Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2012
From ACM News
White House Moves on Cybersecurity
The White House's strategy on cybersecurity: Co-opt the opposition.
From ACM News
Security Flaw In Common Keycard Locks Exploited In String Of Hotel Room Break-Ins
Whoever robbed Janet Wolf's hotel room did his work discreetly.
From ACM News
Risk of Robot prising Wiping Out Human Race to Be Studied
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology, and climate change.
From ACM TechNews
Time-Lapse Code Wins Raspberry Pi Contest
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has named Aaron Hill and Ashley Newson the winners of its summer coding contest for teenagers.
From ACM TechNews
Personalities Influence Workforce Planning
Concordia University researcher Mohammed Othman says his mathematical model, which uses psychological data from personality tests, could improve engineer workforce planning.
From ACM News
Quantum Cryptography Conquers Noise Problem
It's hard to stand out from the crowd—particularly if you are a single photon in a sea of millions in an optical fibre.
From ACM News
Risk Profiling Software Tackles the Terrorist Threat
The U.K. branch of an American company has developed a hi-tech software programme it believes can help detect and prevent potentially dangerous passengers and cargo entering the U.K. using the technique known as "risk profiling"…
From ACM News
Behind the Iron Dome: How Israel Stops Missiles
The success of Israel's Iron Dome in shooting down missiles fired from Gaza has a lot to do with a company you've probably never heard of: MPrest Systems.
From ACM Opinion
What Sinofsky's Departure Suggests About the Current State, and Likely Future, of Microsoft
Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows division, abruptly left the company on November 12, shortly after introducing the latest version of the company's flagship operating system, Windows 8.
From ACM News
Brain-Like Chip Outstrips Normal Computers
Computer chips that mimic the human brain are outstripping conventional chips in crucial ways. They could also revolutionise our understanding of how the brain functions.
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputers Face Growing Resilience Problems
North Carolina State University researchers have developed software that runs in conjunction with the Message Passing Interface, a library for splitting applications across multiple servers so the different parts of the program…
From ACM TechNews
China to nveil Homebrewed Chip in 2013
Longsoon Technology, which is partly funded by the Chinese Academy of Science, will share details about its Godson eight-core processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February.
From ACM TechNews
Filtering Spam
Concordia University researchers have developed a method for removing unwanted spam emails from user inboxes.
From ACM TechNews
More Sensitive Technique Could Lead to Improved Location-Based Mobile Services
A technique developed by an international research team could potentially improve the accuracy of determining the position of mobile devices. The protocol simultaneously predicts the location of the mobile device user and the…
From ACM TechNews
IT Building Blocks for the Man in the Street
Researchers at SINTEF ICT are developing computing tools composed of different building blocks so that people can select, combine, and put together the information technology (IT) services they need.
From ACM TechNews
Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs
Deep-learning technology, an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, has grown in speed and accuracy. Deep-learning systems recently have outperformed humans in certain…
From ACM News
X-37b: Secrets of the .s. Military Spaceplane
In the early morning of 16 June, 2012, a top-secret spaceplane made a picture-perfect landing at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
From ACM News
Michio Kaku Sketches Technological Wonderland of the Future at Sc12
Imagine a world where a computer chip costs just a penny.
From ACM News
Cyber Attacks From Iran and Gaza on Israel More Threatening Than Anonymous’s Efforts
Anonymous, the loose coalition of hackers waging war on Israeli Web sites, is the least of Israel's cyber problems.
From ACM TechNews
China Moves to Beat U.s. in Exascale Computing
China recently has fully embraced high-performance computing and now has 72 systems on the most recent Top500 supercomputer list, making it the second largest HPC user in the world behind the United States.
From ACM TechNews
The Computer That Stores and Processes Information at the Same Time
Computer scientists claim they can now store and process information simultaneously like a human brain by using nanoscale electronic components.
From ACM News
A Short To-Do List For Intel's Next Ceo
With Paul Otellini heading in May to the nearest 18-hole course, speculation is rampant about who will replace him.
From ACM News
Nvidia Still Has a Lot to Prove in the Mobile Market
Nvidia may be flying high on its tablet wins, but it still has a long way to go before it can call itself a real mobile player.
From ACM News
A Missile-Defense System That Actually Works?
The fighting between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza strip over the last few days is the latest round of violence in a region that has been torn apart by a decades-old conflict. But the debut of Israel's Iron Dome missile…
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Find Cheaper Way to Ensure Internet Security
Scientists at Toshiba and Cambridge University have used an advanced photodetector to extract weak photons from the torrents of light pulses carried by fiber-optic cables, in a technique that offers a less expensive way to ensure…
From ACM TechNews
Two-Ton Witch Computer Gets a Reboot
The world's oldest original working digital computer, the Witch, has been restored after a three-year effort and was recently put on display at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, England.
From ACM TechNews
In Fairfax County, the Classroom Is a (cyber) Battlefield
Thousands of students across the U.S. recently participated in the opening round of the CyberPatriot challenge, the premier high school cyberwarfare competition. A second round will be held before the semifinals in January,…
From ACM Careers
College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All
Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition.
From ACM News
Big News From Mars? Rover Scientists Mum for Now
Scientists working on NASA's six-wheeled rover on Mars have a problem. But it's a good problem.
From ACM News
Why the Frontiers of Biology Might Be Inside a Computer Chip
When David Harel started the experiment, the petri dish of mouse cells looked just like any other.