Analysis Finds e-Voting Machines Vulnerable
USA Today (06/27/06) P. 14A; Stone, Andrea
The majority of the electronic voting machines that states have been
purchasing since the 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the
integrity of national, state, and local elections," according to a report
issued by the Brennan Center for Justice. The report cites more than 120
vulnerabilities in the three most popular systems: touch-screen machines
and optical-scan systems with and without paper trails, which together
account for 80 percent of the machines that will be used in the upcoming
November elections. Though there has yet to be a reported case of voting
machines being hacked in an actual election, the Brennan Center's Lawrence
Norden notes incidents of similar software attacks on computerized slot
machines. "It is unrealistic to think this isn't something to worry
about," he said. The report comes amid primary season as concerns about
the security of e-voting machines have been mounting. At least six states
have seen lawsuits filed attempting to block the purchase or use of
electronic systems. The report does not target specific machines, but
rather argues more broadly that the e-voting systems in use today are
inherently problematic. It finds that the easiest form of attack would be
to switch votes from one candidate to another using corrupt software, and
that machines that use wireless components are the most vulnerable.
Without regular audits, machines with paper trails are just as vulnerable
as those without, the report finds. It concludes that states should ban
wireless components (a measure so far implemented only by California, New
York, and Minnesota) and routinely conduct audits to compare voter-verified
paper trails with electronic records. For more on the vulnerabilities of
e-voting, vist
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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U.S. Cybersecurity Chief Abruptly Resigns
Associated Press (06/28/06)
Giving just one day of notice, the U.S. government's cybersecurity chief
resigned from the Department of Homeland Security after holding the post
for one year. Amit Yoran's resignation comes amid strident calls from
technology leaders and some lawmakers to broaden the range of his authority
and give him more money for protection initiatives. Yoran had previously
shared with colleagues his frustration over the perceived lack of attention
that the department paid to cybersecurity. It is unclear who will step in
for Yoran even on an interim basis. Yoran said that he "felt the timing
was right to pursue other opportunities." A department spokeswoman praised
Yoran for his contributions and said that cybersecurity remains a high
priority, and that the department will work quickly to find a replacement.
Industry leaders were unhappy that as a director, Yoran, who led a division
with 60 employees and an $80 million budget, was at least three
bureaucratic levels removed from the Homeland Security Secretary, and had
unsuccessfully lobbied to elevate Yoran's position to the level of
assistant secretary. A bill to that end has stalled in Congress.
Department officials argue that cybersecurity issues should command as much
attention as threats to physical structures, and that they should be
addressed in a coordinated fashion because the vulnerabilities to each
often have a common source. Under Yoran's tenure, the department
implemented a cyber-alert system to notify subscribers about significant
Internet attacks as they arise, along with directions to help users protect
themselves. The department also created a blueprint of the government's
nexus of interconnected electronic devices so that they could be routinely
scanned for weaknesses that intruders could exploit.
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U.S. to Spend Millions on Massive, Ultrafast
Supercomputers
Computerworld (06/27/06) Thibodeau, Patrick
The U.S. government intends to invest hundreds of millions of dollars
developing supercomputers of unprecedented power over the next several
years to tackle some of the most complex problems facing science and
national security. The planned systems will be able to sustain petascale
computing speeds, dwarfing the fastest machines in existence today. Cray
has reportedly signed a $200 million contract with the Department of Energy
to deliver a petascale system by 2008, while DARPA and the NSF are both
shopping around for supercomputers that will carry price tags in the
hundreds of millions of dollars. The magnitude of the computing power of
the new systems will be such a departure that computer scientists will need
to radically change their methods in order to take full advantage of their
capacity, according to the Energy Department's Dimitri Kusnezov. "The
question is what they would do with an infinite amount of computing speed,"
he says. "What would they calculate? And I'll wager that they don't have
an answer for you. Because people think about their problems within the
constraints of what they can calculate, and once you remove that
constraint, people are lost." The Department of Energy maintains the
world's faster supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which broke a record for
sustained speed earlier this month by running a scientific code at 207
TFLOPS. DARPA has been working with Cray, Sun Microsystems, and IBM in a
multiyear program to develop an economically feasible supercomputer, and is
likely to select two of the three vendors for the next phase of the
program. The NSF is interested in a petascale computer for climate
modeling that it hopes to have operational by 2011. While much of the
attention paid to supercomputers centers on processor count, other concerns
arise from issues such as memory, storage, and energy consumption.
