Information Tags Along Everywhere You Go
Baltimore Sun (05/11/08) P. 1A; Kay, Liz F.
Consumers concerned about privacy have been turning to the Internet to
find ways to remove or disable the radio frequency identification (RFID)
tags that are now built into many products and consumer items, including
passports and credit cards. As RFID technology becomes more prevalent in
society, critics say the tags and signals could be used for nefarious
purposes by anyone who would spy on an individual in an effort to steal
their identity or target them in a specific attack. Authorities are
starting to listen to these warnings. The U.S. State Department recently
incorporated metal shielding into the covers of new passports after critics
demonstrated how information from the RFID tag in a passport could be read
from a distance. Meanwhile, California enacted a law prohibiting employers
from forcing employees to implant RFID tags in their bodies. The law,
along with similar efforts in Wisconsin and other states, was spurred by an
Ohio company that implanted a tag in employees who worked with confidential
documents, as long as the employee volunteered. Critics say the real
problem is that RFID tracking is virtually invisible and undetectable by
the subject being targeted. However, even critics say the problem has not
yet reached a crisis level. Some say that RFID tags are not practical
targets, as hackers and criminals would rather target richer sources, such
as corporate databanks that store consumer information. In the case of
RFID passports, all information contained in the chip is already printed on
the front page of the passport, so losing a passport with a chip is no more
dangerous than losing an ordinary passport.
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IETF Kicks Off Routing Effort for Sensor Nets
EE Times (05/07/08) Merritt, Rick
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has launched Routing Over
Low-power and Lossy Networks (ROLL), a new initiative designed to create an
Internet Protocol standard for wireless sensor networks as early as next
summer. The new standard would link wireless sensor networks with the
broader Internet, supporting all linking techniques such as Bluetooth,
Wi-Fi, and 802.15.4. ROLL co-chair Jean-Philippe Vasseur says there has
been an explosion of proprietary protocols for sensor networks in recent
years, and if each one aims to be an ad hoc standard there will be multiple
translations gateways, leading to a complex and expansive architecture. So
far, about 250 people have signed up for the group's email reflector to
work on the standard, and more than 100 people attended the first meeting
in March. "There are thousands and thousands of sensor networks in place
in cars and buildings today but most do not use IP," Vasseur says. "What
we are trying to do is create a way these sensors can talk to each other
without needing a proprietary translation gateway." The group could choose
or extend an existing protocol before it finishes its efforts in June
2009.
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The Healing Power of Computers
BBC News (05/12/08)
Cambridge University professor Andy Hopper is leading a team of
researchers at the Cambridge Computer Lab that will focus on ways computing
technology can help maintain our current way of life and give more people
access to the comfort, safety, and pleasures of technology while
approaching the problem of building a sustainable and supportable economy
with a focus on its environmental impact. The research effort, dubbed
"Computing for the Future of the Planet," is examining whether digital
alternatives to physical activities such as shopping really make a
difference, and if the environmental cost of creating an iTunes economy is
actually greater than the CD-based economy that preceded it. During a
speech about such issues at the Royal Society, Hopper suggested that we
should start placing server farms near renewable sources of energy, as it
is a lot cheaper to transmit data than to transmit energy and the data
networks are often already in place. Doing so would require making cloud
computing an effective tool so processing tasks can be distributed over the
network from desktop computers, laptops, and even mobile phones. Society
also needs data centers that can cope with varying power supplies so server
farms only use electricity that is locally generated. The Cambridge
research could be seen as overly optimistic, writes Bill Thompson, but he
says such research efforts, combined with small changes in our wasteful
lifestyles, offer hope.
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Young Girls Not Interested in IT Careers Due to Lack of
Female Role Models, RIM Study Finds
CIO (05/09/08) Sacco, Al
Just 28 percent of British girls say they are interested in pursuing a
career in the technology industry when they become adults, according to a
survey commissioned by Research in Motion. Meanwhile, 53 percent of
British boys said they are considering careers in the technology industry.
The survey found that the percentage of girls who want to pursue careers in
the technology industry is small because there are relatively few "smart
female role models" in the industry. Many respondents--both male and
female--also had negative perceptions of technology jobs. Forty-three
percent of all respondents said they have never considered a career in the
technology industry because it was not exciting, while nearly 30 percent
said IT jobs were "too geeky." "Never underestimate the power of role
models," says Maggie Philbin, former host of the British science and
technology TV show "Tomorrow's World." "If young women can see a career
path which has been enjoyable and rewarding for another, they are more
likely to follow it themselves."
