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 TechNews
Stretchable Electronics Report How You Feel
Uppsala University researcher Zhigang Wu has collaborated with a team from Laird Technologies to develop a wireless microfluidic stretchable radio frequency electronics sensor.
From ACM TechNews
Cloud Storage Providers Need Sharper Billing Metrics
Cloud service providers could be doing themselves or their customers a disservice by relying on imprecise metrics for billing, says Carnegie Mellon University researcher Matthew Wachs.
From ACM News
How to Make a Clock Run For 10,000 Years
High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for thousands of years.
From ACM Opinion
Eff and Bitcoin
For several months, EFF has been following the movement around Bitcoin, an electronic payment system that touts itself as "the first decentralized digital currency." We helped inform our members about this unique project through…
From ACM News
Apple's New Multitouch Patent (faq)
Apple picked up a patent Tuesday that could come in very handy in today's thicket of smartphone-related intellectual property litigation.
From ACM News
Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands
Kilobots are fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other. On an individual basis, this isn't particularly impressive,…
From ACM TechNews
Free App Protects Facebook Accounts From Hackers
University of California, Riverside researchers have developed MyPageKeeper.org, a free Facebook application that detects spam and malware posted on users' walls and news feeds.
From ACM TechNews
Italian Hi-Tech Software Teaches Perfect Pasta Skills
University of Bologna researchers have developed Tortellino X-perience, a multimedia teaching game that combines a traditional video with a three-dimensional representation of the user's hands.
From ACM TechNews
Genius of Einstein, Fourier Key to New Humanlike Computer Vision
Purdue University researchers have developed two new techniques for computer-vision technology that mimic how humans perceive three-dimensional shapes by instantly recognizing objects no matter how they are twisted or bent.
From ACM News
Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone
Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived. Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.
From ACM TechNews
Sgi, Intel Plan to Speed Supercomputers 500 Times By 2018
By 2018, Silicon Graphics International plans to build supercomputers that are 500 times faster than the most powerful systems today, using Intel's many integrated cores architecture.
From ACM TechNews
Careless Behavior of Cloud sers Leads to Crucial Security Threats
Cloud computing security experts often focus on the underlying infrastructure and provider, but a new analysis from Fraunhofer SIT and the System Security Lab at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt sheds light on the consequences…
From ACM TechNews
Software Extracts Your Location on Twitter Even When It's Secret
Users of online social media reveal more about themselves than they realize, and participation involves a great deal more trust than they think, suggests new research from Northwestern University and the Xerox Palo Alto Research…
From ACM News
With Anonymous and Lulzsec, Is Anyone Believable?
For several months, hackers have been having a heyday taking down Web sites and leaking data from compromised servers with victims ranging from the CIA and U.S. Senate to Sony, Citigroup, and the Turkish government.
From ACM News
Web Addresses Enter New.era
On Monday, the organization that regulates the world's Internet domain names—yes, there is central coordination—approved changes that could allow anyone to register any name they like in almost any language as a Web address…
From ACM News
3D Printing Creating 'a Whole New World'
Not long ago, I asked Scott Summit, a pioneer in using 3D printing in the design of custom prosthetics and an industrial design expert, who he would recommend I look into if I wanted to see the best in the world at using this…
From ACM News
Spies Can Send Messages Hidden in a Google Search
The peculiar list of search options that Google suggests as you type in a query could be hijacked to let people communicate secretly.
From ACM News
What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library
Despite looming budget cuts, the library is flourishing and putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country.
From ACM News
New Technology Revs Up Pixar's 'cars 2'
We all know what the reflections off cars or the roiling of the ocean are supposed to look like. So if you are tempted to believe that what you'll see in "Cars 2" proves that Pixar has made its first live-action film, think…
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Declares Webgl 'harmful' to Security
Some researchers say that WebGL, a universal three-dimensional Web graphics standard that has been widely anticipated by Web programmers, could lead to significant security concerns.
From ACM TechNews
Internet Body Throws Open Domain Names; .anything
ICANN has voted to allow individuals and companies to apply to create new generic top-level domains using almost any word in any language. This means that individuals and companies will be allowed to apply for the new gTLDs…
From ACM TechNews
CLA Team Reports Scalable Fabrication of Self-Aligned Graphene Transistors, Circuits
University of California, Los Angeles researchers have developed a scalable approach to fabricating high-speed graphene transistors.
From ACM Opinion
Seven Questions For Iridium Ceo Matthew Desch
More often than not, the Iridium satellite phone system is remembered as one of the great telecom flameouts of the 1990s. It almost became a literal one: At one point following a 1999 bankruptcy, the 70 or more satellites…
From ACM News
Japan's 8-Petaflop K Computer Is Fastest on Earth
An eight-petaflop Japanese supercomputer grabbed the title of fastest computer on earth in the new Top 500 Supercomputing List officially unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg yesterday.
From ACM News
War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs
Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan…
From ACM TechNews
Gender-Spotting Tool Could Have Rumbled Fake Blogger
A gender analysis program developed by Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Na Cheng could have determined the sex of a 40-year-old U.S. man writing online as a gay Syrian girl, according to tests.
From ACM TechNews
Michigan Two and Four-Year Colleges Team p to Boost Minority STEM Enrollment
The Michigan Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation has enlisted nine community colleges for its effort to increase the number of minority students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines…
From ACM News
How Much Spam Does Your Company nknowingly Send?
SpamRankings.net uses "name and shame" to publicize organizations that are infected by spam bots.
From ACM TechNews
Pentagon's Advanced Research Arm Tackles Cyberspace
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing the National Cyber Range, a model of the Internet that will enable researchers to test defense systems against virtual foreign and domestic-launched cyberattacks…
From ACM TechNews
'hadoop Alternative' to Be Open Sourced
LexisNexis will open source its HPCC Systems supercomputing platform and offer developers an alternative to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing.