The institute is also tasked with reducing the amount of power needed to run a future exascale computer. Dosanjh says an exascale computer using modern technology would consume "many tens of megawatts," which would occupy a significant portion of a power plant.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Jim Hendler Shares AI's Lessons for the Semantic Web
ZDNet (03/20/08) Miller, Paul

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor James A. Hendler has been closely involved with artificial intelligence research for many years, and is one of the progenitors of the semantic Web ideal. Hendler promotes the idea of weakening the "tethers" that bind us to computers, Web sites, and applications, highlighting the transition that we are already making with the expanding capabilities of mobile devices. Hendler also emphasizes the importance of metadata and structured information in sustaining the virtual connections between resources that will allow us to break the physical bonds that tie us to our computers and their applications. Hendler believes that there are currently several shared visions of what the semantic Web will be, but it can essentially be broken down into two main areas of utility. The first is heavy duty reasoning, or the artificial intelligence version of the semantic Web that is based on an extremely detailed and highly expressive model of a subject domain, which is used to analyze large bodies of data. The second vision is the data-driven semantic Web, which is more lightweight and geared toward the application of a less-structured world view. Hendler suggests that the first is more Semantic-oriented while the second is more Web-based, but he stresses that both are important and valid.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Women in Canadian IT: How the Best Get Ahead
Computerworld Canada (03/19/08) Smith, Briony

A recent forum on Women in technology focused on the lack of women in the IT field and how the problem starts in school with teachers that are unaware of the skills required or the opportunities available in the field. Microsoft Canada's Elizabeth Carson says the lack of women in IT is an industry-wide challenge, and finding women with strong, technically-deep experience is hard. "The candidate pool is getting smaller, so having that diversity is not just a rights issue, but a competitive advantage--they can offer a different perspective," Carson says. She says the deeply technical positions tend to be dominated by men, while the women in the field tend to work in less-technical positions such as project managers and business analysts. Bell Canada's Vanda Vicars says that a major barrier preventing more women from entering the field is that they do not network as much as men do, which could be counteracted by implementing a structured mentoring system that would help women navigate the workplace. Vicars also suggests ongoing networking meetings and groups where women in the company's IT department, or IT in general, can interact. Joanne Stanley, the managing director of the Ottawa-based CATA Women in IT Forum, says women should be made aware of IT jobs that might be more interesting to them, such as jobs in human resource technology, online management and collaboration, IT security, IT architecture, and business and system integration.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Q&A: Experimental P2P Technology Eases User, ISP Pain
Network World (03/18/08) Reed, Brad

Many of the problems with peer-to-peer systems that ISPs have traditionally had to contend with could be eliminated with experimental technology created by Yale PhD candidate Haiyong Xie, which was recently tested over the Verizon network. Xie says in an interview that "P4P" technology supplies an iTracker, which is a server that exploits the information in a network topology map to examine traffic patterns and deliver suggestions for people within the network to become network-savvy. Verizon contributed the network topology map to the P4P trial, while Pando Networks offered the use of its P2P software and servers and deployed an appTracker server to communicate with the Pando network and the iTracker. Xie notes that the field test involved a video file that all clients tried to download and share, and the iTracker enabled most of the traffic to become localized. "Now that we know the network information, we can make better decisions and thus dramatically reduce number of hubs used in the transfer," he says. Xie adds that another advantage the technology offers is a substantial reduction of the amount of traffic streaming into and out of the network. He says some ISPs are unprepared to support the P4P technology because their infrastructure differs from Verizon's, which means the iTracker will need to be refined to accommodate them. "P2P in the long run can be a very good complementary solution to the current Internet for delivering commercial products--people are adding more features to P2P tech and are adding more quality of service protocols into P2P," Xie says.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Yahoo Empowering Semantic Web Programmers
eWeek (03/13/08)