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Researcher Discusses iPod Supercomputer
IT News Australia (05/09/08) Tay, Liz
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center computer scientist
John Shalf and a research team from the U.S. Department of Energy's
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are designing a supercomputer based
on low-power embedded microprocessors. Shalf says the microprocessors used
in portable electronics could provide low-power, low-cost supercomputers
designed for specific scientific applications. He says we have reached the
point where the cost of running a supercomputer is very close to the cost
of buying them. "When you move from the old [approach to] supercomputing,
which is performance-limited, to supercomputing where the limiting concerns
are power and cost, then all the lessons that we need to learn are already
well understood by people who manufacture microprocessors for cell phones,"
Shalf says. He says much of today's microprocessor research is aimed at
portable devices such as the iPod. "We're leveraging that trend, and we're
kind of like the early adopters of that idea," he says. Shalf's
supercomputer will use less power than existing designs by removing
unnecessary functions from the processor and by reducing clock frequency.
He says even minor reductions in performance can have huge power savings,
because voltage squared is related to clock frequency. For example, a
high-end server chip running at 2 GHz consumes 120W, but reducing the clock
frequency to 600 MHz lowers the wattage to 0.09W. Shalf acknowledges that
his approach works well for scientific applications that run in parallel,
but there's still a need for general-purpose supercomputing systems.
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NSA Attacks West Point! Relax, It's a Cyberwar
Game
Wired News (05/10/08) Axe, David
For four days in April, the National Security Agency (NSA) conducted
attacks against custom-built networks at seven of the nation's military
academies as part of the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a training
event for future military IT specialists. One of the strategies deployed
was a structured query language insert that was launched to lull the
military students into a false sense of security, only to then unleash a
stealthy kernel-level rootkit that broke into workstations and started
deleting data and communicating with the home computer. The West Point
cadets caught the rootkit by manually searching the workstation. For a
second year in a row, the Army team beat teams from the Navy, Air Force,
and Coast Guard academies. The teams had to design their systems to meet
certain specifications set by NSA. All networks had to be capable of
email, chat, and other services, and had to be up and running at all times
despite any attacks or defensive measures. The West Point team used a
fairly standard Linux and FreeBSD-based network with advanced routing
techniques for steering incoming traffic in directions of the IT team's
choosing. The network took three weeks to build. NSA says it tailored its
attacks to be just slightly too hard for the best undergraduate teams to
handle.
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For Dartmouth Students: Unplug--or the Bear
Drowns!
Union Leader (N.H.) (05/11/08) Wickham, Shawne K.
Dartmouth College computer science professor Lorie Loeb has developed a
way to show students how their behavior affects energy consumption. In the
hallways of four floors of Dartmouth's newest dorm cluster, Loeb installed
monitors that display an animated polar bear. When electricity usage is
low, the polar bear is shown sleeping happily on the ice. When energy use
spikes, the ice begins to crack. If electricity use remains high, the ice
disappears and the polar bear drowns. Loeb says she chose to use a polar
bear because it has become a symbol of the effects of climate change. She
hopes the image of the drowning bear will persuade students to curb their
energy use. The eventual goal of the project is to compute what would
happen if the entire Dartmouth campus began to adopt energy-saving
behaviors such as unplugging electronic devices that are not in use, Loeb
says.
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Ruby Is on the Rise
eWeek (05/07/08) Taft, Darryl K.
The number of Ruby developers will quadruple over the next five years,
predicts Gartner analyst Mark Driver. He says there are currently under
one million professional Ruby developers, but he predicts there will be
four million or more by 2013. Driver says Gartner's research shows there
is "strong interest" in Ruby and that the percentage of developers that
will be creating commercial systems in comparison to the number of
hobbyists will be even greater for Ruby than for other programming
languages. Nevertheless, Driver says Ruby needs more corporate sponsorship
from large organizations. "Ruby is the classic pattern of how technology
gets adopted--it's not one big company telling you what technology to use,"
says Sun Microsystems engineer Chris Nutter. "The people using Ruby now
are hackers--it's kind of an organic system." One disadvantage Ruby has in
comparison to Java and other more mature languages is it has no official
steward or standards body supporting it, but Nutter says there are two
projects supporting Ruby's growth. The first is an initiative from the
Rubinius project to create a set of specification tests for Ruby to define
what the language is. The Rubinius project also is dedicated to creating a
next-generation virtual machine for Ruby. The other project is a
collaborative effort between all the various Ruby implementers to discuss
where Ruby is going.
