Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2011
From ACM Opinion
The Cop on the Cyber Beat
Homeland Security's Bruce McConnell on the government's role in helping companies fight online attacks.
From ACM News
Five Tips For Agile Software Development
The most critical challenge for practitioners of agile software development is learning how to become a self-organizing, cross-functional agile team.
From ACM News
Cooperative Robots That Learn = Less Work For Human Handlers
Learning a language can be difficult for some, but for babies it seems quite easy. With support from the National Science Foundation, linguist Jeffrey Heinz and mechanical engineer Bert Tanner have taken some cues from the…
From ACM News
Smarter Task-Transfers se Mobile Cameras
MIT and Google have devised a method of transferring tasks between your smartphone and your computer by merely pointing the cell-phone camera at your PC's screen.
From ACM TechNews
.s. to Provide Guidelines to Bolster Computer Security
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will release a new system of guidelines intended to increase security in the software in many Web-based services. The guidelines include a list of the top 25 programming errors that lead…
From ACM TechNews
Google Ideas Think Tank Gathering Former Extremists to Battle Radicalization
The Google Ideas think tank has gathered 80 former radicals, including ex-neo-Nazis, Muslim extremists, and U.S. gang members, to brainstorm ways technology can counter radicalization around the world in collaboration with 120…
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Share seful Lessons Learned in Evaluating Emerging Technologies
U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers have developed the System, Component, and Operationally Relevant Evaluations framework, which is designed to judge the performance of a system and its components…
From ACM TechNews
Cern Experiments Generating One Petabyte of Data Every Second
CERN researchers generate a petabyte of data every second as they work to discover the origins of the universe by smashing particles together at close to the speed of light. However, the researchers, led by Francois Briard,…
From ACM TechNews
Smartphone App Helps You Find Friends in a Crowd
Ohio State University researchers have developed eShadow, a smartphone application that helps people locate their friends in a crowd using nearby wireless networks to alert users that a friend is in the area.
From ACM News
Protect Your Computer and Phone from Illegal Police Searches
Your computer, your phone, and your other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. Can police officers enter your home to search your laptop? Do you have to give law enforcement…
From ACM News
Light at the End of the Racetrack: How Pixar Explored the Physics of Light for Cars 2
Although the stories told by Pixar Animation Studios take place in richly realized fantasy realms, the science and technology required to create those worlds have distinctly real-world origins.
From ACM News
Could This Brain Implant Revive Paralyzed Limbs?
In the annals of great oxymorons, "non-invasive brain implant" would surely rank up there. Misnomer or not, the University of Michigan is touting just such a device, one that it says could have a range of applications—the…
From ACM News
Tamper-Proof Internet Security System Begins
A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore last week to start up a global system to make email and e-commerce more secure, end the proliferation of passwords, and raise the bar significantly for Internet…
From ACM News
Mind-Controlled
Video games can be mesmerizing, even for a rhesus monkey. Which may explain, in part, why six-year-old Jasper has been sitting transfixed at a computer screen in a Washington University lab for nearly an hour, his gaze trained…
From ACM TechNews
Hp Plans Apps to Simplify Human-Pc Interaction
Hewlett-Packard's Indian research lab is building applications designed to simplify human-computer interaction for enterprises in sectors such as health care and financial services.
From ACM TechNews
Cracking the Code of Machine Translation
University of Southern California scientists have developed a machine-translation technique that treats translation as a cryptographic challenge rather than a matter of analyzing the statistical characteristics of the same text…
From ACM TechNews
Dns Agility Leads to Botnet Detection
The use of tactics to strengthen botnets, such as fast-flux networks and Conficker-like dynamic domain generation, can tip off their activities, according to research from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
From ACM News
Google to FTC: Bring It On
Google on Friday staked out its position in what could be a long antitrust battle over how the company conducts its core business.
From ACM TechNews
Exeter Study Brings Brain-Like Computing a Step Closer to Reality
University of Exeter researchers recently concluded a study involving the first-ever demonstration of simultaneous information processing and storage using phase-change materials. The new technique could revolutionize computing…
From ACM TechNews
Planetlab Creates a More Advanced Sudo
A new program from Princeton University stands to give data center administrators far greater control over what end users can and cannot access on a computer.
From ACM News
Ftc to Serve Google With Subpoenas in Broad Antitrust Probe
The Federal Trade Commission is poised to serve Google Inc. with civil subpoenas, according to people familiar with the matter, signaling the start of a wide-ranging, formal investigation into whether the Internet-search giant…
From ACM News
Big Win For the Losers at D-Wave
Does D-Wave's first big sale disprove the quantum computing naysayers?
From ACM News
DARPA Crowdsources Interstellar Travel
Last August, a bunch of Star Wars fans pestered NASA about a timetable for building a hyperdrive engine. Maybe someone was listening. In May, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency opened up the discussion by soliciting…
From ACM News
Intel Takes Wraps Off 50-Core Supercomputing Coprocessor Plans
Intel's Larrabee GPU will finally go into commercial production next year, but not as a graphics processor. Instead, it will make its debut in a 50-core incarnation fabbed on Intel's 22nm and aimed squarely at one of the fastest…
From ACM News
Dawn Nears Start of Year-Long Stay at Giant Asteroid
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on track to begin the first extended visit to a large asteroid. The mission expects to go into orbit around Vesta on July 16 and begin gathering science data in early August.
From ACM News
A Start-Up
With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.
From ACM News
Remembering Alan Turing on His 99th Birthday
Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a noted polymath and cryptanalyst who is regarded by many as being the grandfather of modern computing.
From ACM TechNews
Inspired By Insect Intelligence
Monash University researchers are developing wireless sensor networks based on insects' neural systems that could revolutionize how environmental systems, building infrastructures, and health-care patients are monitored.
From ACM TechNews
Botclouds: A Cyberattacker's Dream
Delft University researchers are studying how botclouds can be used to launch attacks, send spam, and commit fraud.
From ACM TechNews
PC Era Giving Way to 'Contextual Intelligence,' Say Top IT Execs
Many information technology leaders say the importance of a single type of device, such as the computer, tablet, or smartphone, is waning as more data moves to the cloud.