Yahoo announced that it will soon provide APIs to its Search platform to allow third-party developers to alter search results with structured data to make it more useful for Web users. The program will enable developers to overlay their own algorithms to determine how the Yahoo Search index is used. Yahoo is also supporting several semantic Web standards, including RDF, and microformats to make programming on Yahoo's search platform easier, says Yahoo's Amit Kumar. Programmers have been slow to support standards and write software for the semantic Web, in part because it lacks a killer application, Kumar says. He says Web search is the missing killer app. Instead of independently developed semantic silos scattered across the Web, Yahoo aims to bring all the semantic information together once it is available. For example, Kumar says that marking up profile pages with microformats will allow Yahoo Search to better understand the semantic content and the relationships of its site's components. "If I can put an algorithm on top of search that says here are all of the things I want the algorithm to prioritize and here's all of the things I want it to exclude that's really powerful," says IDC analyst Rachel Happe.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Cyberscholarship: High Performance Computing Meets Digital Libraries
Journal of Electronic Publishing (Quarter 1, 2008) Vol. 11, No. 1, Arms, William Y.

The convergence of high-performance computing and digital libraries is giving birth to new forms of research that are classified as "cyberscholarship," which is only possible when there are digital libraries with extensive collections in a wide-ranging domain, writes Cornell University computer science professor William Y. Arms. There must be new strategies for organizing and using library collections in order to exploit cyberscholarship opportunities. For example, the National Virtual Observatory is designed to integrate previously disconnected astronomical datasets through the provision of coordinated access to distributed data since the datasets are archived at many locations. There is limited experience to direct the development of cyberscholarship applications, and among the lessons that such applications have yielded is the need for market research and incremental development of cyberscholarship requirements, which in turn requires flexible organization and tight cooperation between researchers, publishers, and librarians. The existence and accessibility of data in machine-readable formats is critical to cyberscholarship, while issues of policy should not be discounted and custodianship involves the preservation of the content as well as the identifying metadata. Tools and services that cyberscholarship needs include APIs that enable direct interaction between computer programs and collections, and instruments that can identify and download sub-collections, which require digital libraries to be designed so that programs can extract large portions. High-performance computing is an essential ingredient of very big collections, and the use of high-performance computing systems by researchers who are not computing specialists remains a major challenge.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Fly, Robot Fly
IEEE Spectrum (03/01/08) Vol. 45, No. 3, P. 25; Wood, Robert

Researchers at Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are working to create insect-like flying robotic vehicles that can "perform rescue and reconnaissance operations with equal ease," writes the laboratory's Robert Wood. This could lead to a whole new paradigm in approaching difficult situations; for example, after a natural disaster, rather than have personnel search out survivors themselves they could deploy thousands of tiny flying robots that could "detect signs of life, perhaps by sniffing the carbon dioxide of survivors' breath or detecting the warmth of their bodies," Wood says. Insects use a complex combination of different wing motions to handle aerodynamics at their tiny scale, much different from the larger scale aerodynamics used for airplanes, even model airplanes. One important motivation for creating these tiny flying robots is to bring unmanned flight within the price range of law enforcement and emergency rescue services. "We placed a great deal of importance on our choice of materials, which ultimately had to be cheap and fairly easy to work with," Wood says. "Durability was less important, because we envisioned a robot that could be replaced for less than $10." The researchers have focused on duplicating the flight of the two-winged insects of the order Diptera, and over hundreds of iterations their design has become ever closer to a real fly's shape. The small scale involved makes the materials and fabrication science behind the robots highly novel. "Just because we designed the robot didn't mean we knew how to make it, and mechanical components with features of one micrometer are well below the resolution of standard manufacturing techniques," Wood says.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

Terror on the Internet: A Complex Issue, and Getting Harder
IEEE Distributed Systems Online (03/08) Vol. 9, No. 3, Goth, Greg

