Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2010
From ACM News
U.s. Businesses Face Increasing Threats From Chinese Cyber Attacks
U.S. businesses and government agencies are facing increasing risks of potential cyber attacks from China, according to a recent report. And IT departments that react defensively to such attacks may not be doing enough to prevent…
From ACM News
U.s. Keeps Foreign Ph.d.s
Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation — at least until the recession began — refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding…
From ACM News
Pentagon Searches For
One of the trickiest problems in cyber security is trying to figure who’s really behind an attack. Darpa, the Pentagon agency that created the Internet, is trying to fix that, with a new effort to develop the “cyber equivalent…
From ACM News
In Digital Combat, U.s. Finds No Easy Deterrent
On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial…
From ACM TechNews
APNIC: IPv6 Adoption Delay Could Create Costs
As the supply of available Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) Web addresses dwindles, the cost of Internet access could rise unless the industry steps up efforts to make the shift to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses…
From ACM News
Breakthrough Could Change Sampling Technology Forever
Research scientists from the Technion-Israel institute of Technology have made a breakthrough that could revolutionize the way broadband signals are sampled, recorded and processed. Their prototype could be used to improve radar…
From ACM News
Software to Test Cybersecurity Systems For Flaws
Cybersecurity systems are tough to crack, but not tough enough. A Clarkson University professor is developing software programs that will test cybersecurity systems for flaws before they become operational. The National Science…
From ACM News
Computing Simulation Tool Nets Best Paper Award
Novel research has improved the simulation performance of hardware models created in SystemC. Preliminary experiments showed the researchers were able to speed up SystemC based simulation by factors of 30 to 100 times that of…
From ACM News
Better Computing, Communication For Disaster Response
The response to natural disasters like the killer earthquake in Haiti is complicated by the difficulty delivering medical care in a chaotic environment where the communications infrastructure on the ground is seriously damaged…
From ACM News
New Life For Magnetic Tape
Music lovers may have long forsaken them, but magnetic tapes still reign supreme when it comes to storing vast amounts of digital data. And new research from IBM and Fujifilm could ensure that tape remains the mass storage medium…
From ACM TechNews
Helping Computers nderstand Natural Human Speech
Lockheed Martin researchers are developing software that can extract meaning from a string of spoken sentences. The technology, called Spoken Language Interaction for Computing Environments (SLICE), can interact with humans…
From ACM TechNews
Agile Development Hitting the Mainstream, Report Says
Agile application development methodologies are being rapidly embraced by enterprises, according to a new Forrester Research study. Forty-five percent of the nearly 1,300 surveyed developers and information technology professionals…
From ACM TechNews
Computer Mouse Still Rules, Says Expert
Next-generation interactive devices, such as gestural interaction and brain-computer interfaces, are unlikely to replace the keyboard and mouse anytime soon, says Andy Cockburn, a human-computer interaction specialist at the…
From ACM TechNews
Software Development Gets a Better Production Line
European researchers have devised a new software development paradigm using an assembly line-style development process. "Think of this as a sandwich shop, where you have different products coming from a product line that shares…
From ACM TechNews
Teaching Computer Games
Rapid computer game creation (RCGC) could be used to close the digital divide, according to Nikunj Dalal and colleagues at Oklahoma State University. Schools and universities have begun to embrace RCGC, and the researchers believe…
From ACM News
Spasers Set to Sum: A New Dawn For Optical Computing
It's a laser, but not as we know it. For a start, you need a microscope to see it. Gleaming eerily green, a "spaser" is a single spherical particle just a few tens of nanometers across. Tiny it might be, but its creators have…
From ACM Opinion
Outsourcing Makes A Comeback
After fizzling out over the past couple years, outsourcing is back in vogue. A new PricewaterhouseCoopers study shows outsourcing has roared back to life in the past six months and is accelerating, driven by the same cost-cutting…
From ACM News
Touchscreen Merges the Real and Digital Worlds
For all the advances in table-top and tablet computing, some design professionals will always prefer the feel of pen on paper to stylus on glass. A new device could provide them with the best of both the digital and the real …
From ACM News
Grid Computing and the Future of Cloud Computing
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of grid computing, a type of distributed computing that harnesses the power of many computers to handle large computational tasks, was all the rage, at least among organizations with…
From ACM TechNews
Picture-Driven Computing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed Sikuli, a system that enables computer users to write programs using screen shots of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The researchers say that Sikuli could…
From ACM TechNews
R&d Partnership to sher in Era of Petascale Computing in Singapore
Fujistu and the Institute of High Performance Computing at Singapore's Agency for Science Technology and Research have announced a joint research and development project to create advanced applications for the next generation…
From ACM TechNews
Slime Design Mimics Tokyo's Rail System
Hokkaido University researchers, working with colleagues in the United Kingdom and Japan, recently completed a study suggesting that a fungus-like mold might be a good example of how to construct computer and mobile communication…
From ACM TechNews
Tech Volunteers Aiding Haiti Relief Efforts
Software developers and tech-savvy individuals from around the world are organizing to help with the Haiti relief effort. Projects already underway include the We Have, We Need Exchange program, an online marketplace for the…
From ACM TechNews
Data at the End of the Tunnel
Scientists at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and French research facility CNRS have made advances in the development of tunnel magnetoresistance-based memory.
From ACM TechNews
Ict Research to Boost India Socio-Economic Development
William Thies and other scientists at Microsoft Research India have created technologies specifically designed to facilitate socio-economic development, spanning such sectors as education, agriculture, microfinance, and health…
From ACM News
Industry Says Gov't Must Regulate 'cloud' to Protect User Privacy
The federal government needs to address electronic security to calm Americans' uncertainty about cloud computing and secure its privacy, according to industry representatives. Cloud computing technology is rapidly expanding.…
From ACM News
Supercomputer Flexibility Increased By Virtualized Operating System
New work on Sandia National Laboratories’ Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible, in effect removing them from the solitary confinement of their specialized…
From ACM News
Security Technique Protects Multi-Party Computation
Recent academic research is advancing the development of secure multi-party computation (SMC), an security technique aimed at protecting data for various online interactions. SMC enables two or more participants to conduct transactions…
From ACM News
Watching Crystals Grow May Lead to Faster Electronic Devices
The quest for faster electronic devices recently got something more than a little bump up in technological knowhow. Scientists at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) discovered that the thin, smooth, crystalline sheets needed to…
From ACM News
If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It Hackme
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”
Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”
Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent…