A federally funded online absentee voting system scheduled to debut in less than two weeks has security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize voter privacy and allow votes to be altered, according to a report prepared by four prominent researchers invited to analyze the system. All experts in cyber-security, they say the risks associated with Internet voting cannot be eliminated and urge that the system be shut down.
The report’s authors are computer scientists David Wagner, Avi Rubin a
You bring questions to your physician, but if your doctor has questions about how to best provide care for you, where does he or she go for answers? Physicians still use paper-based resources, however, a University of Iowa Health Care study focused on pediatricians shows that, in comparison, it takes less than one-third of the time to use the computer to find an answer.
The study, which also shows the effectiveness of training physicians to use computer resources for patient care questions,
By continously adapting the receiver settings of a mobile phone to the current conditions, the advantage is twofold; facing bad reception, the connection can be improved while in good conditions, the energy consumption can be reduced. This is possible by an automatic controller developed by Lodewijk Smit of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. Smit did his PhD work on this, within the Centre of Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT).
The mobile connection can be optimized by fr
In the future, powering up your laptop may require that you unroll it first.
Engineers at the University of Toronto are the first Canadian team to construct flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens. “It opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the future,” says Zheng-Hong Lu, a professor in U of T’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Ima
The first prototype of personalised UMTS Services was tested on the TU Delft campus. A number of congress visitors and a group of students were able to use UMTS and GPS to find their way to a lecture or restaurant, contact other visitors, get a tour of the campus, play a game together or watch a movie clip on internet. Both groups reacted enthusiastically.
UMTS will be introduced in the Netherlands this year. UMTS makes fast and wireless transmissions of large amounts of digital information
Crash! Bang! Crunch! That was the noise of your glasses breaking as your head hit the inflating airbag! Picture a typical road accident scenario. What’s happened? What do you do next?
With luck, within 5 minutes you’ll be compos mentis enough to call for help on your mobile phone. But what if you’re unconscious or have broken your wrist? This is the scenario in which a new e-call system proposed under the IST project E-MERGE will come into its own.
Automatic alerts to emergency
Of all the personal computers to be unwrapped during the holiday season, more than 80 percent will be used to go online and search the Web’s more than 92 million gigabytes of data (comparable to a 2 billion-volume encyclopedia). Getting online is the easy part, finding a useful Web page is a bit harder-keeping track of a useful Web page is another issue altogether.
People have devised many tricks-such as sending e- mails to themselves or jotting on sticky notes-for keeping track of Web pa
UMHS study finds inaccurate, old information on nearly one-third of Web sites
Unlike more common cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer or melanoma, few people understand the basic facts about what causes bladder cancer and how it is treated. So when patients are diagnosed with bladder cancer, they often turn to the Internet for information.
But a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System found 32 percent of Web sites about bladder cancer cont
Internet users can be blind-sided by e-mail “cluster bombs” that inundate their inboxes with hundreds or thousands of messages in a short period of time, thereby paralyzing the users’ online activities, according to a new report by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories in Bedford, Mass.
IUB computer scientist Filippo Menczer and RSA Laboratories Principal Research Scientist Markus Jakobsson describe in the December 2003 issue of ;login: a weakness in Web sit
The next time you try to watch a homemade movie, or access your files from a recordable DVD on your computer’s DVD drive, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. It might not work.
Initial tests conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in collaboration with the DVD Association and the Optical Storage Technology Association show that compatibility between recordable DVDs and DVD drives is only 85 percent. This means that if a recording is made o
Iban Rodríguez Barbarin, a telecommunications engineer from Pamplona, has carried out a study on processing seismic waves emanating from the ocean’s floor. The study is the subject of his graduate thesis, ’Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) processing with refraction seismology’.
The study was carried out within a wider research and development project by investigators at Navarre Public University, jointly with scientists from the Vilanova i la Geltru Centre for Technology, part of the Polytec
The idea of working from a distance with the help of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been with us for three decades now.
According to the most optimistic predictions by some scholars and policy makers, it was envisaged that by the turn of the millennium most, if not all, clerical workers would be familiar with teleworking. However, from today’s perspective it is clear that this has not happened. Much like getting rid of paper in offices, escaping the constr
Future cellular telephones and other wireless communication devices are expected to be much more versatile as consumers gain the ability to program them in a variety of ways. Scientists and engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teamed up with a variety of computing and telecommunications companies to develop both the test methods and the standard protocols needed to make this possible.
Programmable networks will include location aware services that will
How can you be sure your on-line transactions are secure, and find out if anybody has been siphoning off money from your credit card? The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed a way of handling electronic information to protect the rights of cyberspace users and guard against fraud when buying on the Internet.
The EU Cyber Tools On-Line Search for Evidence (CTOSE) project helps identify, secure, integrate and present electronic evidence on on-line criminal offence
Rooftop satellite receivers can look out of place with the historic surroundings of ancient cities. In the first-time participation with ESA, a Greek company is working to solve this.
The project is to develop a kind of satellite receiver known as a planar array. Unlike more commonly seen parabola-shaped dishes, planar arrays pick up less interference from other satellites. Another feature is their square, flat shape.
Low-visibility is a major concern in Greece; unsightly satellite dish
Businesses throughout the UK and Europe should soon be able to reduce their travel costs thanks to improvements in the quality of teleconferencing made possible by a grant of almost €2.5 million from the Information Society Technology (IST) Programme of the European Union’s Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).
The VIRTUE (Virtual Team User Environment) project concentrated on improving the quality aspects of video conferencing and the results look set to revolutionise future technology. The VIRT
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