AT&T recently celebrated the opening of its new AT&T Labs facility in Silicon Valley. On hand were AT&T CTO and president of AT&T Labs David Nagel and CEO C. Michael Armstrong. Nagel, formerly of Apple Computer and NASA Ames Research Center, said that AT&T wanted to bring the innovation in the Silicon Valley to AT&T's customers. Armstrong emphasized AT&T's focus on Internet services, and said that he wanted to "make the phone the most ubiquitous IP device in the world."
The Lab's emphasis on Internet technologies and commercialization of technology was apparent from its demos, which were less-than-impressive, especially considering what the old Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies) used to produce. Among the demonstrations were a web-based phone directory, speech recognition, and crypto platform for distributing digital content. The most interesting demonstration was of DjVu, an imaging solution that used a new compression technique for separating the foreground from the background of an image and compressing the two separately.
Armstrong also suggested that flat-rate pricing for Internet access will continue and even expand into other communications services as a better alternative to the complicated billing processes currently in existence.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
Bowing to the onslaught of technology, the U.S. Naval Academy has dropped sextant navigation as a required course, in favor of computer-based Geographical Positioning Systems (GPS). In addition to being easier to learn and faster to operate, GPS is also more accurate than traditional celestial navigation. Sextants are accurate only to a three-mile radius; computers communicating with satellites are accurate to within 60 feet. Midshipmen aren't crying over the loss -- "cel-nav" has been one of the most tedious classes at the Academy.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Technology has made your life easier, right? According to a recent study by office-product company Pitney Bowes, office workers are receiving an average of 190 communications during the typical workday: 52 telephone calls per day lead the way, followed by 30 e-mail messages, 22 voicemail messages, 15 faxes, four pager calls, and so on. The study, which was based on a survey of 1000 workers in large companies, identified 12 forms of communication, from phone calls to interoffice mail. Compared to a similar study last year, the number of person-to-person phone calls fell, while e-mail and voicemail messaging grew.
-- Jonathan Erickson
According to a recently published report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the pro-Microsoft web site called "The Committee for the Moral Defense of Microsoft" runs on the freely available Linux operating system and Apache web server -- not, as you might expect, Windows NT. 'Nuff said.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Amiga Inc. has announced that it is developing a next-generation Amiga operating system. Amiga, purchased by Gateway last year, will release Amiga OS 4.0 in November, which will run on x86-based systems and retail for $999. The system will run old Amiga applications via emulation, and serve as a "bridge" system for a new open hardware architecture specification, to be based on a microprocessor that is currently under development, and Amiga OS 5.0, which may incorporate an existing kernel to speed development. Amiga hopes to dominate the "convergence" market of television and other media with computers. (Jeff Schindler, the general manager of Amiga, led Gateway's Destination System project.) But will people buy it? If sentimentality has anything to do with it, probably. Programmers who once owned an Amiga fondly remember a high-powered machine and operating system, with its 32-bit multitasking, advanced memory, and high-performance graphics -- all available on an affordable PC in the mid-1980s. And according to Bill McEwen, head of Amiga's sales and marketing, Amiga sales continue to be strong in Europe, and there are over 30 monthly print magazines in the world devoted to the Amiga.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to ease encryption restrictions -- including export limits on encryption. The legislation would also guarantee the right to encrypt messages. The bill, offered by Senators John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), is a compromise among privacy advocates, the computer industry, and law enforcement. The Justice Department has not agreed to support it.
Among other features, the proposed law would require law enforcement to get a court order to get the code for unscrambling messages whenever key recovery is used voluntarily, make it a crime to willfully use encryption to conceal incriminating information, establish a "net center" under the attorney general to help federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies break encryption codes and share information about encryption technology, and ease restrictions on the export of mass-market encryption software.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Computer users aren't the only ones in danger of carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyone who performs highly repetitive motion can suffer from cumulative trauma disorders -- including chicken deboners. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed the Ergonomic Work Assessment System (EWAS), based on work pioneered by Georgia Tech's Agricultural Technology Research Program (ATRP). The system measures wrist position, cutting forces, and muscle exertion used by poultry workers as they debone chickens. Although it's being tested in poultry plants, EWAS can be adapted to virtually any work environment.
-- Jonathan Erickson
The security consulting firm Counterpane Systems (http://www.counterpane.com/) has uncovered what it claims is a flaw in Microsoft's Point-to-Point Tunneling (PPTP) protocol. PPTP is an Internet protocol designed to provide security needed to create and maintain a virtual private network (VPN) over a TCP/IP network. According to Counterpane president Bruce Schneier, the flaw is not with PPTP itself, but with Microsoft's implementation, which "uses weak authentication and poor encryption." Schneier goes on to say that Microsoft PPTP "use the user's password as an encryption key instead of using any of the well-known and more secure alternatives."
-- Jonathan Erickson