Three out of four bank Web sites examined by the University of Michigan had at least one security vulnerability that could leave customers' at the mercy of cybercrooks (10 of the Worst Moments in Network Security).
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BBN Technologies' GENI Project Office has been awarded a 3-year grant from the NSF worth about $12 million to do prototyping of the next-generation research network dubbed Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). The project office will divvy up the funds among partners from 29 universities.
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(A little departure from the usual Alpha Doggs research fare....a different kind of research altogether: New car buying research)
I shop for cars a little more frequently than Halley's Comet comes around, and for the past couple of weeks have had my first adventure in shopping for a vehicle since the Web really took off. Time to ditch my hand-me-down '96 Volvo wagon, which had failed inspection on safety and emissions, and downsize to a little putt-putt car, the Nissan Versa hatchback for my soon-to-be-shortened commute.
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Sitting in on a talk by a Ford senior manager named Eric Karsten recently at the IDC IT Forum in Boston, I heard him say that while the car maker is pretty much all virtualization all the time in an effort to do more with less, there is one group of holdouts:
"Most often the guys who tell me we can't virtualize are the research guys," he said. They want to own and be able to physically touch the servers their data is running on, he said.
During lunch at the event, other IT pros said the same was true at their outfits.
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Associated Press reports that Purdue University researchers are borrowing air conditioning techniques in an effort to cool off increasingly powerful computer chips. The story says that the experiments involve flushing a refrigerant through paths in the chips, and could be used in radar and military weapons systems down the road.
MORE ON COOLING ISSUES
University of Washington researchers have come up with a way to customize computer interfaces for individuals based on a 20-to-90-minute vision and motor skills (mouse handling, etc.) test.
A paper (Decision-Theoretic User Interface Generation) describing the system -- dubbed Supple -- was presented this week at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's conference in Chicago.
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A Ph.D. student at the University of Basque Country in Spain has presented a thesis arguing that avatars can improve computer communications by getting across the sorts of emotional information typically lost in regular computer interactions. Research shows that more than half of transmitting a message successfully to someone face to face involves facial expressions and body language.
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Alpha Doggs is taking a bit of a break to do "research." Back in action week of July 7.
Men are oh so more generous than women about sharing their music, videos and other creative work online, even though men and women are pretty even in terms of content creation, according to a new study from Northwestern University.
"Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that means men's voices are being disproportionately heard," says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, in a statement.
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MySpace and other social network sites teach students about technology, stir their creative juices and broaden their views, according to a new University of Minnesota study. Interesting, the study points out that the students were actually pretty unaware about the fact they were learning when on the sites.
The six-month study (view a video about it) focused on students ages 16 to 18 at 13 urban high schools in the Midwest who use MySpace.
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IEEE Spectrum Q&As the Microsoft Research honcho, who earlier this month received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award “for contributions to the design of modern operating systems, and for innovation and leadership in industrial research.” In particular, Rick Rashid was honored for creating the Mach operating system, which he says formed the basis for the Mac OS, among other things.
Engineers at Duke University have come up with a system for one day exploiting cell phones worldwide so that mobile users can easily learn from each other about everything from art exhibits to traffic jams.
"Every mobile phone can act as a telescope lens providing real-time information about its environment to any of the 3 billion mobile phones worldwide," said Romit Roy Choudhury, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, in a statement.
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Carefully managed virtual servers can make the job of attackers more difficult by reducing the time that any one version of a server is exposed to the Internet, according to a George Mason University professor who has developed software that phases virtual servers in and out of use. By limiting how long virtual servers remain online and synchronizing their replacement with fresh servers, businesses can cut the damage hackers inflict, says Arun Sood, a computer science professor at the school.
Government security magazine Signal Online sums up the latest efforts by Microsoft Research to advance computing. From the story:
Henrique Malvar, managing director and distinguished engineer, Microsoft Research Redmond, explains that there is a method behind what could be perceived as madness in Microsoft’s approach to research. “In simple terms, we’re hedging our bets because we don’t know where the next super crazy cool idea will come up. So we cast in many, many different areas: in computer interfaces, databases, machine translation, natural language processing, signal processing computations, wireless networking, networking with wires, sensor networks,” he says.