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Students Design Sensor Network to Protect Forest
TechWeb (06/26/06) Sullivan, Laurie
A team of Romanian college students took first place in the recent Windows
Embedded Student ChallengE for designing a sensor network that provides
protection for forests. The low-power application uses a network and
routing protocol to connect sensors to a central server, and alerts can be
sent to PDAs when a tree poacher, flooding, or a fire is detected. The
network of sensors monitors humidity, sound, temperature, and carbon
monoxide levels, and the data can be accessed from a Web site. "We used
Microsoft's eBox as the central unit, the brain of the system, and the
sensors are the ears and the nose," says Christian Pop, a 22-year-old
computer science major who led the team from Politehnica University of
Bucharest. "We can listen to sounds of chainsaws to stop loggers from
cutting down trees, or try to prevent fires by analyzing the data from
sensors that monitor carbon monoxide, temperature and humidity." CaLamp
principal engineer James Y. Wilson, who served as a judge, says the project
shows the potential of radio frequency (RF) technology and sensor networks
has not been reached. Second place went to a team from the University of
South Florida that developed an application to monitor fish farms, and
protect fish from birds by spraying water as they approach in order to
scare them away. The application makes use of cameras, motion detectors,
and algorithms for studying changes in images.
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Sun Says Open-Source Java Possible in 'Months'
IDG News Service (06/27/06) Kirk, Jeremy
Sun Microsystems will release its proprietary Java language through an
open-source license within a matter of months. The two remaining issues
facing Sun are ensuring that Java remains universally compatible and
preventing any one company from asserting its own implementation of the
language as the dominant one on the market, says Simon Phipps, the
company's chief open-source officer. "Maintaining both of those dimensions
of compatibility is imperative because the Java market is a huge successful
open market in which many companies are serving many other companies,"
Phipps says. The transition from outgoing CEO Scott McNealy to his
replacement Jonathan Schwartz hastened Sun's decision to make Java open
source. Complicating matters is the dedicated core of old-line employees
who still vigorously oppose open sourcing Java, according to a former Sun
employee. Though no decisions have yet been made, the keys to
compatibility will be licensing and governance, Phipps says. He does not
predict a major impact from the move in the short term, though over time,
Sun will benefit from wider adoption of the platform and increased
innovation. Some observers say that Sun waited too long to make the move,
citing the growing popularity of Microsoft's C# and .NET languages.
Community debugging and broad-based innovation would have helped Java's
popularity earlier, particularly in the server space, says Brian
Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project. Another developer
says the Java Community Process, which defines Java standards, will have to
change.
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Securing America's Power Grid
Iowa State University News Service (06/26/06)
Researchers at Iowa State University believe a network of wireless sensors
could be used to monitor America's power lines for suspicious activity.
Arun Somani and Jerry R. Junkins are leading a team of computer and
engineering experts who are developing a monitoring system that makes use
of a network of wireless sensors mounted with a tiny camera to watch
movements along power lines. The monitoring system could improve national
security, and also be used to watch for conductor failures, tower
collapses, hot spots, and extreme conditions. "Power companies would have
additional abilities to view their systems and that would assist in
disaster recovery," Somani says. The team continues to make progress on a
prototype system, and recently showed off their work at Iowa State's
Wireless and Sensor Networking Laboratory. They are now in talks with
power companies to test the monitoring system on the electrical grid. The
project includes designing a diagnosis algorithm to determine fault
conditions and predict faults, and a decision algorithm to reconfigure
power networks to prevent cascading blackouts. The researchers received a
$400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a $150,000 grant
from Iowa State's Information Infrastructure Institute for the project.
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High School Computer Science: Does Not Compute?
MC Press Online (06/26/06) Stockwell, Thomas M.
