Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2012
From ACM News
NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain
NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.
From ACM News
Lasers, Cameras, and Particle Detectors: Mars Rover's Super High-Tech Science Gear
Assuming it safely passes through its terrifying and complex descent sequence, NASA's newest rover, Curiosity, should get its wheels on the Martian surface in just two short days, at 10:32 p.m. Pacific on Aug. 5.
From ACM News
Hacking Your Memory: Could Total Recall Really Happen?
Do we really need a remake of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi thriller Total Recall? No, but Hollywood is giving us one anyway, this time with Colin Farrell in the place of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the memory-challenged Douglas…
From ACM News
Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion?
Gen. Keith Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency and oversees U.S. Cyber Command, which means he leads the government's effort to protect America from cyberattacks.
From ACM News
Hey, Hackers: Defense Is Sexy, Too
Pleasing the crowd at the Black Hat and Def Con computer security conferences that took place in Las Vegas last week is relatively easy: simply hop on stage and confidently show how to compromise, or "pwn," a system that no one…
From ACM TechNews
Women's Participation in Information Technology Patenting, 2012 Update
The National Center for Women & Information Technology recently released its updated report on female information technology patenting, which examines how female participation in IT patenting has evolved over the past 30 years…
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Tech to Control Computers With a Flex of a Finger
Controlling computers through finger movements is the focus of Microsoft's development of electromyography controlled computing technology. The company recently applied for a patent on a wearable electromyography-based controller…
From ACM TechNews
Apple Bowl-Headed Patent Shows Wearable Computing Plans
Apple recently submitted a patent application for "display resolution increase with mechanical actuation," an invention that aims to compete with Google's Project Glass in developing wearable computing devices.
From ACM TechNews
Computers May Need Patterns to Think Better
An international research team, led by Charles Sturt University professor Terry Bossomaier and University of Sydney professor Allen Snyder, is investigating patterns that help computers think better.
From ACM TechNews
Big Data at Your Service
The growing use of information and communication technology is generating vast volumes of structured and unstructured data that present an opportunity that European Union research initiatives are seeking to take advantage of…
From ACM News
How Fbi Technology Woes Let Fort Hood Shooter Slip By
On November 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, Texas shot and killed 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian Defense Department employee while wounding 29 others.
From ACM News
Strong and Fast Markets, but No Time to Think
Financial markets have greatly improved over the past quarter-century.
From ACM News
Newest Nasa Mars Mission Connects Past and Future
NASA's newest Mars mission, landing in two days, will draw on support from missions sent to Mars years ago and will contribute to missions envisioned for future decades.
From ACM TechNews
Icann Backflips on Batching For New Tlds
ICANN recently announced that it will no longer attempt to batch new generic top-level domains in groups of 500.
From ACM TechNews
Public Can Explore Time-Lapse Videos of Earth With New Tool From Carnegie Mellon and Google
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the U.S. Geological Survey have developed a tool for Google's Earth Engine that enables users to access 13 years of NASA Landsat images of the Earth's surface.
From ACM TechNews
A Computer Infection That Can Never Be Cured
French hacker Jonathan Brossard recently developed Rakshasa, software that can be hidden inside the hardware of a PC, creating a backdoor that would allow secret remote access over the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
A Workshop on Next-Generational Financial Cyberinfrastructure
The Next-Generation Financial Cyberinfrastructure Workshop drew participants from academia, industry, and government to consider the need for a new financial cyberinfrastructure and to discuss common computing research challenges…
From ACM News
Is There a Virtual Mars in Our Future?
Imagine a day when virtual reality gets so good that you could take a computer-generated walk on the Martian surface, right here on Earth.
From ACM TechNews
A New High Performance and Fault-Tolerant Datacenter Network For Modular Datacenters Was Proposed
Scientists from China's National University of Defense Technology propose a hybrid intra-container network for a modular data center called SCautz, along with an attendant suite of routing protocols.
From ACM News
U.s. Sports Fans Using Proxy Servers to Watch Olympics on Bbc
The American network NBC has come in for a lot of flak since the weekend when its Olympics coverage began. The Twitter hadtag of #NBCfail began trending soon after the opening ceremony.
From ACM TechNews
Upgrading the Internet for the Mobile age
Princeton University researchers have developed Serval, a system that makes small changes to the way programs download and manage data, which they say could greatly impact the future growth of the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
Computers Can Predict Effects of HIV Policies
Brown University researchers have developed software that can model the spread of HIV in New York City over several years to make specific predictions about the future of the epidemic under different intervention plans.
From ACM TechNews
Inside the Quest to Put the World's Libraries Online
Making a vast, open, distributed network of books, records, and images available to anyone with an Internet link is the goal of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) through the establishment of a platform to bundle millions…
From ACM TechNews
Honeybot Project Helps Researchers Wipeout Facebook and Twitter Botnets
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Washington have developed Sodexo, an automated "honeybot" system that protects against social botnets.
From ACM News
Low-Power Chips to Model a Billion Neurons
For all their progress, computers are still pretty unimpressive.
From Communications of the ACM
DARPA Shredder Challenge Solved
The eight-person winning team used original computer algorithms to narrow the search space and then relied on human observation to move the pieces into their final positions.
From Communications of the ACM
Broader Horizons
ACM's Committee for Women in Computing (ACM-W) is widening its reach to involve women in industry as well as academia, including community college faculty and students.
From Communications of the ACM
Cosmic Simulations
With the help of supercomputers, scientists are now able to create models of large-scale astronomical events.
From Communications of the ACM
Advertising Gets Personal
Online behavioral advertising and sophisticated data aggregation have changed the face of advertising and put privacy in the crosshairs.