Attempts to crack down on online terror face the challenge of doing so without restricting free speech and access to information, and politicians the world over regularly call for the removal of terrorist sites from their hosts' site servers or for the blockage of access to such sites by search engines. "Those who think that we can stop online terrorism by removal of Web sites are either naive or ignorant about cyberspace and its limitations for interference," says Haifa University professor Gabriel Weimann. "As a short answer, there is a need for strategy and not tactics, there is a need for a multi-measured approach, and not just 'Let's kill those Web sites.'" Weimann says multilateral agreement on fighting Web terror is lacking because the issue is riddled with legal ambiguities, such as who ultimately has authority over the determination of terrorist sites. In addition, there is great disagreement over to what degree content--such as instructions on an arborists' site for making explosives to blow up tree stumps--could be defined as terror-inducing material. Meanwhile, ISPs' efforts to develop filtering and blocking technologies for Web sites owned by a wide range of malevolent parties are being met by jihadists' improvement of work-around strategies. Government-directed anti-cyberterror initiatives include collaboration with independent groups that collect and examine global terror site content, and the development of deep analytic technologies such as Web spiders that can study links between jihadi sites, messages, and forum postings to create white-hat viruses and malware designed to hamstring or compromise jihadi sites.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

The Future of Web 2.0
Campus Technology (03/01/08) Vol. 21, No. 7, P. 20; Grush, Mary

Gary Brown, director of Washington State University's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, says in an interview that the advent of Web 2.0 requires the migration to next-generation online learning, but adds that "so far, instead of transforming the traditional classroom with online learning, we've merely transposed it to what is now the traditional course management system [CMS] or collaboration and learning environment [CLE]." Brown predicts that the percentage of the college population that goes to community college and must work will increase, while about half of the population is comprised of students who take courses from multiple institutions. EPortfolios may be more effective measures of student learning than standardized tests, but Brown says they are currently limited because they are institution-specific, while Web 2.0 offers students an opportunity to combine numerous applications that they would control themselves and can share with anyone. "To that end, we should start thinking not so much in terms of an ePortfolio but, instead, in terms of a personal learning environment [PLE]," he says, adding that the technology WSU is generally tapping to promote this transition is already out in the world. These "worldware" applications exist in the hundreds, and Brown says it is critical to expect that these technologies will continue to change, mature, and explode so that proper accommodations can be made. WSU is collaborating with Microsoft on a "harvesting" gradebook that an instructor would use to link students to all of the work they must perform, and which Brown expects to be a killer app. Brown is also an advocate of inviting outside employers to participate in the online learning process, pointing out that employers are less interested in the degrees students earn or the courses they complete as in their ability to perform the desired work.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

E-Voting Vendor's Web Site Hacked
IDG News Service (03/20/08) Montalbano, Elizabeth; McMillan, Robert

Sequoia Voting Systems' e-voting Web site has been hacked, stirring uproar from New Jersey officials that used the Ballot Blog in a February presidential primary. Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten reported the breach, following an inquiry from a state county clerks coalition to investigate the e-voting system. Evidence of the infiltration was apparent because the hacker had inserted a message with a cyber tag name. The system was temporarily suspended and users were redirected to a hosting-provider page, but Sequoia later brought the blog back online. "My guess is that they took the site down temporarily while they were clearing out the stuff left behind by the intruder," Felten says. The county clerks have asked New Jersey attorney general Anne Milgram to probe Sequoia Voting Systems AVC Advantage e-voting machines, due to discrepancies in vote counts during the primary. Sequoia says different vote totals were due to poll worker mistakes and warned Felten against investigating it further.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top

To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact: [email protected]

To be removed from future issues of TechNews, please submit your email address where you are receiving Technews alerts, at:
http://optout.acm.org/listserv_index.cfm?ln=technews

To re-subscribe in the future, enter your email address at:
http://signup.acm.org/listserv_index.cfm?ln=technews

As an alternative, log in at myacm.acm.org with your ACM Web Account username and password, and follow the "Listservs" link to unsubscribe or to change the email where we should send future issues.

to the top

News Abstracts © 2008 Information, Inc.