Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2024
From Schneier on Security
Long Analysis of the M-209
Really interesting analysis of the American M-209 encryption device and its security.
From insideHPC
atNorth Announces Heat Reuse at Denmark Data Center
Copenhagen – September 4th, 2024 – Nordic coloction HPC and AI service provider atNorth has announced plans to build its largest data center to date in Ølgod in Varde Denmark. The site, to be known as DEN02, will cater to colocation…
From insideHPC
VDURA Announces Partnership with Jeskell Systems for IT Modernization
SAN JOSE and LAUREL, Md.– High performance storage and management company VDURA has announced a partnership with Jeskell Systems, a renowned IT modernization specialist with nearly two decades of experience serving Federal and…
From The Noisy Channel
Take Searchers Seriously, Not Literally
Search application developers manage numerous tradeoffs, foremost the tradeoff between precision and recall. Precision measures the fraction of search results that are relevant, while recall measures the fraction of relevantUnfortunately…
From insideHPC
DOE Awards $118M for Energy Frontier Research Centers
Sept. 4, 2024 — Ten Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) designed to bring together teams of scientists for fundamental research have been funded in nine states by the U.S. Department of Energy. The projects are: A Center…
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Parity Games
A quasipolynomial-time algorithm for a long standing open problem. Yes, we have two of them this decade.
Cristian Calude, Sanjay Jain, Bakhadyr Khoussainov, Wei Li and…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Participation: Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research
The Community Computing Consortium (CCC) is engaging in a new visioning activity to craft a research agenda focused on how human-computer collaborations can solve some of the most pressing scientific problems through citizen…
From Schneier on Security
Security Researcher Sued for Disproving Government Statements
This story seems straightforward. A city is the victim of a ransomware attack. They repeatedly lie to the media about the severity of the breach. A security researcher repeatedly proves their statements to be lies. The city gets…
From Schneier on Security
List of Old NSA Training Videos
The NSA’s “National Cryptographic School Television Catalogue” from 1991 lists about 600 COMSEC and SIGINT training videos.
There are a bunch explaining the operations of various cryptographic equipment, and a few code words…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressing floating-point numbers quickly by converting them to brain floats
We sometimes have to work a large quantity of floating-point numbers. This volume can be detrimental to performance. Thus we often want to compress these numbers. Large-language models routinely do so. A sensible approach isContinue…
From insideHPC
HPC News Bytes Podcast 20240902: Nvidia and Blackwell Hit Limits, Revved-Up AI Inference and Oncoming Regulations, HPC in Russia
Happy Labor Day to you! From the world of HPC-AI, we offer a rapid (5:57) review of recent news, including: Nvidia and Blackwell push technology's limits, big AI inference numbers from Cerebras, the uncertainties of oncoming…
From Schneier on Security
SQL Injection Attack on Airport Security
Interesting vulnerability:
…a special lane at airport security called Known Crewmember (KCM). KCM is a TSA program that allows pilots and flight attendants to bypass security screening, even when flying on domestic personal …From Computational Complexity
Six degrees of separation has been proven. Really?
There is a paper (see here for an article about the paper, the link to the paper itself is later) that claims to PROVE that, on average, the distance (for some definition of distance) between any two people is 6.
1) We've blogged…