Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2013
From XRDS
XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students - The Complexities of Privacy and Anonymity Volume 20 Issue 1, Fall 2013
From XRDS
Equip Yourself for Creativity
Peter Kinnaird, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
From XRDS
Inbox
XRDS Staff
From XRDS
Keeping Your Little Back Shop
Maire Byrne-Evans, Christine Task
From XRDS
<i>XRDS</i> Mobilizes
Debarka Sengupta
From XRDS
Managing Your Time
Vaggelis Giannikas
From XRDS
Revitalizing ACM Student Chapters: A look at how to refresh student initiatives
Michael Zuba
From XRDS
Algorithms Fit for Compilation?
Olivia SimpsonShould there be a standard in the way of algorithms languages to improve productivity and remove ambiguity?
From XRDS
Habits: Our cognitive shortcut
Gidi NaveAccepting the habitual system as an inseparable part of our minds, understanding its limitation and the way it works, may help us to achieve our long-term goals.
From XRDS
Coordination When Information is Scarce: How privacy can help
Aaron RothThere is something to be gained by borrowing the tools of differential privacy and applying them to solve problems in seemingly unrelated fields.
From XRDS
The New Firefox Cookie Policy
Jonathan MayerStanford grad student Jonathan Mayer discusses cookies, Web tracking, and changes to Mozilla's cookie policy.
From XRDS
What is Public and Private Anyway? A Pragmatic Take on Privacy and Democracy
Andreas BirkbakRevealing private content on the Web can also spark public engagement. To understand this, we need to challenge our common sense notions of privacy and democracy.
From XRDS
Something Bad Might Happen: Lawyers, anonymization and risk
Marion OswaldThe line between personal and anonymous information is often unclear. Increasingly it falls to lawyers to understand and manage the risks associated with the sharing of "anonymized" data sets.
From XRDS
Personal, Pseudonymous, and Anonymous Data: The problem of identification
Iain BourneWhy defining what counts as personal data is important for data protection and information sharing.
From XRDS
Talking 'Bout Your Reputation
David BirchPeople think they want anonymity, but actually desire privacy. But how do we reframe the debate surrounding privacy and security? Perhaps technology is the answer.
From XRDS
Understanding the Data Environment
Elaine Mackey, Mark ElliotProtecting data privacy and anonymity requires a better understanding of the conditions and mechanisms under which they may be threatened.
From XRDS
What is Bitcoin?
Dominic HobsonStrengths and weaknesses of the leader in a new generation of emerging cryptocurrencies.
From XRDS
The Tor Project: An inside view
Kelley MisataA decade since the first version was released, Tor continues to be at the center of the debate around online privacy.
From XRDS
It's Not About Winning, it's About Sending a Message: Hiding information in games
Philip C. RitcheyNew information hiding techniques use online games to transmit secrets covertly. The technique is simple, but the problem of detecting these covert channels is far from solved.
From XRDS
An Illustrated Primer in Differential Privacy
Christine TaskThe vast amounts of data that are now available provide new opportunities to social science researchers, but also raise huge privacy concerns for data subjects. Differential privacy offers a way to balance the needs…
From XRDS
Cynthia Dwork on Differential Privacy
Michael ZubaDistinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, Dr. Cynthia Dwork, provides a first-hand look at the basics of differential privacy.
From XRDS
Jessica Staddon: Managing Google's privacy research
Adrian ScoicăIn this profile, Jessica Staddon discusses managing privacy research for one the world's best-known technology corporations.
From XRDS
CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (Pittsburgh, PA)
Rich ShayCUPS, a research lab at Carnegie Mellon University, is dedicated to addressing the broad array of challenges collectively called "usable privacy and security."
From XRDS
WLAN Security
Finn KuusistoA look back at wireless technology through the years.
From XRDS
Zero-knowledge Proofs
Marinka Zitnik
From The Eponymous Pickle
Theory vs Learning Models
A testimonial to easy data visualization and exploration. I believe that data visualization should always be the first step to analytics. Which means it can often be all that is needed. Even if you need to ultimately do something…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Future of the Bionic Body
In the Smithsonian Mag: A good nontechnical view of the current state and future of the bionic body. " ... The Insane and Exciting Future of the Bionic Body ... From “i-limbs” to artificial organs, advances in technology have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Statistician vs Data Scientist
Vincent Granville measures the frequency of use of different keywords and finds the use of the word 'statistician' dropping versus 'data analyst'. Death of the statistician? I don't think so, but some re-calibration of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Glass Streaming Surgery
It is not uncommon to stream point of view surgery video. Apparently an early case of doing it with Google Glass. Not new, but can lead to thinking about different kinds of viewing augmentation that would be useful to a surgeon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualization of Research Activities at EMC
In Innovation Excellence: Using visualization to understand and improve categories of research activities. This might have been very useful in our enterprise. Points to an approach I had not hear of: " ... EMC has dozensStanford…