Dr. Dobb's Journal July, 2004
The first-ever Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to Tim Berners-Lee for his work developing the World Wide Web. The prize carries an award of one million euros. Established by the Finnish government in 2002, the Millennium Technology Prize (http://www.technologyawards.org/) honors "outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development." The prize acknowledges specific technological innovations, rather than lifetime achievements, and is intended to support the awardees' continuing work.
The 2003 Turing Award (http://www .acm.org/awards/taward.html), bestowed by the ACM to honor contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field," has been given to Alan Kay. Kay led the team at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center that invented the object-oriented programming language Smalltalk. The Turing Award, which is accompanied by a $100,000 prize (funded by Intel), has been awarded every year since 1966.
The ACM has also acknowledged Stuart I. Feldman, who developed the Make configuration management system in 1977, with the ACM Software System Award (http://www.acm.org/awards/ssaward.html). The award carries a $10,000 prize (funded by IBM).
A flaw in TCP long thought to be practically impossible to exploit turns out to be a real threat, according to security researcher Paul Watson. The problem involves spoofing TCP packets with the RST (Reset) or SYN (Synchronize) flags set, which could disrupt connections and, in certain cases, constitute a denial of service attack.
The security community has known about TCP Reset attacks for a decade, but because packets are checked for their 32-bit sequence numbers, it's been assumed that the chances of sending a packet with the correct sequence number were only about 1 in 4 billion. Watson, however, pointed out that most systems will accept sequence numbers that are slightly higher than the expected number, under the assumption that packets can arrive out of order. Because an attacker need only find a number that falls within the correct range, it's possible to execute the attack in a reasonable amount of time.
Britain's National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC) issued an advisory about the flaw (http://www .uniras.gov.uk/vuls/2004/236929/index .htm), and Cisco warned that routers using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are particularly vulnerable to the attack. Exploit code is circulating, but most major ISPs have already implemented fixes to guard their networks, and the threat to the Internet at large is judged to be small. For more information, see http://www .packetstormsecurity.org/papers/protocols/ SlippingInTheWindow_v1.0.doc.
The Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code—Basic, for short—has turned 40 years old. Developed in 1964 by Dartmouth College math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny to get students more involved with computers, the language was much easier to learn than other programming languages of its day. Originally Basic ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/ ~mac/dtss.html), a network of multiple simple terminals connected to a large computer. And let's face it, without Basic, there would not have been Microsoft Basic, hence, probably not Microsoft, nor TinyBasic, and Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Internet2 has set a new record for data transmission speeds over IP—a connection set up by researchers from Caltech and CERN averaged speeds of 6.25 gigabits per second over an 11,000 kilometer distance. That's about 10,000 times faster than a DSL connection. This record was set using IPv4; the same team has also recorded transmission speeds of 4 Gbps over the same distance using IPv6. The current Internet2 speed records in various categories are listed at http://lsr.internet2.edu/.
With its Patent Busting Project (http:// www.eff.org/Patent/), the Electronic Frontier Foundation has squared off against "illegitimate patents," citing one-click shopping, framed browsing, and hyperlinking as examples of technologies that are covered by bogus patents. The EFF's efforts will have two stages; the first involves documenting prior art that would show the invalidity of these patents, and collecting evidence to demonstrate that these patents harm the industry and hamper innovation. In the second stage, the EFF will file "re-examination requests" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.