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 Computational Complexity
Random Thought on AI from someone in the REAL WORLD
Guest Post from Nick Sovitch.
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Bill Gasarch recently blogged on RANDOM THOUGHTS ON AI here . He is in the realm of theory. I am in the realm of applications…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
JavaScript hashing speed comparison: MD5 versus SHA-256
Hashing algorithms convert input data into a fixed-size string of characters, known as a hash value or digest. These algorithms are one-way functions, meaning the original data cannot be feasibly retrieved from the hash, which…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Adrian Stokes: Internet pioneer
We take the Internet for granted now, but it is not that long ago that it did not exist at all. Despite being disabled from birth with spina bifida, Adrian Stokes was one of the people who helped build it: a celebrated “Internet…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Cotton-and-Squid-Bone Sponge
News:
A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report…From insideHPC
TSMC: December Monthly Revenue up 58% YoY
HSINCHU, Taiwan, R.O.C. – Jan. 10, 2025 – TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced its net revenue for last mont. On a consolidated basis, revenue for December 2024 was approximately NT$278.16 billion, an increase of 0.8
…
From Schneier on Security
Apps That Are Spying on Your Location
404 Media is reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics:
The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics…From insideHPC
Blackstone Invests $300M in DDN at $5B Valuation
Chatsworth, CA, January 9, 2025 – AI and data intelligence solutions company DDN today announced an investment of $300 million from Blackstone, an alternative asset manager, valuing the company at $5 billion. “This investment…
From insideHPC
Hammerspace and Cloudian Partner on Unstructured Data Management
SAN MATEO, Calif. – January 9, 2025 – Data orchestration company Hammerspace and Cloudian, an S3-compatible object storage company, have announced a partnership to deliver a solution for managing unstructured data at scale. Combining…
From Schneier on Security
Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN
It’s being actively exploited.
From Computational Complexity
When DO Names Change? When SHOULD Names Change?
BILL: Good news for Jimmy Carter! He won The Betty White Award! (see here).
LANCE: That's not good news. He had to die to get it.
BILL: Call it a mixed bag. Good news for me, in that I have a famous person for The Betty White…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Herman Hollerith: from punch cards to a special company
Herman Hollerith, the son of immigrants, struggled early on at school and then later in bookkeeping at college but it didn’t stop him inventing machines that used punch cards to store data. He founded a company to make and sell…
From insideHPC
PSC Interns to Represent US at ISC 2025 Student Competition
Pittsburgh — A team of interns from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has been selected to represent the United States at an international high-performance computing (HPC) competition for students. PSC’s “Benchmark Beasts”…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Counting the digits of 64-bit integers
Given an integer in software, you may want to know how many decimal digits it needs. For example, the integer 100 requires 3 digits, the integer 9999 requires 4 digits. It would be an easy problem if we could compute the logarithm…
From insideHPC
Nvidia at CES: Omniverse Blueprint for Industry, Generative Physical AI, Access to Blackwells, Cosmos Model for Physical AI
Nvidia issued its anticipated raft of news at CES this week, here’s an overview of announcements for the HPC-AI sector: ‘Mega’ Omniverse Blueprint for Industrial Robot Fleet Digital Twins The company said Mega is an omniverse…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Nominations Open
The mission of Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact computing research that aligns with pressing national and global challenges. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement…
From Schneier on Security
US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks
From the Washington Post:
The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled…From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A handshaking puzzle
By Przemysław Wałęga, Queen Mary University of London Logical reasoning and proof, whether done using math notation or informally in your head, is an important tool of computer scientists. The idea of proving, however, is often…
From insideHPC
Quantum: IonQ Completes Acquisition of Qubitekk
COLLEGE PARK, MD – January 6, 2025 – IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) today announced the completion of its acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Qubitekk, Inc., a quantum networking company. The acquisition brings Qubitekk’s esteemed…
From Computational Complexity
The Betty White Award for 2024
In Jan of 2023 I estabalished the Betty White Award, see here which is given to people who died late in the prior year and hence won't be in the those who we lost in year X articles. I also gave out a few from prior years. Here…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Tanaka Atsuko: an electric dress
Wearable computing is now increasingly common whether wearing smart watches or clothes that light up. The pioneer of the latter was Japanese artist, Tanaka Atsuko, with her 1950s art work, Electric Dress. It was anything butContinue…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post
I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week (with maybe only a few exceptions). There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other…
From insideHPC
LLNL to Lead Research on Advancing Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
EUV, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is nearly completely associated with the Dutch company ASML, the only maker of EUV machines that are used by TSMC, Intel and other chip manufacturers of advanced HPC-AI chips. Now Lawerence…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Electric Dreams and Solid Light at the Tate Modern
Two current exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London that those interesting in technology and art may want to see are “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet”, and Anthony McCall’s truly wonderful “Solid Light…
From Schneier on Security
ShredOS
ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data.
GitHub page here.
From insideHPC
Eni Officially Unveils €100M HPC6 Supercomputer for Exploration and Decarbonization
Italian energy company Eni has officially announced one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers that will be used to to scale up its oil and gas discovery technology and support its decarbonisation and clean energy strategies…
From insideHPC
Rigetti Launches 84-Qubit Ankaa-3 Quantum System
BERKELEY, Calif.,– Quantum-classical computing company Rigetti announced the launch of its flagship 84-qubit Ankaa-3 system featuring a hardware redesign. Rigetti said it also has achieved two-qubit gate fidelity milestones with…
From Schneier on Security
Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How does your URL parser handle Unicode?
Most strings today in software are Unicode strings. It means that you can include mathematical symbols, emojis and so forth. There are many different versions of the letter ‘M’, for example: the Roman letter M (U+004D) is semantically…
From Computational Complexity
My Drunken Theorem
Bill's SIGACT Open Problems Column remembering Luca Trevisan is out. I chose the problem of whether Promise-ZPP in P implies Promise-BPP in P, an extension of an earlier theorem by Luca and his co-authors, which showed that Promise…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
My first Signs
Alexander Graham Bell was inspired by the deafness of his mother to develop new technologies to help. Lila Harrar, then a computer science student at Queen Mary, University of London was also inspired by a deaf person to do something…