Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2011
From Schneier on Security
Attacking PLCs Controlling Prison Doors
Embedded system vulnerabilities in prisons:
Some of the same vulnerabilities that the Stuxnet superworm used to sabotage centrifuges at a nuclear plant in Iran exist in the country
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred ThompsonCongratulations Louis Zulli Jr. and Doug Bergman
There were nine winners in the Partners in Learning 2011 U.S. Innovative Education Forum, four second place winners and five first place winners (one of these was the teacher
From My Biased CoinFun Links, via Google+
One fun aspect of being on Google+ is occasionally a link comes along worth further notice.The first, from David Karger, is a link to a report (by Democrats, says David) refuting a previous report (by Republicans) that had argued…
From Wild WebMink? Kiva Free Trial
Kiva is a project that allows you to make tiny loans, together with many other people, that accumulate to make a larger loan that will prove huge for an otherwise impoverished person. I’ve been making Kiva micro-loans for several…
From Computer Science Teachers AssociationIs Computer Science Antithetical to the Liberal Arts?
Many of us who teach college level computer science have been happy with the latest news about computing and IT related jobs. With the promise of fast growth in these job areas through at least 2018, we can expect to see our …
From The Computing Community Consortium BlogThe
The NSF’s Science Nation has a great feature today on the “Science of Shopping,” describing how computer scientists Rajeev Sharma and Satish Mummareddy have developed cameras and software that track our shopping behavior in brick…
From The Eponymous PickleScavenging Power
Fascinating Fastcompany article about scavenging power from waste paper and data. Must be some sort of energy conservation involved, though we will always have waste by products of our activities,
From Schneier on SecurityBreaking the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA Bitstream Encryption
It's a power-analysis attack, which makes it much harder to defend against. And since the attack model is an engineer trying to reverse-engineer the chip, it's a valid attack.
Abstract: Over the last two decades FPGAs have…
From The Eponymous PickleMeeting Shopper Expectations
In e-commerce Times: '... In-content ad delivery is tightly integrated with the content a consumer is most interested in -- e.g., a post in a forum, an article on a blog, or a conversation within a social network. As a result…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACMHill Tech Happenings, Week of August 1
Yes, there is more to Washington right now than negotiations and voting on the results. August 2 Briefing: The Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee will receive a closed briefing on cybersecurity…
From Daniel Lemire's BlogScientists are communists
Overconfident individuals often win by claiming more resources than they could defend (Johnson and Fowler). If nobody knows who is strongest, whoever thinks he is the strongest might win by default. That is, there is no better…
From Computational ComplexityDoes STOC/FOCS take simple-nice-ideas papers? A one-element case study
WRITTEN AUG 1,2011: It has been said that simple innovative ideas to not get into STOC/FOCS and only hard technical improvements do. This is one of the motivations for the INNOVATIONS conference. But is it true? People mostly…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A few months ago, we announced
From Schneier on SecurityUsing Science Fiction to Teach Computer Security
Interesting paper: "Science Fiction Prototyping and Security Education: Cultivating Contextual and Societal Thinking in Computer Security Education and Beyond," by Tadayoshi Kohno and Brian David Johnson.
Abstract: Computer…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred ThompsonInteresting Links 1 August 2011
Last week was incredible at the US Innovative Education Forum. I