Computing Now News Briefs

Businesses Turn to Object Storage to Handle Growing Amounts of Data

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Big Data has gotten so big that traditional, hierarchical file systems are straining to keep up with today's exponential information growth. Full story

Is IPv6 Secure Enough?

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Proponents are pushing network operators and equipment makers to adopt IPv6. Full story

Gig.U Project Aims for an Ultrafast US Internet

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 09:00:00 -0400

The US lags behind numerous other countries in the deployment and affordability of high-speed Internet services. Full story

Bringing Location and Navigation Technology Indoors

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Location and navigation technologies have become popular, with demand steadily increasing for improved approaches to driving from one place to another. Now, researchers and vendors are starting to work on these technologies for indoor use. Full story

Plans Under Way for Roaming between Cellular and Wi-Fi Networks

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Cellular and Wi-Fi provide important services to many users. Industry observers say users' ability to move smoothly between the two systems would make mobile technology more useful. However, such roaming is currently difficult. Full story

Encryption System Flaw Threatens Internet Security

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Researchers have found a vulnerability that affects an encryption system widely used to provide security for e-mail, e-commerce, e-banking, and other online services. Full story

For Business Intelligence, the Trend Is Location, Location, Location

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Businesses are always looking for better ways to analyze the large amounts of data they receive from customers, suppliers, market analysts, and other sources. Full story

Corpus Linguistics Keep Up-to-Date with Language

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Language is a living thing that changes regularly. New words are added, and others become archaic. Words take on new meanings, and some old uses fall out of fashion. Full story

Are Tomorrow's Firewalls Finally Here Today?

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:00:00 -0400

In an effort to efficiently meet the challenge of the new cyberthreats that arise almost daily, network administrators are beginning to adopt next-generation firewalls in significant numbers. Full story

Spatial Humanities Brings History to Life

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Research in history, archaeology, literary theory, geography, cultural and religious studies, and other fields depends on analyzing many pieces of information relevant to specific topics. Full story

Could Hackers Take Your Car for a Ride?

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Cars are becoming increasingly networked, leading to concern among some security experts that hackers could exploit this to cause potentially serious problems. Full story

What to Do about Supercookies?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Complaints by two US legislators have renewed privacy-related concerns about supercookies, which users can’t remove from their browsers even with a common delete-cookies command. Full story

Lights, Camera, Virtual Moviemaking

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Computer graphics have remade moviemaking, enabling the creation of virtual worlds, animations, images, and special effects that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to achieve. Full story

Revolutionizing Wall Street with News Analytics

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:00:00 -0400

The development and adoption of news-analytics software is part of a technological revolution that is reshaping Wall Street. Full story

New Project Could Promote Semantic Web

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Schema.org — a new project organized by major search-engine providers Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo — promises to improve Semantic Web adoption by building support for a single set of structured data specifications. Full story

FBI Employs New Botnet Eradication Tactics

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:00:00 -0400

The US government has taken a novel approach to fighting botnets that it hopes will be a model for combating these security threats in the future. Full story

Google and Twitter “Like” Social Indexing

Thu, 7 Jul 2011 09:00:00 -0400

For the last decade, the dominant approach to finding information on the Web has been Google's link-based approach. Full story

Computing Commodities Market in the Cloud

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Once an IT buzzword, cloud computing has evolved over the past couple of years to represent a widespread practice for using remote computing resources. And now it's catching on among enterprises as a financial commodity. Full story

Intel Chips Step up to 3D

Thu, 26 May 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Intel has introduced 22-nm Tri-Gate chips that use a new process technology for patterning transistors in 3D. Full story

Apple Programming Error Raises Privacy Concerns

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:00:00 -0400

At the Where 2.0 Conference last April, Alisdair Allan, senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, and Pete Warden, founder of Data Science Toolkit, reported finding a mysterious unencrypted database file going by the name "consolidated.db" with almost a year's worth of location data. The file was being stored on both iPhone and iPad2 devices. Full story

Thunderbolt Promises Lightning Speed

Fri, 6 May 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Intel's Light Peak optical interconnect technology has been integrated into Thunderbolt, a new electrical port that uses a mini-DisplayPort (mDP)-compatible plug to support 40 gigabits per second of aggregate bandwidth over 3 meters. Full story