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Oklahoma State University’s Technology Business Assessment Group recently announced it will fund research on an approach to information protection called data shuffling. The project is led by Professor Rathindra Sarathy (shown left) of OSU’s Department of Management Science and Information Systems, who explains to us just what data shuffling is and why it could be coming to your network soon. See Q&A here.
A new Web site lets you chase Tornados without risking life and limb.
The University of Michigan's Tornado Paths site allows visitors to zoom in on cities or step back and look at the United States as a whole to see where twisters hit each day (alas, none had hit in the past 24 hours...not that I was wishing anyone got whacked, just wanted to see what they looked like on the site).
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It struck me as I was attending my son's first grade class poetry reading extravaganza last week what a shame it is that people seem to put so little thought or effort into how they actually present their hard work, big thoughts or poetry, for that matter (not that I'm blaming the kids in this situation and not that I'm leading any Toastmasters sessions anytime soon).
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The United States remains atop the world when it comes to science and technology leadership, and in no small part this is due to the influx of foreign students and scientists, according to a new study by nonprofit research outfit RAND Corp.
While concerns are aired regularly by tech executives, including those from Microsoft and Intel, about the lack of government and corporate funding for tech R&D in the U.S., the 189-page RAND study ("U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology") shows that the U.S. still blows away other countries when it comes to science.
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Louisiana State University (LSU) astrophysicist and high performance computing expert Edward Seidel as its director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which oversees awarding of grants to researchers. He takes on the new role Sept. 1
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The University of Texas at San Antonio's Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) , the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and The University of Texas at Dallas have been chosen to take part in a five-year, $7.5 million Department of Defense Multi University Research Initiative grant.
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Bit of late notice here, but for those of you in the Boston area, the IEEE-USA Innovation Institute is holding its Innovation Forum at the Westin Waltham Boston in Waltham, Mass., this week from June 10-12. The event really gets going tomorrow, so still time to head over there and check it out. The agenda listed on the web site is a bit on the vague side, but the general idea is to yap about how to convert ideas and inventions into things people can actually use. Speakers include:
Is your teenager restless, careless, stressed, knocking back too many stimulating drinks and sleep deprived? Sounds like you might have a cell phone obsessed kid.
That’s according to a new study out of Sahlgren’s Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden that was presented at this week at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) .
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It's not every day tech business editors get issued press passes to attend events like this month's NBA Finals, but I did yesterday.
The adventure actually started on Wednesday, when I was in Boston at a tech conference listening to a market watcher spew out numbers on virtualization and data centers and later squirming through a talk by an open source enthusiast whose presentation software or hardware was on fritz.
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Fellow NW blogger Layer 8 has the scoop on an Ohio State University breakthrough for thwarting Internet worms within minutes of an infection:
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From the IDG News Service:
Over the past five years, 43 U.S. states have adopted data breach notification laws, but has all of this legislation actually cut down on identity theft? Not according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who have published a state-by-state analysis of data supplied by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
"There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the laws actually reduce identity theft," said Sasha Romanosky, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon who is one of the paper's authors.
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Flat screens for computers? They will soon be passe if the vision of Queen's University computing professor Roel Vertegaal takes off outside the lab.
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According to Shalini Kesar, a computer scientist at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, a key way to combat computer fraud is to make managers aware of security issues and have them drop hints that they know to their lackeys.
Kesar's findings, which focus on the social aspects of information security, are published in the International Journal of Business Information Systems. The researcher says a lack of communication is a major contributor to computer fraud.
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Four big thinkers from Princeton University have written a paper called "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" that suggests: "If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens."
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The future of networking as seen through the works of university and other labs.
Our mission is to give you a peek into the future of networking by tracking "alpha" research at university and other labs and at companies based on this work. Your Alpha Doggs are Network World editors Bob Brown, Linda Leung and Neal Weinberg.
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