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Computer Science Students Launch Humanitarian
Software
Bowdoin College (05/09/08)
Four computer science students from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine,
have been recognized by Portland's Ronald McDonald House for their work in
developing volunteer management software for the non-profit organization.
The software was developed as part of the Humanitarian Free Open Source
Software Project (HFOSS), a collaborative, community-building project
started by supporters of open source software and members of the computing
faculty at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Wesleyan University in
Middletown, Conn., and Connecticut College in New London. The software
developed by the students will be used to replace the handwritten volunteer
calendars and paperwork that were previously used to manage, track, and
schedule the more than 300 people who volunteer at the Ronald McDonald
House in Portland. According to HFOSS directors, the software could
eventually be used at Ronald McDonald Houses across the country. HFOSS is
funded by the Directorate for Computing & Information Science & Engineering
of the National Science Foundation under its Pathways to Revitalized
Undergraduate Computing Education program.
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Microsoft Grows DAISY for Blind Computer Users While
Adobe Wilts
Computerworld (05/09/08) Lai, Eric
Microsoft recently announced the availability of a plug-in that allows
Word 2007, 2003, and XP users to easily save documents in the Digital
Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) XML format, which is the latest
version of a standard developed by the nonprofit DAISY Consortium to be the
most accessible format for visually impaired computer users. DAISY offers
a considerably less frustrating experience for users than screen readers
and text-to-speech tools, which miss invisible structural metadata embedded
in the document (paragraph marks, table structures, headings, etc.) that
represent the most important parts of a Web page because they are key to
navigation, browsing, and searching. "From DAISY, you can easily move to
other accessible formats, such as Braille or large print, in addition to
audio, with little to no extra work," says Sam Ogami with the California
State University system's chancellor's office. The DAISY Consortium also
aims to help make documents and books accessible to the illiterate,
dyslexic, or developmentally disabled, for which the plug-in could also
prove helpful. President of the National Federation of the Blind in
Computer Science Curtis Chong has high praise for the plug-in, but points
to a gulf between its theoretical and its practical applications.
Meanwhile, Jutta Treviranus with the University of Toronto's Adaptive
Technology Resource Center noted in a 2008 paper that she harbors "grave
concerns" with the DAISY XML that will be generated from a Word 2007
document because its native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML),
breaks basic axioms such as not conflating stylistic metadata with
structural metadata. Microsoft's Reed Shaffner says DAISY XML eventually
may be ported to versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML. The DAISY
plug-in is currently being hosted on SourceForge as an open-source
project.
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Public Transportation in Evolution--Using Advanced
Technology for Safer Roads
Innovations Report (05/08/08)
The integration of people, roads, and automobiles with a wireless network
to improve safety is the goal of the national Intelligent Transport Systems
(ITS) project, and currently available ITS services include the Vehicle
Information and Communication System and Electronic Toll Collection System.
Human-machine-interface technology, wireless communication technology, and
GPS technology are just some of the technologies employed in these
services, while the human engineering research group also employs cognitive
engineering and applied psychology to analyze fundamental engineering and
assessment techniques in adopting ITS. Numerous experiments are executed
to collect and study behavior and biological responses of motorists to
further investigate the provision of various kinds of information via
on-board equipment of car navigation systems, development of on-road
equipment, and general planning of next-generation traffic information
systems. Experimentation involves the use of a driving simulator that can
help determine, for instance, how car navigation systems can be modified to
enable understanding among all kinds of drivers, including senior citizens,
women, and the hearing-impaired. One researcher says that in the future a
"car-to-car communication" system that uses a wireless network rather than
flashing lights may be accessible, while a "probe car" may show up on the
streets to employ each vehicle as a mobile sensor to gather traffic
information or road surface data on a snowy day. Another researcher has
conceived of mounting a camera above an intersection to provide visual
information of the blind spot to the driver's car navigation system, and
thus reduce the likelihood of accidents caused when drivers make right
turns.
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Is Quantum Internet Search on the Way?
