Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2012
From ACM TechNews
Would You Pay to Block Your Own Internet Connection?
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Fred Stutzman has developed productivity apps designed to maintain workers' focus on tasks and prevent them from being distracted by the Web and social media.
From ACM Opinion
The Education of Google's Larry Page
Larry Page is surrounded.
From ACM News
Google Begins Testing Its Augmented-Reality Glasses
If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from "Star Trek," don’t worry.
From ACM News
Watching and Waiting
It is called an advanced persistent threat, and if it sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, that's because it pretty much is.
From ACM TechNews
To Convince People, Come at Them From Different Angles
Cornell research on Facebook users' behavior demonstrates that people base decisions on the variety of social contexts rather than on the number of requests received.
From ACM TechNews
The Benefits of Data Talking to Data
Wall Street JournalSome companies on the cutting edge of technology are combining data streaming with advanced data-analytics methods that let them tie information they already possess to what is happening now. This promises…
From ACM TechNews
Hacking It Systems to Become a Criminal Offense
A draft law supported by the Civil Liberties Committee would criminalize the hacking of information technology systems and carry a minimum prison sentence of two years throughout the European Union.
From ACM News
How China Blocks the Tor Anonymity Network
The Tor Project is a free network run by volunteers that hides users locations and usage from surveillance and traffic analysis.
From ACM News
Self-Sculpting Sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool.
From ACM News
A Billion Stars Revealed
Astronomers have released a picture containing more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
From ACM News
Apple's War on Android
In her black robe and strand of white pearls, Lucy Koh projects the serious, deliberate demeanor befitting a U.S. District Court judge.
From ACM TechNews
Icann Under More Scrutiny
Critics of ICANN's plan to create hundreds of new generic top-level domains are likely going to continue closely monitoring the organization now that it is clear that they have been unable to stop or delay the gTLD program.
From ACM TechNews
Virtual Wall For Manipulating Objects in 3D
A team at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia has developed a high-performance wall for visualizing and interacting with objects in 3D.
From ACM TechNews
Uspto Partners With Nasa's Center For Collaborative Innovation and Topcoder
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, working with the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation and TopCoder, recently launched PatentLabeling2, the second in a series of phased innovation competitions aimed at modernizing…
From ACM Careers
Giving Women the Access Code
When Maria Klawe became president of Harvey Mudd College in 2006, she was dismayed— but not surprised—at how few women were majoring in computer science.
From ACM News
Jeffrey Bigham: sing the Crowd to Help People With Disabilities
Jeffrey Bigham's research uses Web-based applications and crowdsourcing to help people with disabilities in near real-time. Is it any surprise he won a NSF Career Award?
From ACM News
How Facebook 'contagion' Spreads
To join Facebook or not to join Facebook? You might think the decision depends on how many of your friends are already on the social-networking site.
From ACM News
How Seagate's Terabit-Per-Square-Inch Hard Drive Works
Magnetic hard disks will soon be able to store one terabit (a trillion bits) per square inch.
From ACM News
Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool
Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using…
From ACM TechNews
How the Cost of Computation Restricts the Processes of Life
Biologists and computer scientists have begun to examine what restrictions the theoretical limits of computation place on the way living things operate, which could help reduce the amount of energy needed to process information…
From ACM TechNews
Google Launches Go Programming Language 1.0
Google has released version 1.0 of its Go programming language, which was initially introduced as an experimental language in 2009.
From ACM TechNews
Ideas Global Challenge Team Profile: Wecyclers
A participant in MIT's IDEAS Global Challenge is Wecyclers, a crowdsourced recycling platform that will operate in Lagos, Nigeria, and is designed to incentivize the collection of recyclable materials by slum residents.
From ACM Careers
Computer Science For the Rest of S
Reading, writing, and—refactoring code?
From ACM News
The Miri Has Two Faces: Go 'behind the Webb' (telescope)
A short new video takes viewers behind the scenes with the MIRI or the Mid-Infrared Instrument that will fly on-board NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
From ACM News
Dead Stars 'to Guide Spacecraft'
German scientists are developing a technique that allows for very precise positioning anywhere in space by picking up X-ray signals from pulsars.
From ACM News
Systems to Handle Big Data Might Be This Generation's Moon Landing
An effort to build a radio telescope that can see back 13 billion years to the creation of the universe is prompting a five-year €32 million ($42.7 million) effort to create a low-power supercomputer and networks to handle the…
From Communications of the ACM
Open For Business
Should academic articles be available for free on the Web?
From Communications of the ACM
Preserving Digital Data
Scientific data is expanding at an unprecedented rate. While new tools are helping preserve this data, funding must be increased and policy coordination needs improvement.
From Communications of the ACM
Talking to Machines
Voice recognition programs like Siri are now capable of understanding spoken commands, recognizing a conversation's context, and answering questions in a personable manner.