The historic gap between the version of computer science that is taught in
high schools and the practical skills that employers expect from their IT
workers could lead to a severe shortage of qualified workers, analysts
report. Computer science education varies widely among high schools
throughout the United States, as some classes actually teach programming
languages while others focus more on word processing and spreadsheet
skills. For many teenagers, the bulk of their knowledge about computers
comes from casual Internet usage, and a declining number are enrolling in
formal computer science programs once they get to college. A recent report
by the Computer Science Teachers Association offers a detailed analysis of
the current state of secondary school computer science education,
emphasizing the need for students to develop a comprehensive understanding
of computer science as a legitimate discipline unto itself. The study also
debunks common myths about computer science, including the conflation of
computer science with computer literacy, the assumption that computer
science and programming are the same thing, and the perception that
computer science is only a field for men. The study concludes that
students should not only understand the theoretical foundation of computer
science, but also the practical implications of that theory, and that
instruction should focus on problem solving. Rather than concentrating on
specific applications, the study calls for education to take a more
conceptual approach, and that it should prepare students for what will be
expected from them by their future employers. The report argues that by
creating a clearer definition of the theoretical and practical elements of
computer science, high schools can do a better job of preparing students to
meet the growing demand for IT workers and stave off a potentially critical
shortage. To learn more about CSTA, and to view The New Educational
Imperative report, visit
http://csta.acm.org
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Prospects Fading for European Patent Agreement
IDG News Service (06/26/06) Meller, Paul
Industry groups appear likely to scuttle efforts to create a single patent
system for the entire European Union as they step up lobbying efforts
urging the European Commission to give up its attempts to enact the
Community patent. The Community patent would lower the cost of registering
inventions throughout the Union and give inventors more legal certainty
about the status of their patents. Proponents of the measure argue that it
is an essential instrument for the Union to remain competitive with the
United States and Japan, and the Commission had promised in January to make
one last attempt to negotiate with industry and break the deadlock. But
far from reaching a consensus, three powerful industry groups have called
on the Commission to abandon the Community patent, arguing instead that it
should concentrate on improving the existing patent regime. Some are
concerned that further efforts to enact the Community patent could touch
off a debate similar to the one that erupted last year over the issue of
software patents. "To start a debate about the Community patent now would
be like opening a Pandora's box," said the Business Software Alliance's
Francisco Mingorance. "Looking at the debacle over the proposed law on
computer-implemented inventions, a lot of companies fear this could happen
all over again but on an even broader scale in a debate about the Community
patent." The Commission first proposed draft legislation for the Community
patent in 2001 that called for patents to be written only in three
languages, thereby reducing the cost of translation, but it was
significantly altered by national governments reluctant to give up the use
of their own languages. Two alternative measures backed by industry would
create a Union-wide legal system and require countries with an official
language other than French, English, or German to provide a translated
version of their patents.
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Coming Soon: Mind-Reading Computers
Reuters (06/26/06) Reaney, Patricia
British researchers plan to use a four-day science exhibition starting
Monday in London to gather more data for an application that would allow
computers to read people's minds. Peter Robinson, a professor at the
University of Cambridge in England, and his colleagues will allow attendees
at the Royal Society-organized event to participate in a study to analyze
their facial movements for signs of boredom, interest, confusion,
agreement, or disagreement. The system makes use of a video camera pointed
at someone to determine their emotional state, says Robinson. "Imagine a
computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you
something, a future where mobile phones, cars, and Web sites could read our
mind and react to our moods," he explains. "For example, a Web cam linked
with our software could process your image, encode the correct emotional
state, and transmit information to a Web site." He adds that the
application could be used to improve online learning and road safety
because it could determine when a person is confused or tired. The British
scientists have teamed up with researchers at MIT for the project, and they
are considering other input for the application, such as posture and
gestures.
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When Robots Learn Social Skills
IST Results (06/22/06)
While most attempts at creating intelligent machines have centered on
scientists attempting to program a group of predefined rules, a team of
European researchers is attempting to develop machines capable of learning
from their interactions with the environment, more closely resembling the
evolutionary way in which humans learn. "The result is machines that
evolve and develop by themselves without human intervention," said Stefano
Nolfi, coordinator of the ECAgents program that combines the efforts of a
diverse range of disciplines, including robotics, linguistics, and biology.
The project's technology, termed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has
enabled researchers at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France, for
instance, to give the AIBO dog an added layer of intelligence that enables
it to develop a language and interact with its fellow robots. Instead of
being pre-programmed with human language, the robots agree on their own
common terms to describe their environment. The Sony researchers instilled
in their robots a sense of curiosity that drives them to learn. The
so-called "metabrain" forces the robots to pursue more challenging
activities and perform more complex tasks. The success of the
social-learning technique has been demonstrated in other projects, such as
the filesharing technology developed at the Viktoria Institute that
automatically shares music files among users on the street or in a cafe.
Technology that uses intelligent software agents to search and categorize
information based on user's preferences could also be applied to the
Internet, and robots capable of learning, communicating, and adapting to
their environment should be a reality within a few years, according to
Nolfi.
