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The Symposium on Foundations in Software Engineering is an annual conference sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery, a computer portal and dedicated to the presentation of innovative research results contributing to an engineering discipline for software systems. This special section of the July 1998 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering features three of the best papers from the fourth symposium, held in October 1996 in San Francisco, California. During its first half-decade, research results presented at this conference have covered engineering research topics. However, a number of distinguishing properties tend to characterize the best of the papers and have helped set the standards for high-quality software engineering research. The three papers in this special section illustrate these properties. One of the critical challenges for software engineering research is to find practical tools that help system builder restructure existing systems. Mark Moriconi was general chair for the symposium and deserves considerable credit for its success.

Presents news briefs related to Internet computing as of June 2005. Information on new approval and classification systems adopted by the Open Source Initiative board for open-source licenses at its April 205 meeting in San Francisco, California; Recipients of the 14th annual Pioneer Awards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Background on new top-level domains approved by the International Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers at its April 2005 meeting in Argentina.

The article highlights the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) Conference held in April 2004 in Berkeley, California. Three years in the making, the Council of Europe Cybercrime Treaty will go into effect on July 1, 2004. The legislation calls for, among other things, international cooperation among law enforcement officers attempting to investigate crimes committed by computer. Indeed, records retention will be a big question for the technology community once the treaty goes into effect. The CFP Conference also discussed the work of the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society, which drew more than 10,000 delegates from governments, industry and activist groups to its December 2003 meeting. In a related conference session, attendees looked at wiretapping efforts, which are increasingly encroaching on Internet communications. Federal and local law enforcement intercepted some 2.2 million conversations with court approval in 2002, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. For the technology community, the balance between security and privacy presents both a philosophical and a technical challenge.