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Turing Award for Grace Hopper: The ACM responds

On March 1, a blog reader responded to the news about the 2006 ACM A.M. Turing Award — which recognized Fran Allen as the first female recipient of this honor — asking a pointed question:

I guess the Lady Admiral who wrote Fortran wasn’t very important… So I won’t bother to even name her. After all, she only worked for the U.S. Government and not a large conglomerate like IBM…

I asked the Association for Computing Machinery if the Turing Award committee had a response to this question. Here’s what they told me this morning.

“Good morning Alan, and thanks for your patience. We appreciate your interest in ACM’s Turing Award, and the issue it raises about women and technology. So let me explain how the process works.

“ACM’s A.M. Turing Award recipient is selected by a committee of prominent computer scientists and engineers. The selection process is confidential, and no single person knows the history of all the deliberations over the years.

“ACM has recognized Grace Hopper with the Grace Murray Hopper Award which originated in 1971. It is presented to the outstanding young computer professional of the year. In addition, ACM is a co-sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing which is now an annual event. It is designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.

“As the demand for talented computing professionals grows, it is increasingly imperative that women and other underrepresented groups be encouraged to pursue this career path. The recognition provided by ACM’s Turing Award this year has already raised awareness of the achievements of women in the field. We hope this news will motivate girls and women to see the growing opportunities for exciting careers, and to get the recognition they have earned as critical contributors to technology and innovation.”

While I’m delighted that the ACM focuses on the issues of women and technology (which it does in a very prominent way), and that Adm. Hopper was given many other honors, it’s a shame that she was not given their highest honor.

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Congratulations, Fran Allen!

The 2006 recipient of the ACM Turing Award is Frances E. Allen, a retired researcher from IBM. To quote from the ACM’s announcement,

Allen, an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T.J. Watson Research Center, made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of program optimization, which translates the users’ problem-solving language statements into more efficient sequences of computer instructions. Her contributions also greatly extended earlier work in automatic program parallelization, which enables programs to use multiple processors simultaneously in order to obtain faster results. These techniques have made it possible to achieve high performance from computers while programming them in languages suitable to applications. They have contributed to advances in the use of high performance computers for solving problems such as weather forecasting, DNA matching, and national security functions.

You can learn a lot more about Ms. Allen (pictured) at the IBM Archives. It’s noteworthy that Ms. Allen is the first woman to be honored with the ACM Turing Award, and has indeed been heaped with many professional “firsts,” including being the first woman named an IBM Fellow.

Ms. Allen even has an IBM award named after her, the “Frances E. Allen Women in Technology Mentoring Award,” of which she was the first recipient. She also received the first Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership in 2004. Technologically, her groundbreaking work was in compiler optimization and in cryptography.

Ms. Allen retired from IBM in 2002.

The ACM Turing Award has been presented since 1966, and according to the ACM, it’s “given to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.” I

t’s a shame that it’s taken 40 years to recognize the first woman for the most prestigious award in computing, but historically there have been few women at the highest levels of our profession. Not only was Fran Allen the right person to win the ACM Turing Award, but perhaps this honor will inspire more young women to enter the fields of computer science and software engineering. Their talents, like Allen’s, are both needed and appreciated.

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Consolidation, growth in software security

Yesterday, we learned that Fortify Software will be buying Secure Software. Each company makes source code analysis tools. Both are well-regarded in terms of the quality of their products, and in the expertise of their teams.

However, Secure Software had been undergoing a transformation, as the well-known security guru, John Viega, had already left the company (in March 2006) to join McAfee. This led to questions about the future of CLASP, the comprehensive, lightweight, application security process that Viega developed. The sale of Secure Software was no surprise.

What did surprise me, however, is that it was bought by another small security company. We’re certainly the point when bigger ALM companies, such as Borland, IBM Rational, Telelogic or Serena, should be adding security tools to their product portfolio. It’s not a question of if, but when, these specialist firms get snatched up.

This consolidation of the software security market is offset by the launch of a new player. The next issue of SD Times introduces us to a new player, Veracode, which was created out of the remnants of V0pht, a hacker collective in Boston. Look for Alex Handy’s story, coming out on Feb. 1st.

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Greetings, Earthlings and Script Kiddies

cobra wheelWelcome to my blog. It has to start somewhere, and this is where it starts. And the trek had to start sometime; it should have started a long time ago, but it didn’t, so here we are.

This blog will be a spot to discuss topics of professional and personal interest to me, mainly focused on the realm of information technology, focusing on software development, security, enterprise computing, and the like.

Let me start with a story software hacking that begins, oddly enough, with an automotive service experience.

Earlier this week, I took my beloved 1993 Mustang GT to the Ford dealer for a routine maintenance, which includes a tire rotation. At about 11:00 am, I got a call from the service advisor: “Mr. Zeichick, I can’t find the key for your wheel locks. Where is it?”

I drove back to the shop, we searched high and we searched low. We couldn’t find the special key, so we skipped that part of the service.

But now I’ve got my mighty steed parked in the driveway, with a missing wheel lock key. What if I get a flat? I need to get those locks off pronto!

Wheel locks are a nuisance. However, I have expensive Ford Cobra rims, the dealer advised that their TTL (time to live) without locks would be less than a week. Ever since, I assumed that the wheel locks would do a decent job protecting the vehicle. How can I get them off without damaging the wheels? Gosh, this is going to be hard.

Time to ask an expert. I went to my local Sears hardware store with a spare lug nut, and asked my favorite salesman if he knew how to jury-rig sockets, wrenches, pry bars and other implements to get the wheel locks off. “Relax,” he laughed, and referred me to the “SK 2-Piece 1/2-Inch Drive Wheel Removal Kit” designed expressly for removing damaged lug nuts and wheel locks.

Five minutes after getting home, the lock nuts were removed, without damaging the wheels or bolts. And three of those five minutes were spent finding the half-inch socket set.

My confidence in Sears went up – while my confidence in wheels locks went down. If I could buy this tool “over the counter” at my local hardware store, then presumably anyone who wanted to lift wheels would already have one. Bottom line: those wheel locks wouldn’t have even slowed a thief down. Ignorance was bliss. My ignorance could have cost me, big-time, especially if those had been really expensive rims, or if the car was routinely parked on the street, instead of in my garage.

When it comes to people who want to break into your system, there are two types: technical experts, who will use their superior knowledge and experience to find and exploit your Web site or application vulnerabilities – and “script kiddies,” who will simply apply pre-existing hack techniques and use tools created by other people. Just like any petty thief could buy the wheel-lock removal kit at Sears, so any script kiddie can download hacking tools for free.

Now I’m hunting for a better grade of wheel lock… and you should be making sure that your own app-security measures won’t fall to the first script kiddie who decides to target your applications and data with an over-the-counter tool.