A quick two-page "In The News" article in the October 18 issue of _Nature_. Here's the lead-in:

"It all falls into place...

Researchers working on molecular self-assembly have never lacked ambition, but their dreams of producing commercially viable devices always looked like a distant goal. That may be about to change, says Philip Ball."

"Imagine a future in which computers build themselves. The nanoscale components of these machines would simply be brought together in solution and stirred gently. By tweaking the chemistry of the components so that some are attracted to each other, while others are repelled, the individual parts would assemble themselves, as if by magic, into a working whole." [...]

On the verge of molecular self-assembly?

A new paper on reacting to (distributed) denial of service attacks, published by Micah Adler of UMass-Amherst on October 2. Worth reading; some very clever ideas are emerging on this subject.

"There has been considerable recent interest in probabilistic packet marking schemes for the problem of tracing a sequence of network packets back to an anonymous source. [...] In this paper, we introduce a new marking technique for tracing a sequence of packets sent along the same path. [...] the sequence of packets can be traced back to their source using only a single bit in the packet header. [...]"

Tradeoffs in Probabilistic Packet Marking for IP Traceback

Bill Pohlman, founder of Intel-backed startup Primarion, reports on the progress toward 10 GHz microprocessors within the next four years. A 27-slide presentation (converted here to PDF, sans multimedia) given as the keynote speech to the Microprocessor Forum on October 16.

Outline:
* The 10 GHz Processor
* Power for 10 GHz Processors
* I/O for 10 GHz Processors
* The Encapsulated Processor

Challenges for 10 GHz Processors (from Microprocessor Forum) [PDF]

Digital rights management firm Authentica last month obtained an important patent on the technology behind the company's key product. Here it is, in grep-ready HTML (with page images also available).

I just happened to notice that this patent was awarded on September 11, 2001. I also find it interesting that although Authentica is just down the road in nearby Waltham, the three inventors live in Pennsylvania and Delaware. They also know their lawyers; this patent was handled by Steptoe & Johnson LLP (www.steptoe.com).

Authentica's DRM Patent: US # 6,289,450

"We will continue to leverage this unique architecture in future product development efforts to address evolving business requirements and content types."

Authentica issued DRM-related patent

Most recent responses: Margaret Wertheim, Kevin Kelly, Paul W. Ewald, Roger Schank, Steven Strogatz, J. Doyne Farmer, Esther Dyson, David Berreby, Sylvia Paull, Julian Brown, Jordan Pollack, Cliff Barney, Jay Ogilvy, Timothy Taylor."

Edge 91: What Now?, part 2

Held in Italy in September. Papers of interest:

Interactive Integration of Information Agents on the Web
CoWing: A Collaborative Bookmark Management System
Context Aware Agents for Personal Information Services
Decision Trees for Multiple Abstraction Levels of Data
Supporting Information Integration with Autonomous Agents
Domain-Independent Ontologies for Cooperative Information Agents
Arms Race within Information Ecosystems
Information Agents: The Social Nature of Information and the Role of Trust
Ontology Negotiation as a Basis for Opportunistic Cooperation between Intelligent Information Agents

LNAI 2182: Cooperative Information Agents V

Held in Atlanta, GA just three weeks ago.

Includes papers from Roy Want, Terry Winograd, and from Ma Tech: Gregory Abowd, Cory Kidd, Anind Dey, and Jason Brotherton. Of interest:

Privacy by Design - Principles of Privacy-Aware Ubiquitous Systems
Serendipity within a Ubiquitous Computing Environment: A Case for Opportunistic Browsing
Ubiquitous Computing and The Disappearing Computer - Research Agendas, Issues, and Strategies
Unearthing Virtual History: Using Diverse Interfaces to Reveal Hidden Virtual Worlds
InfoScope: Link from Real World to Digital Information Space

LNCS 2201: Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing

The forum: seeks to bring technologists into the debate; will follow the model of ACM's successful RISKS Forum. [...] The moderator is Edward W. Felten."

ACM Forum on Legal Regulation of Technology

Sponsored by the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT, "An Evening with Noam Chomsky" will be held on Thursday, October 18, 2001 at 7:00 pm. All forum events are broadcast live online.

"The Technology and Culture Forum's speakers represent a wide variety of viewpoints and frequently raise important questions not often heard at MIT in community-wide public forums. The timeliness, importance and unusual character of the perspectives presented at Technology and Culture Forum programs make a special contribution to the intellectual life at MIT."

Noam Chomsky: The New War Against Terror