Industrial Control Systems Face More Security Challenges

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Researchers bring further awareness to the pervasive lack of fundamental critical infrastructure security. Full story

Microsoft Effort Takes Down Massive Botnet

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 09:00:00 -0400

A coordinated effort from Microsoft, security researchers, and law enforcement brought down Rustock, one of the world's largest botnets, on 16 March. The successful botnet eradication effort opened the door to new legal and operational tactics for crippling botnets. Full story

IP Addresses Getting Security Upgrade

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is being advanced for securing the Internet's IP addressing space and its autonomous system (AS) numbers, which represent IP routing prefixes. Full story

Studios Agree on DRM Infrastructure

Mon, 7 Feb 2011 09:00:00 -0400

The majority of large movie studios have partnered in creating a shared infrastructure for digital rights management (DRM) called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. Full story

New Web Protocol Promises to Reduce Browser Latency

Mon, 7 Feb 2011 09:00:00 -0400

The WebSocket protocol is a proposed IETF standard to reduce Web application latency, code size, and development complexity by enabling two-way communication between Web pages and a remote host. Full story

To Be or NAT to Be?

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0400

The imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses is driving the transition to IPv6. But carriers face the challenge of supporting the new addressing scheme, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing IPv4 traffic. Full story

Intel Gets inside the Helmet

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Intel is working with the US National Football League (NFL), helmet maker Riddell Sport, and several university research labs to bring medical body area technology out of the hospitals and into football helmets. Full story

Tuning Body-to-Body Networks with RF Modeling

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Understanding the human body's radio characteristics is in its infancy. The dynamics of human tissue capacitive, absorptive, and resistive properties pose unique challenges to wireless networking. Apple's latest iPhone was unexpectedly crippled by the capacitive effects of an errant finger. Full story

New Wi-Fi Spec Simplifies Connectivity

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The Wi-Fi alliance has begun certifying devices that support Wi-Fi Direct, a new mode of communication that eliminates the need for a wireless router. The technology promises to simplify connectivity to peripherals and between computers via a peer-to-peer network. Full story

Expanded Top-Level Domains Could Spur Internet Real Estate Boom

Mon, 8 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The organization that oversees the Internet addressing system is pursuing a plan that would significantly increase the number of generic top-level domains (gTLD). There are currently 20 gTLDs, including .com, .mil, and .gov. Plans call for adding as many as 500 new gTLDs per year. Full story

New Weapon in War on Botnets

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have developed a new technique for tracking stealthy botnets that use peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Full story

Content-Centered Internet Architecture Gets a Boost

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Research to improve the underlying Internet architecture got a boost in August with a $7.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Full story

Gesturing Going Mainstream

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The computer interface could take another big leap with a variety of lower-cost techniques for tracking hand gestures. Full story

Is Context-Aware Computing Ready for the Limelight?

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Context-aware computing — which leverages information about users and their environments to improve the interactions among them — has been around for almost two decades. Full story

Flexible Routing in the Cloud

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Cloud computing gives businesses flexible resource access that lets them offer multitiered pricing for different infrastructure classes of services such as CPU, storage, and total network throughput. Full story

Signal Congestion Rejuvenates Interest in Cell Paging-Channel Protocol

Fri, 6 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The unexpected signaling demand of smart phones has forced network operators to rethink network engineering and dust off an old protocol to keep networks flowing. Full story

New Protocol Improves Interaction among Networked Devices and Applications

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0400

An emerging specification promises to make it easier for devices and applications to share metadata. Full story

Security for Domain Name System Takes a Big Step Forward

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0400

DNSSec on the root zone will provide a common anchor of trust for securing the way domain names are translated into Internet protocol addresses. Full story

The ROADM to Smarter Optical Networking

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Optical networking is the key to today's high-capacity, high-speed networks, including the Internet. Full story

Distributed Cache Goes Mainstream

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Distributed-cache technology took a major step forward in June with the release of Microsoft AppFabric. Full story

New Application Protects Mobile-Phone Passwords

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology developed MobileSitter, a password-vault application that makes it more difficult for an attacker to unlock any secret data stored on the phone. Full story

