Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2015
From ACM TechNews
A 'flickr-Ing' View of the World, in 4-D
The Scene Chronology system enables an observer to navigate a virtual 3D space while using a slider control to move forward and backward in time.
From ACM News
The Great Sim Heist
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according…
From ACM News
Magic Leap
Logically, I know there isn’t a hulking four-armed, twisty-horned blue monster clomping in circles in front of me, but it sure as hell looks like it.
From ACM News
The Hot Yet Little-Known Trend That'll Supercharge AI
When Andrew Ng trained Google's army of computers to identify cat videos using artificial intelligence, he hit a few snags.
From ACM News
How Hackers Could Attack Hard Drives to Create a Pervasive Backdoor
News that a hacking group within or associated with the National Security Agency compromised the firmware of hard drive controllers from a number of manufacturers as part of a 14-year cyber-espionage campaign has led some to…
From ACM News
Physics in Finance: Trading at the Speed of Light
Financial traders are in a race to make transactions ever faster.
From ACM TechNews
Bigger Steps: Berkeley Lab Researchers Develop Algorithm to Make Simulation of ltrafast Processes Possible
A new algorithm increases the small time step required to create real-time simulations of ultrafast phenomena.
From ACM TechNews
Li-Fi-Like System Would Bring 100-Gbps Speeds Straight to Your Computer
Researchers are developing a system that takes light from optic fiber, amplifies it, and beams it across a room to deliver data at more than 100 Gbps.
From ACM TechNews
The Future of Electronics--Now in 2d
Ohio State University researchers are developing ways to turn germanium into a potential replacement for silicon in electronics.
From ACM TechNews
Nist Announces Pilot Grants Competition to Improve Security and Privacy of Online Identity Verification Systems
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a fourth round of grants for developing online identity verification systems that help improve the privacy, security, and convenience of online transactions…
From ACM Careers
White House Names Nation's First Chief Data Scientist
Taking a page from Silicon Valley's playbook, the White House said on Wednesday it had appointed the nation's first chief data scientist.
From ACM News
Time Lords: The Clocks That Rule Our World
Time is money—and never was this clearer than at 09:59:59.985 Eastern Time, on 3 June 2013.
From ACM News
If Software Looks Like a Brain and Acts Like a Brain—will We Treat It Like One?
Long the domain of science fiction, researchers are now working to create software that perfectly models human and animal brains.
From ACM News
Hacking the Hill
A growing number of organizations think technology holds the potential to improve the efficiency of government.
From ACM Opinion
The Shape of Things to Come
In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if…
From ACM News
Star Buzzed Solar System During Human Prehistory
A recently discovered stellar neighbour of the Sun penetrated the extreme fringes of the Solar System—the closest encounter ever documented—at around the time that modern humans began spreading from Africa into Eurasia.
From ACM News
Comet on 14 February from 8.7 Km
On 14 February 2015, Rosetta swooped over the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko at a distance of just 6 km. The closest approach took place at 12:41 GMT over a region known as Imhotep, which is on the larger of the comet’s…
From ACM TechNews
An Exclusive Look Inside Darpa's Plan to Visualize Cyberoperations
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on a new project that would visualize the often highly abstract world of cyberoperations.
From ACM TechNews
New Algorithms Locate Where a Video Was Filmed From Its Images and Sounds
A new system can geolocate videos by comparing their audiovisual content with a worldwide multimedia database.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Engineer Produces Free Braille-Writer App
Stanford University researchers have developed iBrailler Notes, an iPad app they say is the world's first Braille writing platform designed for a tablet computer.
From ACM TechNews
Apple Gears p to Challenge Tesla in Electronic Cars
Apple reportedly has several hundred of its employees working on a project to create a new Apple-branded electric vehicle.
From ACM TechNews
Rare Alan Turing Journal Shows His Genius at Work
Two decades after its discovery, a rare handwritten journal belonging to computing pioneer Alan Turing will be auctioned off this spring in San Francisco.
From ACM News
Smarter Multicore Chips
Computer chips' clocks have stopped getting faster. To keep delivering performance improvements, chipmakers are instead giving chips more processing units, or cores, which can execute computations in parallel.
From ACM TechNews
Obama Calls For New Cooperation to Wrangle the 'wild West' Internet
President Barrack Obama has called on the private sector to take greater steps to share information about cybersecurity threats.
From ACM Opinion
Raspberry Pi 2 Review: A $35 Computer Can Do a Heck of a Lot
Our computers have become too easy to use.
From ACM News
Did Nsa Plant Spyware in Computers Around World?
Did the National Security Agency plant spyware deep in the hard drives of thousands of computers used by foreign governments, banks and other surveillance targets around the world?
From ACM Careers
Hoping Google's Lab Is a Rainmaker
Google's research arm, Google X, is called the company's Moonshot Factory. One reason the company picked the word "Moonshot" was to remind people to tackle big problems that may well blow up in their faces.
From ACM News
Bringing Coding to Kindergarten
How young is too young to learn to write software?
From ACM News
Dawn Captures Sharper Images of Ceres
Craters and mysterious bright spots are beginning to pop out in the latest images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft.
From ACM News
Cryptographers Could Prevent Satellite Collisions
In February 2009 the U.S.'s Iridium 33 satellite collided with the Russian Cosmos 2251, instantly destroying both communications satellites.