Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2024
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
H1B AI and the Future of Computer Science education
H1B visas are back in the news these days. One one hand we have some loud calls for more H1B visas with a claim that US native workers are not up to snuff. Or at least that there are not enough good ones locally. On the other…
From Schneier on Security
Gift Card Fraud
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Efficient In-Place UTF-16 Unicode Correction with ARM NEON
Modern-day text in software can be expected to be Unicode. Unicode is stored in two formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. UTF-16 is an encoding system used by several platforms and applications to represent Unicode characters. Notably,Continue…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Join the crowd with swarm intelligence
Next time you are in a large crowd, look around you: all those people moving together, and mostly not bumping into each other. How does it happen? Flocks of birds and schools of fish are also examples of this ‘swarm intelligence…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Three Keys To Being A Great Teacher
For the last 20 years or so I have been able to meet some truly great teachers. Some I visited in their schools. Some I met at conferences. Some I have become good friends with. I have concluded that there are three things that…
From Schneier on Security
Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Nemisindo: breaking the sound barrier
Games are becoming ever more realistic. Now, thanks to the work of Joshua Reiss’s research team and their spinout company, Nemisindo, it’s not just the graphics that are amazing, the sound effects can be too. There has been a…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on Pizza
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.”
From Schneier on Security
Scams Based on Fake Google Emails
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com.
Brian Krebs reports on the effects.
Boing Boing post.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The logic piano
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London Victorian, William Stanley Jevons was born in Liverpool in 1835. He was famous in his day as an economist and his smash hit book ‘The Coal Question’ drew the nation’s attentionContinue…
From Schneier on Security
Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it.
Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Mike Lynch: serial success
By Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London Mike Lynch was one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs. An electrical engineer, he built his businesses around machine learning long before it was a buzz phrase. He alsoContinue…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Superhero Syllogisms
by Paul Curzon Queen Mary University of London, first appeared in A BIT of CS4FN 2 Superheroes don’t just have physical powers. Often they come out on top because of their mental abilities. Sherlock is a good example, catching…
From Schneier on Security
Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware.
From insideHPC
HPC News Bytes: The Next New Big Thing in AI?, UALink and Optical I/O, Arm vs. Qualcomm
A happy start to the holiday season to you! As we enter Christmas week, here’s a quick (6:14) run-through of recent news from the world of HPC-AI, including: long thinking AI – the next new big thing?, UALink and optical I/O…
From Computational Complexity
Complexity Year in Review
Back in the day (circa 1989) we studied locally random reductions which would lead to all those exciting interactive proof results. Somehow locally random reductions got rebranded as locally correctable codes and this year's
An…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Simpler and faster parsing code with std::views::split
Parsing text files is often confusing irrespective of your programming language. It can also be surprising slow. As an example, let us consider the following problem. You have a comma-separated-value file. It is a text file made…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sticker
A sticker for your water bottle.
From insideHPC
DOE Issues $75M SciDAC Funding Opportunity
Washington, DC, Dec. 20, 2024The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC), under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, is announcing that $75 million is available to support large multi-disciplinary…
From insideHPC
DOE Releases Report on Data Center Electricity Demand
WASHINGTON, DC, Dec. 20, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the publication of the 2024 Report on U.S. Data Center Energy Use produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) which outlines the…
From Schneier on Security
Mailbox Insecurity
It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox.
I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it’s very…From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
2024 in Review: Milestones in Universal Acceptance Progress
Authors: Anil Kumar Jain, Chair, Universal Acceptance Steering Group Sarmad Hussain, Senior Director, IDN and UA Programs, ICANN As 2024 draws to a close, it is a good time to reflect on the strides made in advancing Universal…
From insideHPC
NASA Awards Quantum Computing Inc. Contract for Phase Unwrapping Using Dirac-3 Photonic Optimization Solver
HOBOKEN, N.J., Dec. 17, 2024 — Quantum Computing Inc. ((Nasdaq: QUBT), a photonics and quantum optics technology company, today announced that the company has been awarded a prime contract by the National Aeronautics and Space…
From insideHPC
Photonic Interconnect: Lightmatter Joins UALink Consortium
Dec. 18, 2024, MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. –Photonic interconnect company Lightmatter has joined the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink), an industry initiative focused on creating high-speed, low-latency open interconnect standards…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Supporting At-Risk Users Through Responsible Computing
Last week the CCC held a workshop on Supporting At-Risk Users Through Responsible Computing in Washington, DC. We brought together 49 experts from industry, academia, and civil society, to explore the specific challenges at-risk…
From Computational Complexity
Information is Physical?
I've heard a few times recently the phrase "Information only exists in a physical state". It come from the quantum computing world where they claim quantum changes the game when it comes to representing information.
As one who…From Schneier on Security
New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers
Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters.
From insideHPC
Multiverse Computing and Bundesdruckerei Use Quantum for Data Privacy and Fraud Detection
DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIÁN, SPAIN – December 18, 2024 – AI and quantum company Multiverse Computing and the Bundesdruckerei Gmbs, the German federal government’s technology company, are exploring the potential of quantum and quantum…
From insideHPC
Eaton Announces Data Center Battery Backup
Dec. 17, 2024 — Power management company Eaton today announced the launch of its Eaton Samsung Gen 3 lithium-ion battery system, battery backup for data center, medical and industrial customers. It provides power for energy storage…
From insideHPC
DOE: 10 National Labs to Establish Semiconductor Manufacturing Institute
WASHINGTON, DC, Dec. 17, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that 10 of its national labs will establish the Semiconductor Manufacturing and Advanced Research with Twins USA (SMART USA) Institute, a manufacturing…