Computing Now's News Podcast

US National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a testing tool designed to cut costs by finding software flaws more efficiently than similar approaches.

Researchers have developed a high-tech brush that lets users create art by picking up images, video, audio, colors, and textures from objects and painting them onto a touch-screen canvas.

Personal mobile hotspots let users wirelessly access network services even when no traditional Wi-Fi hotspots are nearby.

Concerned organizations say basic flaws in Web-security design may be causing many websites that display padlock icons-designed to show that they're secure-to be unsafe.

Two scientists have developed a system that uses ambient radio waves to generate energy, potentially eliminating the need for batteries in mobile devices. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.263

Academic researchers have developed an approach that promises to make object-recognition systems efficient users of system memory and thus also of computational resources. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.263

A new product promises to help users determine the most relevant results of their online searches. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.263

A researcher has developed visualization techniques and a toolkit that let users comb through disease-related statistics in otherwise unexamined sources - such as patient records and newspaper articles - to discover geographic trends that could help control the spread of illnesses. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.236

Purdue University researchers are working on a small device that converts laser pulses into radio signals, which could enable high-speed wireless communications in place of many of the wired transmissions currently used in home and office systems. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.236

A Carnegie Mellon University doctoral student has developed a prototype system that could let users turn their arms or hands into keyboards or display screens via acoustic vibrations produced by tapping their skin. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.236

Researchers are beginning to work on an approach they call social TV, which seamlessly combines social networks and traditional television viewing. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC

A Canadian university researcher is working on ways to provide security for RFID technology. His approach would let users know when a reader is accessing information on an RFID tag or enable them to control access to the data. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.204

A proposed specification that would standardize Web-based fonts promises to enable rich typography on the Web. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.178

Researchers have developed a new approach to steganography that could conceal information on CDs in a way that makes it unreadable by conventional CD players but detectable by specially designed devices. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.178

A standards organization has finished work on Bluetooth 4.0, which will offer high data rates and work with low-power devices such as medical and physical-fitness sensors. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.178

For centuries, academic libraries have faced challenges in preserving and storing important written documents. Now, they face a new set of hurdles in preserving and storing born-digital material. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.141