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Net Defenses May Be in Danger
Dallas Morning News (06/22/06) Harrison, Crayton
The simple test that asks a user to type in a series of squiggly letters
or numbers when making a purchase or conducting some other sensitive
application on the Internet, long a stalwart of Web-based security, is
"getting to the point where it's almost defeated," according to Luis von
Ahn, a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's computer
science department. "The ones not yet defeated by computers are really
hard to read for humans. But they'll be defeated pretty soon." Computers
now have the sophisticated programming required to read all but the
messiest distorted-letter tests, sending computer scientists in search of a
replacement. The tests are failing because computer scientists are working
to improve the text-recognition ability of computers for benign
applications, though once the technology exists, hackers will not be far
behind. The current tests, known as Captchas, a term coined by Carnegie
Mellon researchers for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell
Computers and Humans Apart," date back to the late 1990s. Some Captchas
display letters that are only slightly distorted, but are crisscrossed with
lines overlain on a grainy background, while others make the letters float
and swirl. To beat the text-based Captchas, some hackers have reportedly
paid users to enter the correct information, while others have been able to
detect patterns in the characters or the code used to create them. Still
others have developed computers that are advanced enough to actually read
the symbols in the same way that supercomputers have been able to defeat
chess masters. Image-based Captchas, where a series of otherwise unrelated
pictures might have one common element, can be harder to crack, and
Google's Blogger service has begun offering an audio Captcha for
sight-impaired users.
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U.S. Unprepared for Net Meltdown, Blue Chips Warn
CNet (06/23/06) Broache, Anne
The U.S. government is ill-prepared to coordinate an effective recovery
response to a major Internet shutdown caused by natural or manmade
disruptions, according to a new Business Roundtable report. "A massive
cyberdisruption could have a cascading, long-term impact, without adequate
coordination between government and the private sector," said Cyber
Security Industry Alliance executive director Paul Kurtz. "The stakes are
too high for continued government inaction." Given the devastating effects
many sectors of the economy would feel in the event of a massive Internet
outage, the government should be better prepared, the Business Roundtable
concluded. "There is no national policy on why, when and how the
government would intervene to reconstitute portions of the Internet or to
respond to a threat or attack," the report noted. The U.S. Computer
Emergency Readiness Team is primarily responsible for coordinating
cyberattack responses. The report recommends that the government establish
a means for providing global-scale advance warnings of Internet
disruptions, and release a policy that specifically assigns roles to
business and government representatives should such an emergency occur.
Other recommendations include the setup of formal cyberdisaster response
training programs, and the allocation of more funding for cybersecurity
protection.
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Cyberprotection Takes Center Stage
Washington Technology (06/26/06) Vol. 21, No. 12, P. 48; Lipowicz, Alice
The National Infrastructure Protection Plan should address the
vulnerabilities of the nation's virtual assets, such as the networks that
relay data between major power plants, as well as physical assets, leaders
from the computing industry argue. Meeting under the auspices of the IT
Sector Coordinating Council, IT executives and cybersecurity experts are
developing recommendations that they hope to discuss with the Homeland
Security Department's National Cyber Security Division to develop a
protection plan for critical IT infrastructure. IT is one of the 17
economic sectors expected to complete its preparedness plans, with the
others including sectors such as energy, food, water, and
telecommunications. Traditional infrastructure defense plans have focused
on physical structures, but assets in cyberspace are different, and one of
the critical challenges is evaluating how well the Internet could withstand
a major attack on a national scale. There are also the questions of which
assets overlap with telecommunications, and who should shoulder the cost of
protecting resources that could have multiple classifications. "We're
defining [IT critical assets] by critical functionality," said Paul Kurtz
of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance. "We're asking: What is the
top-level functionality that needs to be there? What needs to be there
reliably 99.9 percent of the time?" Ultimately, the list of critical
assets will likely include some physical resources on it, such as servers,
routers, and the Internet exchange sites MAE-East and MAE-West, though
those sites could also be included in the telecom list. Physical assets
are less important today than they were five years ago, because operators
have widely disseminated them throughout the country to minimize the
disruptive impact of a localized attack. The ongoing convergence of IT and
telecom may eventually eliminate the need to divide assets between the two
industries.
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Heterogeneous Processing Needs Software
Revolutions
HPC Wire (06/23/06) Vol. 15, No. 25,
Heterogeneous processing in high-end computing is doomed to failure
without a system software revolution, writes the High-End Crusader.
