Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2011
From ACM TechNews
Google to nveil 'Dart' Programming Language
Google plans to introduce a new programming language called Dart at the Goto conference, which takes place Oct. 10-12 in Aarhus, Denmark.
From ACM News
Court Case Asks if 'Big Brother' Is Spelled GPS
The precedent is novel. More precisely, the precedent is a novel. In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell's "1984"…
From ACM News
Patents, Anyone? Gadget Makers Continue to Square Off in Court
Whatever your stance on the current state of patent law—it's essential to protecting intellectual property, it's detrimental to innovation, or something in between—the fact is that there's a whole lot of patent-related activity…
From ACM TechNews
Innovation Is Step Toward Digital Graphene Transistors
Purdue University researchers have created a type of graphene inverter, a key building block of digital transistors.
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Computing With Light
Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have conducted an experiment that enables a single photon to control the quantum state of another photon, a development that could lead to a quantum Internet.
From ACM TechNews
Linux Foundation Chief Talks About Torvalds' Leadership, Html5 and Mobile's Future
Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says in an interview that the desktop platform's relevance is diminishing as technologies such as smartphones, connected TVs, and in-vehicle infotainment grow.
From ACM TechNews
New Technologies to Lighten the Web's Energy Load
An international research team has developed a chip that promises to reduce the carbon footprint of the Internet's core telecommunications and computing technology.
From ACM News
Can Brain Research Keep S Safe?
Human conflict is often associated with the emergence of a new science or technology. The Civil War's Gatling gun changed battlefield tactics and led to modern machine guns, like the M61, that are still in use. World War I's…
From ACM News
New Emotion Detector Sees When We're Lying
A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watching our faces as we talk, experts say. The computerized system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolution thermal imaging sensor, and a suite of algorithms.
From ACM News
Understanding and Improving Crowdsourcing Models
A network of researchers are attempting to create more efficient and useful crowdsourcing models that could be used to predict everything from terrorist attacks to changes in societal eating habits.
From ACM News
Bike Crash Wiped Details; Gps Data Filled Them In
After racing and biking back roads on the San Francisco Peninsula for almost half a century without serious incident, on July 3 I crashed while riding downhill at more than 30 miles an hour.
From ACM TechNews
Parallel Programming Skills Crisis Could Stall Server Evolution
The lack of parallel programming expertise worldwide will become a major issue for the IT industry over the next 10 years, warns a RMIT University report.
From ACM TechNews
Application Development Boosts It Job Market: Dice Report
The number of available technology jobs as of Sept. 1 stood at 82,836, with 50,659 full-time positions, 35,378 contract positions, and 1,565 part-time positions, reports Dice.com.
From ACM TechNews
Ibm's Futuristic Storage Aims For Speed, Density
IBM is developing super-fast, super-dense storage media that could be available within 10 years.
From ACM TechNews
The AlloSphere Offers an Interactive Experience of Nano-Sized Worlds
The University of California, Santa Barbara's AlloSphere Research Laboratory takes scientific data that is too small to see and hear and magnifies it to a human scale so researchers can better analyze the data and find new patterns…
From ACM News
Hacker Rattles Security Circles
He claims to be 21 years old, a student of software engineering in Tehran who reveres Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and despises dissidents in his country.
From ACM News
Diginotar Ssl Certificate Hack Amounts to Cyberwar, Says Expert
The Dutch government says hackers who broke into a web security firm in the Netherlands last month issued hundreds of bogus security certificates that could be used on websites including the CIA and Israel's Mossad, as well…
From ACM News
Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots
They're not quite psychic yet, but machines are getting better at reading your mind. Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot.
From ACM News
Quantum Minds: Why We Think Like Quarks
The fuzziness and weird logic of the way particles behave applies surprisingly well to how humans think.
From ACM Careers
In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores
Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They're studying Shakespeare's "As You Like It"—but not in any traditional way.
From ACM News
Security and Surveillance Pervades Post-9/11 New York City
From building-blocking bollards to millimeter-wave scanners, the September 11 terrorist attacks have led to significant changes in security techniques and technology worldwide over the past decade to discourage future attacks…
From ACM TechNews
Ten Years After 9/11, Cyber Attacks Pose National Threat, Committee Says
Catastrophic cyberattacks are a very real threat to U.S. security, according to a study from the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Preparedness Group.
From ACM News
Brain-Reading Devices Could Kill Off Keyboard
The QWERTY keyboard has dominated computer typing for more than 40 years, but a new breakthrough that translates human thought into digital text may spell the beginning of the end for manual word processing.
From ACM TechNews
Engineers Find Leaky Pipes With Artificial Intelligence
University of Exeter researchers are using artificial intelligence software to monitor water systems to identify leaky pipes and flood risks.
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Logic Could Make Better Robot Bartenders
Researchers are studying how quantum logic can be used to give robots multiple personalities to make them act more like humans.
From ACM TechNews
Why They Chose STEM
Although most U.S. college students pursuing STEM degrees decided to do so in high school, just 20 percent said that their pre-college education prepared them "extremely well" for those fields, according to a recent Microsoft…
From ACM News
Nasa Technology, At Work on Earth
Variations of many NASA inventions, initially developed for space travel and exploration, have worked their way into consumer culture, ranging from common household items to complex medical technology. Since 1973, when NASA…
From ACM News
Nasa Gives Public New Internet Tool to Explore the Solar System
NASA is giving the public the power to journey through the solar system using a new interactive Web-based tool.
From ACM News
The Next Wave of Botnets Could Descend from the Skies
The buzz starts low and quickly gets louder as a toy quadricopter flies in low over the buildings. It might look like flight enthusiasts having fun, but it could be a future threat to computer networks.
From ACM News
When Cookies Leak Data
We all know that cookies need to be handled with care, and new research indicates that the Google search cookie has particular problems.