WiGig Alliance Reveals Ultrafast Wireless Specification

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance published the initial specification for an ultrafast networking technology and, simultaneously, announced an agreement to interoperate with Wi-Fi. Full story

Cognitive Radio Adds Intelligence to Wireless Technology

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Radio communications are becoming increasingly complex as more devices — including laptops, cellular phones, and even sensors — compete for limited bandwidth in various frequency ranges. Full story

New Product Uses Light Connections in Blade Server

Wed, 12 May 2010 09:00:00 -0400

A company has delivered the first version of a product that uses light signals, instead of cables and switches, to connect blade-server nodes. Full story

Browser Fingerprints Threaten Privacy

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The ongoing contest between Web users' privacy and behavior-tracking browser applications has moved from cookies to fingerprints. By gathering seemingly insignificant bits of information, such as a browser's version number and plug-ins, websites can uniquely identify ("fingerprint") a browser and, in extreme cases, its user. Full story

New Animation Technique Uses Motion Frequencies to Shake Trees

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 09:00:00 -0400

UK researchers have developed a new way of making high-quality animations of trees from video footage. Full story

Researchers Take Promising Approach to Chemical Computing

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

A multinational European project has begun work on a biologically inspired, "wet" computer designed to mimic living brain functions through chemical assembly processes and pharmaceutical manufacturing techniques. Full story

Screen-Capture Programming: What You See is What You Script

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Researchers at the University of Maryland and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a screen-capture–based scripting environment that could signal a new programming paradigm that leverages the graphical interface as a sort of API. Full story

Research Project Sends Data Wirelessly at High Speeds via Light

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Siemens scientists are working with the Heinrich Hertz Institute the Visible Light Communication (VLC) project. Full story

Faster Testing for Complex Software Systems

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Testing applications for large software systems can be a time-consuming and expensive process that ultimately delays the release date. Full story

IEEE 802.1Qbg/h to Simplify Data Center Virtual LAN Management

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Widespread virtualization has made data center operations more efficient, but it has also raised serious management issues. Full story

Distributed Data-Analysis Approach Gains Popularity

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0400

The more data that organizations collect, the more they must process. At a certain point, they face the enormous challenge of making sense of the information in a reasonable amount of time. Full story

Twitter Tweak Helps Haiti Relief Effort

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 09:00:00 -0400

A short message service (SMS) syntax called Tweak the Tweet (TtT) is aiding relief efforts in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Full story

Infrastructure Sensors Improve Home Monitoring

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0400

A University of Washington researcher is developing a system to make it easier for individuals and companies monitor "home" activity by using strategically placed sensors on air, water, gas, and electrical infrastructure. Full story

Internet Search Takes a Semantic Turn

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Search has become one of the Internet's most important technologies, as evidenced by the rise of Google as one of the world's most important technology companies. Full story

Phase-Change Memory Technology Moves toward Mass Production

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0400

Numonyx, a joint venture of chipmakers Intel and ST Microelectronics, says it has built a prototype of an advanced phase-change memory (PCM) chip that it hopes will become a breakthrough product in nonvolatile memory. Full story

IBM Crowdsources Translation Software

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0400

IBM researchers have created n.Fluent, software that translates text between English and 11 other languages. Full story

Digital Ants Promise New Security Paradigm

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0400

A prototype distributed security system uses an army of "digital ants" to help sniff out computer malware. Full story

Program Uses Mobile Technology to Help with Crises

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0400

A nongovernmental organization has released open source software tools for collaboration and communication that let government agencies or humanitarian organizations quickly report, share, aggregate, and analyze important data via a cell phone. Full story

More Cores Keep Power Down

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0400

Startup chipmaker Tilera has announced plans for the world's first 100-core chip, which targets cloud computing, networking, and media-processing applications. Full story

White-Space Networking Goes Live

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0400

Under an experimental license from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Spectrum Bridge launched the first US wireless broadband network using empty airwaves ("white spaces") in the broadcast television spectrum, which emerged in the transition to digital TV. Full story

Mobile Web 2.0 Experiences Growing Pains

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0400

As wireless technologies and social networking have become more popular, there has been increasing interest in combining the two. Full story

More Spectrum Sought for Body Sensor Networks