Obstacles in the way of heterogeneous processing include a complete lack of
academic, governmental, and vendor leadership; an absence of compelling
heterogeneous processing visions; and even the lack of simple heterogeneous
processing guidelines. "To anticipate, the key task for
heterogeneous-system system software lies in scheduling strategies and
other system functions that maximize the performance extracted from scarce
system resources, notably the heterogeneous system's limited global system
bandwidth," the author states. The High-End Crusader calls for a blend of
latency-avoidance and latency-tolerance methods, and the tasking of the
system software for the mix and match of preemptive (agile) and
nonpreemptive (cumbersome) threads. Limited global system bandwidth can be
more productively used via the exploitation of these threads by
heterogeneous systems. The author recommends that heterogeneous multicore
processors should be designed with one big out-of-order core and 10 small
in-order cores. "If we agree that thread migrations are bite-sized
dependence requests, and that dependence satisfiers are bite-sized
responses to thread migrations, then HPCS should demand 1) global system
bandwidth sufficient to carry both dependence and operand traffic, and 2)
sophisticated system software that extracts appropriate heterogeneous
threads from difficult applications and dynamically schedules them onto
heterogeneous execution resources in order to use limited global system
bandwidth well," the High-End Crusader concludes.
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Got a Minute?
New Scientist (06/24/06) Vol. 190, No. 2557, P. 46; Motluk, Alison
Constant interruptions impair office productivity, with a Basex survey
determining that more than two hours of the working day--and $588 billion a
year in the United States--are consumed by such distractions, even when
they are work-related. This situation is caused, and some researchers say
can be cured, by technology. Computers that can rate the value of a
communication and ascertain whether the recipient is in the right state of
mind to receive it--essentially predicting his or her
interruptability--could be key to the solution. This will require training
a system to know its user's disposition, work habits, and signs of
availability. The prototype Bestcom system is designed to assess the
advantages of keeping its user informed and compare them to the cost of
interruption. Reservations with such a setup include a lack of certainty
that the system will not be used to monitor employees intrusively, the
possibility that the system's checking might become an annoyance for
workers and a distraction in and of itself, and the inevitability of error.
A more considerate computer that apologizes for its mistakes and appears
to empathize can help address the potential for irritation, according to
the MIT Media Lab's Rosalind Picard. The difficulty of getting back into
the flow of work after an interruption is another cause of lost
productivity, and Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine,
thinks technology can help in this regard by keeping people apprised of
each other's projects or "working spheres" to lower the chance of
interrupting workers for tasks that are outside those spheres. Ultimately,
the responsibility for controlling workplace interruptions lies with people
and how they use technology, not the technology itself.
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How to Build a Babel Fish
Economist Technology Quarterly (06/06) Vol. 379, No. 8481, P. 20
Scientists are getting closer to developing practical machines that can
understand any language thanks to emerging statistical machine translation
software that, unlike earlier attempts at machine translation, does not
require a linguist to identify rules. Carnegie Mellon researchers have
launched a project that they hope will result in a machine that can learn
language simply by listening to a foreign speaker or, ultimately, by
watching television. The next few years will see an explosion in
translation applications, including real-time automatic dubbing, search
engines that comb through multilingual resources, and even in-ear devices
that instantly translate speech from a foreign language. Though some of
those technologies may seem remote, researchers have already developed a
system that can translate speeches or lectures through a statistical
analysis of a large built-in repository of speeches taken from the United
Nations and the European Parliament. Though there are a variety of
statistical-translation techniques, they all rely on statistical analysis
rather than predefined rules. Most begin with a bilingual body of text and
identify the relationships between words by evaluating the frequency that
words are clustered near each other, offering much greater flexibility than
systems based on rules, which are unable to deal with similes, poor
grammar, or ambiguous meanings. The statistical method is closely linked
with the way that humans learn language, where comprehension is gradually
acquired through extensive exposure. In the case of machines, that
exposure comes from a vast repository of sample texts. The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding numerous mobile
machine-translation projects, such as Babylon, a technology that provides
two-way translation between English and Iraqi Arabic.
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A Conversation With Leo Chang of Clickshift
Queue (06/06) Vol. 4, No. 5, P. 12; Coatta, Terry
In an interview with GPS Industries software development director Terry
Coatta, Clickshift founder and CTO Leo Chang explains that simplicity
rather than standards might be central to the adoption of component
software. "I have pretty much given up on the success of the standard idea
or standard language that everybody is going to speak," he states. "I
would just like for each one to be relatively simple to use." Chang
associates a software component with "a library that's distributable,
that's published, that's versionable," and he believes Web services align
well with that classification. Chang attributes many standards' lack of
penetration to a cultural resistance organizations have toward third-party
components, and he also cites a deeply entrenched disparity between
designing a completely flexible yet simple-to-use standard. He says
simplicity and functionality are key factors in his decision to take up a
new standard. Chang notes that the development of an open-source software
component standard is a major influence on his selection of that standard,
given that the collective effort of its creation is often reflected in its
robustness. He thinks it is possible that a diverse collection of Web
services can be integrated into a bigger application.
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