by T. N. Vijaykumar on Jun 6, 2019 | Tags: Conference, Opinion
We would find it unacceptable for grading in a college-level course to be done by multiple TAs without any rubric or common guidelines. Why is it acceptable for our career-affecting review process?
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by Timothy Roscoe on May 13, 2019 | Tags: Accelerators, Datacenters, Hardware, Operating Systems, Opinion, Systems
This is a time of great interest in new hardware. Computers are becoming much more complex. The multicore era has given way to increasingly heterogeneous computing platforms. Modern SoCs contain a tremendous variety of processors, accelerators, and peripheral devices,...
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by Mark Silberstein on Feb 26, 2019 | Tags: Advice, Opinion
Modern academic culture is founded on perpetual evaluation and relentless ranking of researchers and their results. Obtaining competitive research funds and publishing in top-tier venues are prerequisites to a successful career. Unfortunately, as was shown by several...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan, Steven M. Bellovin, Paul Kocher, Ed Suh on Feb 7, 2019 | Tags: Opinion, Security
In a recent opinion post on security disclosures, Uht questions if the public disclosure of hardware security vulnerabilities has had any benefits, and suggests that it would be better not to disclose these vulnerabilities. As Uht points out, debate on security...
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by Gus Uht on Jan 31, 2019 | Tags: Opinion, Security
There are millions of viruses, etc., in the wild today. Countless new ones are devised by black-hat hackers all the time. In order to proactively defend against new exploits, some white-hatters seek out or create weaknesses or vulnerabilities and then devise fixes for them. However, in some cases, such as Spectre, fixes are not readily apparent, either to the inventor or the vendor of the target software or hardware. Regardless of the existence of a fix or not, the question arises as to what to publicize or disclose about the vulnerability. We argue that no public disclosure should be made at all, until and unless the exploit appears in the wild.
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