Archive for the ‘LINKS’ Category.
March 6, 2003, 8:14 am
ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – IBM sells mainframe for grid research:
“The university has created software that lets actual grids be carved up into private ones for individual users or specific applications. The researchers are using the z800 with z/VM and Linux and the cluster of Intel servers running VMware’s virtualisation software for Linux. In addition to developing grid virtualisation, the systems will be used for nanotechnology and computer science research.
The National Science Foundation funded the purchase of the z800, which was sold by Cornerstone Systems. The University of Florida also bought an Enterprise Storage Server “Shark” system with 3.36 terabytes of capacity.”
March 5, 2003, 1:00 pm
The Register: LSD puts Sendmail bug under the microscope:
“Polish ethical hackers Last Stage of Delirium (LSD) yesterday published proof of concept code for a serious flaw in Sendmail which emerged this week.
In a posting to BugTraq yesterday, LSD provides a detailed analysis of the buffer overflow vulnerability for the first time. ”
March 5, 2003, 12:38 pm
The Wired News article “Gambling on Private Data Search” includes many naive-sounding quotes regarding hashing and data mining. Obviously hashing alone is not enough to avoid serious privacy problems. So is there more to this than the vendor quotes below? (I hope so.)
Systems Research and Development, a company known for helping casinos spot fraud, has developed a product called Anonymous Entity Resolution. It claims the technology can help investigators determine whether a terrorist suspect appears in two separate databases — say, a government watch list and a hotel reservation system.
…
It not only finds the information by comparing records in multiple databases, but also scrambles the information using a “one-way hash function,” which converts a record to a character string that serves as a unique identifier like a fingerprint.
“All it tells them is that they have somebody in common,” said Jeff Jonas, founder and chief scientist at SRD. “It doesn’t tell them who.”
Once a match is found, which happens when disparate records produce the same character string, agents can isolate those particular records without examining any other information.
A record that has been one-way hashed cannot be “un-hashed” back to the original record — any more than “a sausage can be turned back into a pig,” Jonas said.
March 5, 2003, 12:22 pm
UR loses big patent decision:
In his opinion
[PDF], Larimer wrote: “An inventor or patentee is entitled to a patent to protect his work but only if he produces or has possession of something truly new and novel.”
“The invention he claims must be sufficiently concrete so that it can be described for the world to appreciate the specific nature of the work that sets it apart from what was before. The inventor must be able to describe the item to be patented with such clarity that the reader is assured that the inventor actually has possession and knowledge of the unique composition that makes it worthy of patent protection. The patent at issue here does not do that.
“What the reader learns from this patent is a wish or plan or first step for obtaining a desired result. What he appreciates is that the patentee had a goal for achieving a certain end result. The reader can certainly appreciate the goal but establishing goals does not a patent make. The reader also learns that the patentee had not proceeded to do what was necessary to accomplish the desired end. In my view, such an invention is not really one at all.”
March 4, 2003, 4:27 pm
AtNewYork :
DRMAA, according to Peter Jeffcock, Sun Group Marketing Manager for Grid Computing, will expand the reach of grid computing because it will make it easier for independent software vendors to make and promote grid computing applications.
March 3, 2003, 3:09 pm
Antivirus firm joins war on spam:
“The software will use a scientific method known as heuristics, which calculates the probability that a particular e-mail is spam by examining a pattern of characteristics in the message.” !
March 3, 2003, 2:26 pm
Tim Bray tries OS X “Mail.app” and Mozilla 1.3beta mail filters, and concludes that this easy availability of
good (learning) mail filters may represent a
Spam Inflection Point.
March 1, 2003, 3:58 pm
Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG): IRTF Charter:
The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) focuses on the problem of unwanted email messages, loosely referred to as spam. The scale, growth, and effect of spam on the Internet have generated considerable interest in addressing this problem. Once considered a nuisance, spam has grown to account for a large percentage of the mail volume on the Internet. This unwanted traffic stands to affect local networks, the infrastructure, and the way that people use email.
The definition of spam messages is not clear and is not consistent across different individuals or organizations. Therefore, we generalize the problem into “consent-based communication”. This means that an individual or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for certain communication and have the architecture support those desires. Expressing consent is more straightforward on an individual basis; as the solution is moved closer to the source, it is more difficult to express a policy that satisfies all downstream receivers. The research group will investigate the feasibility of: (1) a single architecture that supports this and (2) a framework that allows different systems to be plugged in to provide different pieces of the solution.
Network World Fusion article
Wired News article
February 26, 2003, 3:38 pm
