Internet

The growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and College of Engineering have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attacks.
The system, called Perspectives, also can protect against attacks related to [...]

Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, however, is a matter of debate.
Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos. While initially used to share pirated material, the system is now used by [...]

More than 75 percent of the bank Web sites surveyed in a University of Michigan study had at least one design flaw that could make customers vulnerable to cyber thieves after their money or even their identity.
Atul Prakash, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and doctoral students Laura Falk and [...]

A genome sequence is a long sequence written in a four letter code — 3 billion letters in the case of a human genome. But what is the meaning — how is the code deciphered? Traditionally this is left to professional annotators who use information from a number of sources (for instance, knowledge about similar [...]

Businesses risk chasing away prospective customers when they send chummy e-mails that bandy around people’s names, hobbies and other personal information to pitch sales, according to a new study of the popular marketing tool.
"People bristle at personalization just for the sake of personalization," said Tiffany Barnett White, a University of Illinois marketing professor who headed [...]

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised the first computerized method that can analyze a single photograph and determine where in the world the image likely was taken. It’s a feat made possible by searching through millions of GPS-tagged images in the Flickr online photo collection.
The IM2GPS algorithm developed by computer science graduate student James [...]

You buy a television on eBay. When it arrives, you eagerly unwrap it, only to find it is badly scratched. You return it, and leave a negative comment about the seller on the site. The next day, you find the seller has retaliated by posting a nasty comment about you, branding you as a time-waster. [...]

At the request of a worldwide Internet organization, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new “top-level domains” — the last part of an Internet address, such as .com, that people type in navigating the Web. As new top-level domains are [...]

Proactive policies are needed to facilitate broadband Internet access and adoption in rural areas so that rural hospitals, schools and businesses can drive social and economic development and better position themselves to compete, say Penn State researchers in a recently released report from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.
The report, “Broadband Internet Use in Rural Pennsylvania,” [...]

Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others — or terrible misfortune if it isn’t. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question — how do [...]

If you use one of America’s top Internet service providers, you may share server space with an organization that enables worldwide terrorism, says a new study by Tel Aviv University.
A workshop on terrorist organizations and the Internet was organized for the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) by the Netvision Institute for Internet Studies (NIIS) and [...]

Philanthropy just got easier and a lot more accessible to the public thanks to the social networking power of the Internet and a ground-breaking partnership between a young British entrepreneur, a global health think tank, and an African medical research institute.
Debuted April 20 to offer individuals a meaningful way to mark World Malaria Day (Friday, [...]

In a first-of-its-kind study, UC Irvine researchers have provided new insight into blog readers’ online habits and experiences, as well as how they perceive their roles in blog-based communities.
The research, led by Eric Baumer, doctoral candidate at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; Mark Sueyoshi, international studies and East Asian cultures undergraduate [...]

Gnomie David Orban writes:
Hi, Chris!
I wanted to let you know about a new initiative with which I am involved. Here it is!
You have heard about spimes. They are a new class of objects, originally envisioned by Bruce Sterling, author and Wired columnist, who also invented the term by compressing ’space’ and ‘time.’ Spimes are aware [...]

A fascinating new paper from the Journal of Consumer Research investigates the seven-year war on music downloading that unfolded among corporate music executives and music downloaders. Markus Giesler (York University) uses a performance-ethnography approach, studying the music marketplace as a cultural stage on which consumers and producers interact as dramatic players to reach their conflicting [...]

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has resolved to formally request the Free Software Software Foundation (FSF) modify the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) so that mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia can use and license existing GFDL content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license.
“We are grateful for the wonderful work the Free Software [...]

With public concern over online fraud, new research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, has revealed that internet users will reveal more personal information online if they believe they can trust the organisation that requests the information. ‘Even people who have previously demonstrated a high level of caution regarding online privacy will accept [...]

Being among the first to pick up on Internet news and gossip and rapidly detecting contamination anywhere in a water supply system are similar problems, at least from a computer scientist’s point of view. Both can be solved with a versatile algorithm developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers.
Using a problem-solving method called the Cascades algorithm, [...]

Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You’re studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor’s explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don’t have time to [...]