PhysOrg.com (05/06/08) Marquit, Miranda
MIT researcher Seth Lloyd believes that a new architecture for quantum
random access memory (QRAM) could be used to reduce the energy wasted by
random access memory (RAM) as well as for completely anonymous Internet
searchers. Classical computing requires the use of RAM to retrieve
information, but RAM design is wasteful and subject to interference, Lloyd
says. Lloyd worked with Vittorio Giovannetti at the NEST-CNR-INFM in Pisa,
Italy, and Lorenzo Maccone at the University of Pavia, Italy, to create a
system that works as QRAM. Lloyd says their QRAM architecture was
discovered when his colleagues and him were researching how to make QRAM
work on classical RAM design. He says QRAM is a "sneakier" way of
accessing RAM. In traditional RAM, the first bit of an address throws two
switches, the second throws four, and so on, Lloyd says. With QRAM, "all
the bits of the address only interact with two switches," Lloyd says. The
energy saved using QRAM is not enough to offset the larger energy problems
associated with classical computing, and Lloyd says QRAM is slower than
RAM. However, he says QRAM's benefits can be applied to quantum Internet
searches. "If you had a quantum Internet, then this would be useful," he
says. "This offers a huge decrease in energy used and an increase in
robustness." For this to work, Lloyd says "dark fiber" is needed, and
although it is already being used for some classical communications, a
quantum Internet would need more.
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Powering Up IT for Professional Learning
ICT Results (05/09/08)
The goal of the EU-funded PROLEARN project is to cross the gulf between
research and education at universities and similar organizations, and
training and continuing education that is supplied for and within
companies. The resulting links provide network members with the ability to
create a new class of educational tools and technologies that could be
advantageous to learners in their professional fields and workplaces.
PROLEARN project manager Dr. Eelco Herder says the initiative gathers key
research groups, other organizations, and industrial collaborators into a
"network of excellence" in professional learning and training. "Because
academic institutions are where [technology-enhanced learning] is being
researched, they become the first adopters of new technologies, but there
are also implications for the corporate world," Herder says. To guarantee
that TEL is more widely embraced, systems from different institutions must
exchange data and communicate with one another, and the PROLEARN
researchers encourage system compatibility through the use of an
educationally focused Simple Query Interface that contains programming
instructions and assumes the responsibility of sending and responding to
user queries. PROLEARN researchers have established a new European
Association for Technology Enhanced Learning, and the project is supporting
companies with the setup of a Virtual Competence Center. The transference
of research results into education and training programs, international
conferences, and scientific journals is the goal of another
PROLEARN-initiated network, the PROLEARN Academy.
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OLPC Tries to Bridge Gap With Developer Community
IDG News Service (05/07/08) Shah, Agam
Developers have begun raising doubts about One Laptop Per Child's (OLPC)
commitment to open-source software in the wake of Chairman Nicholas
Negroponte's criticism of Sugar, a user interface that currently works with
Linux-based XO laptops. Negroponte has said that he would like to see
Sugar's development extended to Windows in order to make XO laptops more
appealing to consumers, and has asked developers to help make that a
reality. Developers are upset because they see the XO laptop as being a
watershed open-source project. OLPC, meanwhile, wants to extend Sugar to
Windows because it wants to sell more cheap PCs, said OLPC observer Wayan
Vota. The controversy among developers about Negroponte's remarks has
forced Kim Quirk, the director of the technical team at OLPC, to reassure
developers that her organization is not abandoning open source. "I'd like
to reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an
open-source project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners
and for contributors," she wrote in a recent email. Quirk added that the
community needs to address its communication problem so the project can get
back on track.
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Q&A With: IARPA Director Lisa Porter
IEEE Spectrum (05/08) Adee, Sally
Lisa Porter is the inaugural director of the Intelligence Advanced
Research Projects Activity (IARPA), whose mission is the development of
high-risk, high-payoff technologies for U.S. intelligence agencies. IARPA
is due to announce its division into three program offices--Smart
Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe and Secure Operations--that Porter
says will collectively cover the whole of the intelligence challenge, and
that will respectively focus on improving the value of collected data,
maximizing the insight drawn from collections in a timely manner, and
countering foes' ability to adversely affect U.S. intelligence's effective
networking operations. Porter says the decision to site IARPA at the
University of Maryland, College Park, partly came from a desire to send a
message that the organization is academic friendly and engaged in the
community. She says she is applying an insight she picked up at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to her IARPA tenure: The
recognition that the justification for starting programs must be based on a
solid concept as well as with capable program managers. "I anticipate that
since the problems we'll be addressing are very hard, we'll be advancing
technology capabilities, and that will spill over into commercial or
private-sector applications," Porter says. She notes that IARPA is on the
lookout for program managers, and that part of the strategy involves
spreading the word through community engagement, while the IARPA.gov Web
site will post application information once it is up by the end of May.
"We're looking for very smart people who understand what it takes not just
to technically comprehend a problem but how to bring an idea to reality
programmatically," Porter says.
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