Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2023
From Schneier on Security
Facebook Enables Messenger End-to-End Encryption by Default
It’s happened. Details here, and tech details here (for messages in transit) and here (for messages in storage)
Rollout to everyone will take months, but it’s a good day for both privacy and security.
Slashdot thread.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 11: the proof of the pudding… mathematical proof
A mathematical proof and a maths puzzle (but no hard sums, promise). Thank you to everyone who’s been reading our Advent Calendar and said nice things about it and shared it with others. If you’re new to our pages you can see…
From Computational Complexity
Where do Journals go to Die?
In 2011 I had a post, here, about a real journal called The Antarctica Journal of Mathematics. Note that I put in the link in the last sentence; however, if you go there you will get to a page that IS labelled with the name of…
From BLOG@CACM
Cook-Levin: The Ugly Underbelly is Good for Us
Don't just tell your students that SAT is NP-Complete; show why.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Virtual reality goggles for mice
To become a Jedi Knight you must have complete control of your thoughts. As you feel the force you start to control your surroundings and make objects move just by thinking. Telekinesis is clearly impossible, but could technology…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Looking Back on Computer Science Education 2023
I’m posting this early this year. My thinking is clear so why wait?
For many, 2023 was the year that Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT and other tools, really toss a stick in the wheel of CS education. Suddenly students could use…From Geeking with Greg
Book excerpt: The rise and fall of wisdom of the crowds
(This is an excerpt from drafts of my book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the Internet and How to Fix It")
Wisdom of the crowds is the epiphany that combining many people's opinions is useful…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 10: #AI – Holly, Ivy and Alexa – chatbots & the useful skill of file management. Plus win at noughts and crosses
Venues around the UK will be livestreaming the Royal Institution's AI-themed Christmas Lectures this week (you can get tickets). Today's post features chatbots and today's puzzle poses whether paper can be intelligent...
From BLOG@CACM
Sensibles of Software Engineering, 1 and 2
Common-sense rules, which projects violate again and again.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Influencer Accidentally Posts Restaurant Table QR Ordering Code
Another rare security + squid story:
The woman—who has only been identified by her surname, Wang—was having a meal with friends at a hotpot restaurant in Kunming, a city in southwest China. When everyone’s selections arrived…From Geeking with Greg
Book excerpt: Manipulating likes, comments, shares, and follows
(This is an excerpt from drafts of my book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the Internet and How to Fix It")
“The systems are phenomenally easy to game,” explained Stanford Internet Observatory…
From insideHPC
Exascale Software for Disaster Weather Warnings
...“the (Exascale Computing Project) software presents an array of possibilities and examples that have proven effective. The accelerated abilities afforded by ECP software give access to faster machines, improve our infrastructure…
From insideHPC
TSMC November 2023 Revenue Down 7.5% YoY
HSINCHU, Taiwan, R.O.C. – Dec. 8, 2023 – TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced its net revenue for November 2023: On a consolidated basis, revenue for November 2023 was approximately NT$206.03 billion, a decrease of 15…
From Schneier on Security
New Bluetooth Attack
New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth.
The vulnerability has been around for at least a decade.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 8: gifts, and wrapping – Tim Berners-Lee, Right to Repair & another computing puzzle
Possibly one of the few times a computer scientist has been cheered at a major sporting event :)
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast Buffer-to-String conversion in JavaScript with a Lookup Table
When programming in a JavaScript environment such as Node.js, you might recover raw data from the network and need to convert the bytes into strings. In a system such as Node.js, you may represent such raw bytes using a Buffer…
From The Noisy Channel
Using Retrievability to Measure Recall
In court, witnesses swear to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Search engines are not under oath, but they should be truthful.
Two metrics for search relevance are precision and recall. Precision means tellingPrecision…From insideHPC
IDC Names Pure Storage a Leader in Container Data Management
Dec. 7, 2023 — Pure Storage announced it has been named a leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Container Data Management 2023 Vendor Assessment. According to the IDC MarketScape: “Portworx is generally well suited…
From insideHPC
CEA-Leti Paper Reports Memristor-Based Bayesian Neural Network Implementation
GRENOBLE, France – Dec. 7, 2023 – A team comprising CEA-Leti, CEA-List and two CNRS laboratories has published a paper in Nature Communications presenting what the authors said is the first complete memristor-based Bayesian neural…
From Schneier on Security
Spying through Push Notifications
When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own reasons or in response to government…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Call for Applications for ACM-W Rising Star Committee Chair
Deadline: 22nd of January, 2024 Apply here ACM-W (ACM Women in Computing) seeks applicants for the next ACM-W Rising Star Committee Chair. The ACM-W Rising Star Award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 7: Computing for the birds: dawn chorus, birds as data carriers and a Google April Fool (plus a puzzle!)
Welcome to Day 7 of our advent calendar. Yesterday’s post was about Printed Circuit Birds Boards, today’s theme is the Christmas robin redbreast which features on lots of Christmas cards and today is making a special appearance…
From insideHPC
Quantum: Harvard, QuEra, MIT and NIST/University of Maryland Announce Error-Corrected Algorithms on 48 Qubits
BOSTON, December 6, 2023 – Neutral-atom quantum company QuEra Computing today announced what the company said is a quantum computing breakthrough, published in the scientific journal Nature. In experiments led by Harvard University…
From insideHPC
Taking on NVIDIA: AMD Announces Availability of MI300 GPU Accelerators
After years of NVIDIA having its dominant way in the GPU AI chip market -- a market that has exploded over the last 12 months with the emergence of generative AI -- AMD today announced the availability of the long-awaited and…
From Schneier on Security
Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol
Interesting analysis:
This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting…From Computational Complexity
Do We Need to Formalize?
Back in the 1990s I explored the system Nuprl for formalizing mathematical proofs. We had a theoretical paper on quickly checking a proof and I wanted to see if we could code it up and make it work on some simple theorems. It…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Responds to OMB RFC on Advancing Governance, Innovation, and Risk Management for Agency Use of AI Draft Policy
Yesterday, December 5, CCC submitted a response to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s Request for Comments (RFC) on Advancing Governance, Innovation, and Risk Management for Agency Use of Artificial Intelligence Draft…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
CS4FN Advent 2023 – Day 6: patterned bauble: tracing patterns in computing – printed circuit boards, spotting links and a puzzle for tourists
Patterned baubles reminded us of printed circuit boards, and a puzzle to do with maps.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can you validate UTF-8 strings in JavaScript?
When you recover textual content from the disk or from the network, you may expect it to be a Unicode string in UTF-8. It is the most common format. Unfortunately, not all sequences of bytes are valid UTF-8 and accepting invalid…
From insideHPC
Nexusflow Unveils Open-source Generative AI Model
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Dec. 5, 2023 – Nexusflow, a generative AI company targeting the cybersecurity industry, today announced the release of NexusRaven-V2, a 13-billion parameter open-source genAI model that delivers function
…