Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2012
From ACM News
10k Reasons to Worry About Critical Infrastructure
A security researcher was able to locate and map more than 10,000 industrial control systems hooked up to the public internet, including water and sewage plants, and found that many could be open to easy hack attacks, due to…
From ACM TechNews
Google Looks to Speed Up the Internet
Google researchers want to overhaul the Internet's Transmission Control Protocol transport layer and have suggested ways to reduce latency.
From ACM TechNews
Next Generation of Supercomputers Requires Radical Redesign
The next generation of exascale supercomputers could complete one billion billion calculations per second, which would be 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers.
From ACM TechNews
Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections
A group of freelance Web researchers have created a Twitter bot, called a socialbot, that can fool users into thinking the bots are real people and serve as virtual social connector, accelerating the natural rate of human-to-human…
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Set to Develop Super-Secure 'cognitive Fingerprint'
U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency researchers are developing security technologies that go beyond recognizing complex passwords.
From ACM News
Speed Limit For Birds
The northern goshawk is one of nature’s diehard thrill-seekers.
From ACM News
Hewlett Packard Opens Doors to Its HP Labs .K. Research Base
The year is 2015, and in a government-owned data centre somewhere in southern England thousands of servers are humming away, hard at work keeping the country running smoothly.
From ACM News
Google Wants Ability to 'combine' Your ser Data
Google is planning to rewrite its privacy policy to grant it explicit rights to "combine personal information" across multiple products and services, the company said today. Previously, it had only implicit rights to do so.
From ACM TechNews
Organizations Capitalize on Collective Intelligence
Crowdsourcing facilitates service improvements, higher sales volumes, and engagement promotion, according to IBM research.
From ACM TechNews
Nasa's Sean Herron and William Eshagh on Code.nasa.gov
In an interview, the U.S. NASA's William Eshagh and Sean Herron discuss the open.nasa initiative, a response to President Obama's Open Government Directive, which challenges federal agencies to be more transparent, participatory…
From ACM TechNews
MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip
Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, recently launched Tilera, a company that specializes in squeezing cores onto computer chips.
From ACM News
Strongest Solar Radiation Storm Since September 2005 Could Reach Earth Today
The sun erupted late on January 22, 2012 with an M8.7 class flare, an earth-directed coronal mass ejection, and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons known as a "solar energetic particle" event.
From ACM News
Open-Source Surgical Robot Fuels niversity Research
U.S. researchers have developed a new, open source robot — said to be the first of its kind — that is now facilitating robotic laparoscopic surgery research at seven different universities.
From ACM News
Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch dacity
Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity—an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car.
From ACM News
When Self-Driving Cars and the Real World Collide
Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun wrestling with the changes that would be required in a system…
From ACM News
Sign Says What? Park at Your Peril
Writing is a craft whose basic purpose is to transmit meaning, but there are certain writers who seem to have different goals in mind: patent lawyers, many poets, authors of banking regulations and, of course, the writers of…
From ACM News
Europe's Driverless Car (driver Still Required)
Tucked away in the basement of an iconic office tower shaped like four engine cylinders, engineer Werner Huber is telling me about the joy of driving.
From ACM TechNews
Nyc Opens First High School For Software Engineering
New York City will create its first public high school dedicated to training students in software development.
From ACM TechNews
Un Sets Stage For Blazing Fast Mobile Devices
The United Nations has approved new standards for the IMT-advanced system, which should make the next generation of mobile technology 500 times faster than 3G smartphones.
From ACM TechNews
Pentagon-Funded Games Would Crowdsource Weapons Testing
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing Crowdsourced Formal Verification, a set of computer games designed to refine the way weapons systems are tested to ensure they are free from software errors…
From ACM TechNews
Sopa, Pipa Stalled: Meet the Open Act
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) recently introduced the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which he says provides stronger intellectual property (IP) rights for U.S. artists and innovators while protecting…
From ACM TechNews
A Big Leap Toward Lowering the Power Consumption of Microprocessors
University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed systematic power profiles of microprocessors, which they say could help lower the energy consumption of both small cell phones and giant data centers.
From ACM News
Digitizing Health Records, Before It Was Cool
The push to move the nation from paper to electronic health records is serious business. That's why a first look at the campus of Epic Systems comes as something of a jolt.
From ACM News
Warrants Needed For Gps Monitoring, Supreme Court Rules
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that law enforcement authorities need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move.
From ACM News
How .s. Lost Out on Iphone Work
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley's top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
From ACM News
Automobile Design for the Connected Age
Car design is in a state of flux. The designer's job used to be about tail fins and chrome. Then it was all about cup holders and plastics.
From ACM News
Air Force's Top Brain Wants a 'Social Radar' to 'See Into Hearts and Minds'
Chief Scientists of the Air Force usually spend their time trying to figure out how to build better satellites or make jets go insanely fast. Which makes Dr. Mark Maybury, today's chief scientist, a bit of an outlier.
From ACM News
Quantum Computing Could Head to 'the Cloud,' Study Says
A novel high-speed, high-security computing technology will be compatible with the "cloud computing" approach popular on the Web, a study suggests.
From ACM TechNews
A New Artificial Intelligence Technique to Speed the Planning of Tasks When Resources Are Limited
Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) researchers have developed an artificial intelligence technique that can automatically create plans and quickly solve problems in situations with limited resources.
From ACM News
Engage: Apple's New Tools For Interactive Books on Ipad
Engagement is a big word in education. It combines both objective participation and subjective emotion. It's one of the few psychological terms in education that links students, teachers, and content.