Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2012
From ACM TechNews
Insider Security Threat Gets a Serious Look By .s. Security Agencies
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Secret Service, and Carnegie Mellon University recently published a study that examined the technical and behavioral patterns from 67 insider and 13 external fraud…
From ACM TechNews
Fbi Launches $1 Billion Face Recognition Project
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is using facial-recognition technology to identify criminals and the system will be rolled out nationwide by 2014.
From ACM TechNews
A Computational Model of an Anticancer Nanoparticle
Researchers have used IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to build a model of how a drug inhibits a target enzyme known to spur the spread of cancer.
From ACM TechNews
Eye Movements Could Help in Diagnosis of Neurological Disorders
USC researchers have developed a method for detecting several neurological disorders by studying a person's eye movements.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's China Problem
Last May when Mark Zuckerberg wed his Chinese-American girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a joke began to make the rounds on China's version of Twitter, a microblog—or weibo—run by the Internet portal Sina. It went something like this…
From ACM News
Tech's New Wave, Driven by Data
Technology tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and smartphones in the last five years.
From ACM News
Anonymous: Behind the Masks of the Cyber Insurgents
Spalding railway station in Lincolnshire is not a big place. It takes me about two seconds to scan the platform and spot who I'm looking for: Jake Davis, aka Topiary, the computer hacker who at one point last year was the subject…
From ACM News
Are Hackers Heroes?
On the last day of June of this year, a tech Website called Redmond Pie posted two articles in quick succession that, on their face, had nothing to do with each other.
From ACM News
Insiders Suspected in Saudi Cyber Attack
One or more insiders with high-level access are suspected of assisting the hackers who damaged some 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's national oil company last month, sources familiar with the company's investigation say.
From ACM TechNews
Math Tree May Help Root Out Fraudsters
Researchers at the University of Alberta, University of Connecticut, and University of California-Merced recently outlined the connection linking fraud cases and the algorithm designed by Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner, known…
From ACM TechNews
Robots at War: Scholars Debate the Ethical Issues
Lethal autonomous systems are gradually penetrating battlefield operations, and Georgia Tech professor Ronald C. Arkin predicts the advent of robots that are ethically superior to human soldiers.
From ACM TechNews
Who’s the Most Influential in a Social Graph?
Georgia Tech researchers say they have developed an algorithm that quickly determines betweenness centrality for streaming graphs.
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence, Powered by Many Humans
University of Rochester researchers have developed Chorus, an approach to virtual personal assistants that creates a smart artificial chat partner from small contributions from many crowdsourced workers.
From ACM News
Calibration Target For Curiosity's Arm Camera
This view of the calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines two images taken by that camera during the 34th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Sept. 9,…
From ACM News
Amateur Mapmakers Redraw Boundaries, Working Online
Reshaped and renamed by generations of developers and gentrifiers, the borders of New York City’s neighborhoods are often hazy at best. Yesterday's Chinatown is today's east TriBeCa; a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant may, after…
From ACM News
Big Brother on a Budget: How Internet Surveillance Got So Cheap
When Libyan rebels finally wrested control of the country last year away from its mercurial dictator, they discovered the Qaddafi regime had received an unusual gift from its allies: foreign firms had supplied technology that…
From ACM News
Nokia's Visionary Wants to Out-Design Apple
Marko Ahtisaari spreads out several models of Nokia's new smartphone with the self-assurance of a Tiffany diamond salesman.
From ACM TechNews
A U.s.-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation recently announced the U.S.-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science, which aims to support collaborative research projects that…
From ACM TechNews
Mapping Neurological Disease
MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that can analyze information from medical images to identify diseased areas of the brain and their connections with other regions.
From ACM TechNews
Estonia Reprograms First Graders as Web Coders
Estonian public schools recently launched a program to develop a curriculum for teaching Web and mobile application development to students as early as first grade.
From ACM TechNews
Bridging the STEM Gap With Girl Scouts
The Girl Scout Research Institute recently found that girls' future career choices are more influenced by inspiring role models than by academic interests.
From ACM TechNews
New App Will Help Make Sign Language Communication More Accessible
Hearing and deaf sign language users should be able to communicate more effectively using an app designed by researchers at the University of Bristol.
From ACM Opinion
Nasa Sparks Its Imagination
It's been a month since Curiosity’s remarkable soft landing on the surface of Mars. Remember the massive, supersonic parachute that slowed the spacecraft’s descent from 1,000 down to 200 miles per hour, and the sky crane that…
From ACM News
Most Watched Online Ad of 2012 Campaign Is…
As we head into the election homestretch, it seems a good time to ask: What is the top watched online ad of the 2012 election cycle so far?
From ACM News
How the Pros Thwart Computer Spies with James Bond Tricks
H.D. Moore wasn't taking chances.
From ACM Opinion
Review: Raspberry Pi
You can get a lot for $35 these days. It bought me what looks like a credit card-size James Bond gadget prototype but is actually a fully functional computer.
From ACM News
What Do the H-Bomb and the Internet Have in Common? Paul Baran
Paul Baran set out to build a means of communication that could survive a nuclear war. And he ended up inventing the fundamental networking techniques that underpin the Internet.
From ACM News
'Junk DNA' Debunked
The deepest look into the human genome so far shows it to be a richer, messier and more intriguing place than was believed just a decade ago, scientists said Wednesday.
From ACM TechNews
Statisticians Calculate Probability of Another 9/11 Attack
There is a 50 percent chance of another devastating terrorist attack within the next decade, according to statistics compiled by the Santa Fe Institute's Aaron Clauset and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Ryan Woodward…
From ACM TechNews
Twitter Data Crunching: The New Crystal Ball
Big data analysis of Twitter activity can help predict the outcome of election-based processes such as TV talent shows, according to new research.