Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2025
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Oh no! Not again…
What a mess. There’s flour all over the kitchen floor. A fortnight ago I opened the cupboard to get sugar for my hot chocolate. As I pulled out the sugar, it knocked against the bag of flour which was too close to the edge… Luckily…
From Computational Complexity
People who live through two square years
44*44=1936.
45*45=2025. This year!
46*46= 2116.
Since my fake birthday is Oct 1, 1960 (I do not reveal my real birthday to try to prevent ID theft), which is past 1936, and I won't live to 2116 unless Quantum-AI finds a way toSince…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Regular expressions can blow up!
Regular expressions, often abbreviated as regex, are a powerful tool for pattern matching within text. For example, the expression \d*\.?\d+ would match a positive number such as 1.1 or 12. If designed and tested with care, regular…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid
A Travers’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that “the prevalence of squid remains [in its stomachs] suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of…
From insideHPC
$200M HPC Data Center for AI in Wisconsin Launched by DPO and Billerud
NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2025 — Digital Power Optimization, Inc. (“DPO”), a developer and operator of power-dense data centers, today announced it has secured land and a power supply to develop a $200 million high-performance computing…
From insideHPC
Pipeshift Raises $2.5M for AI Infrastructure Platform
San Francisco – January 23, 2025: Today, AI infrastructure startup Pipeshift announced their $2.5 illion seed round to address the challenge of deploying open source AI models, launching a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables…
From Schneier on Security
Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)
Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024) at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the…
From insideHPC
DigitalOcean Launches Generative AI Platform
Austin, TX – January 22, 2025 – Today, scalable cloud provider DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) introduced its new GenAI Platform at the company’s biannual developer conference, Deploy, in Austin, Texas. The GenAI Platform allows customers…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for CCC Council Member Nominations
Thank you to everyone who has nominated a colleague or nominated themselves for the opportunity to be a CCC Council member for the three-year term beginning July 1, 2025 and concluding June 30, 2028. Read more here. As a reminder…
From Computational Complexity
The Fighting Temeraire
From Schneier on Security
AI Will Write Complex Laws
Artificial intelligence (AI) is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies—all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the…
From insideHPC
QuEra: Quantum Budgets to Grow by 20%
Boston – January 22, 2025 – Research from neutral-atom quantum coputing company QuEra Computing indicates global budgets for quantum applications projected to rise nearly 20 percent in 2025, according to the company. The findings…
From insideHPC
White House Announces $500B AI Data Center Infrastructure Build-Out
The Trump Administration ended its first full day of business with a major AI business announcement, that hundreds of billions of dollars – potentially trillions of dollars – will be invested in the build-out of AI infrastructure…
From insideHPC
Liquid Cooling: Iceotope Names New CEO, Non-Executive Chairman
San Francisco and Sheffield, UK – January 15, 2025 – Iceotope, a liquid cooling for AI systems company, today announced two leadership appointments designed to transition the company from its roots in technology R&D to mass market…
From insideHPC
Seagate Introduces Hard Drive Capacities up to 36TB
FREMONT, CA, January 21, 2025 – Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a maker of of mass capacity data storage, today announced shipments of Exos M hard drive samples to select customers in capacities up to 36 terabytes…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC and CRA-I Respond to NTIA Request for Comment on Ethical Guidelines for Research Using Pervasive Data
Last week, CCC, in collaboration with CRA-Industry, submitted a Response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Department of Commerce’s Request for Comments: Ethical Guidelines for Research…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
I wandered lonely as a mass of dejected vapour – try some AI poetry
by Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London Ever used an online poem generator, perhaps to get started with an English assignment? They normally have a template and some word lists you can fill in, with a simple algorithmContinue…
From Schneier on Security
AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes
Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses…
From insideHPC
Hammerspace a Finalist in 3 Categories of theCUBE Technology Innovation Awards
SAN MATEO, Calif. — January 20, 2025 — Hammerspace, the company orchestrating the next data cycle, has been recognized as a finalist in three categories of theCUBE Technology Innovation Awards, including “Most Innovative Tech…
From Schneier on Security
Biden Signs New Cybersecurity Order
President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide.
Some details:
The core of the executive…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Checking whether an ARM NEON register is zero
Your phone probably runs on 64-bit ARM processors. These processors are ubiquitous: they power the Nintendo Switch, they power cloud servers at both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, they power fast laptops, and so forth. ARM processors…
From Computational Complexity
Presidential Quiz!
I made up a quiz about the American Presidents here.
It has 40 questions. In the modern electronic age you can probably look up most or even all of the answers. So what to do about that?
1) The quiz is not for money or credits…From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Conjuring with logic: the remote control red-black mind meld
Magic tricks are just algorithms – they involve a magician following the steps of the trick precisely. But how can a magician be sure a trick will definitely work when they do it in front of an audience? Just like computer scientists…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Opioid Alternatives from Squid Research
Is there nothing that squid research can’t solve?
“If you’re working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic…From insideHPC
@HPCpodcast Industry View: A Deep Dive into High-Density Data Center Cooling and Efficiency Strategies with DDC Solutions
In this “Industry View” episode of the @HPCpodcast, Chris Orlando of DDC Solutions discusses the rapidly changing landscape of high density data center cooling, monitoring, safety and compliance, hybrid liquid-air solutions and…
From Schneier on Security
Social Engineering to Disable iMessage Protections
I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem.
A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CRA Releases 2024-2025 Quadrennial Paper Series, Including Many CCC Led Papers
We are pleased to announce that today CRA is releasing the 2024-2025 Quadrennial Paper Series. Every four years, the Computing Research Association, through its subcommittees, publishes a series of Quadrennial white papers that…
From Schneier on Security
FBI Deletes PlugX Malware from Thousands of Computers
According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from “approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks.”
To retrieve information from and send commands to the hackedAccording…From insideHPC
At SC24: An Update from HPC-AI Skills Development Organization OpenACC
OpenACC helps the scientific R&D community develop their accelerated computing skills. Here are Dr. Sunita Chandrasekaran of the Univ. of Delaware and OpenACC User Group Chair, and NVIDIA's Jack Wells, Director of Higher Education…
From insideHPC
DOE Announces $625M Quantum Research Funding Opportunity
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC) announced that $625 million is available to support National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. These centers, which are multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary…