In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages “disappear” after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.
A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers.
For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. That metaphor is the map.
The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.
“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff.
For Apple, these are the best of times and the worst of times. The Cupertino, Calif., consumer electronics company is on a tear like never before. But there have also been dramatic stumbles.
At the outset of his presentation at the opening session of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs showed a slide of a stool with three legs to describe the company’s businesses: Macintosh, music and the iPhone. The company is making another bet on parallelism, and the implications may be more profound than anyone yet realizes.
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