Intel is turning to former DARPA researcher Dave Tennenhouse to move beyond the clock-speed race with AMD. He wants Intel to take risks and pursue smart dust, personal area networks, and "proactive" (aka ubiquitous or pervasive) computing. It looks like Intel may be beginning to hedge its bets in case the folks at Bell Labs (and elsewhere, presumably) can't commoditize molecular electronics within the next few years.

Corporate Techies Pursue Disruptive Technologies

Papers of interest from an upcoming conference, to be held in Japan on October 23-26:

Knowledge Is Power: The Semantic Web Vision
Social Networks on the Web and in the Enterprise
Emerging Topic Tracking System
Dynamic Expert Group Models for Recommender Systems
The ABC's of Online Community
Collecting, Visualizing, and Exchanging Personal Interests and Experiences in Communities
Discovering Seeds of New Interest Spread from Premature Pages Cited by Multiple Communities
Collaborative Filtering Using Principal Component Analysis and Fuzzy Clustering
An Adaptive Recommendation System with a Coordinator Agent
Discovery of Emerging Topics between Communities on WWW

LNAI 2198: Web Intelligence: Research and Development

In the November issue of MIT Technology Review, Mark Fraunfelder talks with Tim Berners-Lee and others about the companies on the leading edge of the Semantic Web development effort.

Technology Review - A Smarter Web

Jessica Litman, a Wayne State University law professor who is an expert on copyright law, has prompted renewed debate among scholars about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with her book Digital Copyright (Prometheus Books, 2001). In the book, she argues that copyright holders and owners crafted the law, and that consumers' interests were ignored."

Q-and-A with a well-known lawyer addresses the ins and outs of the DMCA, including the Sklyarov and Felten cases.

Law Professor Sparks a New Debate Over Flaws in Digital-Copyright Act

Fact Squad provides information from acknowledged and respected experts (many with decades of experience in their fields), not from vested interests attempting to skew available information regarding these topics exclusively for their own betterment."

Fact Squad

by Yochai Benkler, professor of law at New York University.

"New communications technologies offer the potential to be used to promote fundamental values such as autonomy and democratic discourse, but, as Professor Yochai Benkler discusses in this Article, recent government actions have disfavored these possibilities by stressing private rights in information. He recommends that laws regulating the information economy be evaluated in terms of two effects: whether they empower one group to control the information environment of another group, and whether they reduce the diversity of perspectives communicated. Professor Benkler criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of information policy on property and commercial rights, which results in a concentrated system of production and homogenous information products. He suggests alternative policies that promote a commons in information, which would distribute information production more widely and permit a greater diversity of communications.

Outline:
* Autonomy, Law, and Information for Context-Bound Individuals
* Property and Influence
* Social Patterns of Information Flow and Personal Autonomy
* Conclusion: Paths for the Taking

Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law [PDF]

From the introduction: "One of the more confusing paradoxes of this Internet Era is that even as more information is becoming readily available than ever before, various commercial forces are converging to make information more scarce, or at least more expensive and amenable to strict market control. More than an oddity, this paradox may be an augury about the fate of the free information ecology that has long distinguished our democratic culture.

Can The Information Commons Be Saved? [PDF]

An excellent and freely available 181-page "textbook" about modern cryptography. From the preface:

"This is a set of class notes that we have been developing jointly for some years. We use them for the graduate cryptography courses that we teach at our respective institutions. Each time one of us teaches the class, he takes the token and updates the notes a bit. [...] The viewpoint taken throughout these notes is to emphasize the theory of cryptography as it can be applied to practice."

Topics include: Block Ciphers; Pseudorandom Functions; Symmetric Encryption; Hash Functions; Message Authentication; Authenticated Encryption; Number Theory; Asymmetric Encryption; Digital Signatures; Key Distribution; Zero Knowledge Proofs; and more.

Introduction to Modern Cryptography, by Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway [PDF]

Bob Woodward's latest report appears "above the fold" in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post:

"President Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al Qaeda network, according to senior government officials."

Washington Post: CIA Told to Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill Bin Laden

Lexant: The technology at the heart of the MindfulEye suite of services is an artificial intelligence system called Lexant. [L]earn how Lexant reads and understands online discussion to turn raw Internet data into actionable information."

MindfulEye.com: The World Talks. We Listen.