Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2012
From ACM News
Web War Ii: What a Future Cyberwar Will Look Like
How might the blitzkrieg of the future arrive? By air strike? An invading army? In a terrorist's suitcase? In fact it could be coming down the line to a computer near you.
From ACM News
Nhtsa Testing V2v Communication Systems, Considering Requiring Technology on New Cars
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration wants to ramp up the development and deployment of vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems, and the federal agency is actively considering requiring the technology to…
From ACM TechNews
CLA Researchers Combat Global Disease With a Cell Phone, Google Maps and a Lot of Ingenuity
UCLA researchers say they have developed a compact and cost-effective rapid diagnostic test-reading device that works with standard cell phones.
From ACM TechNews
It Engineers Ponder Fix to Dangerous Internet Routing Problem
Information technology engineers have been studying methods for fixing a weakness in the Internet's routing system known as the Border Gateway Protocol, which can cause networks to become unavailable if mistakes are made in entering…
From ACM TechNews
Esnet Launches Architecture to Help Researchers Deliver on Data-Intensive Science
Key to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network's effort to supply reliable high-bandwidth network services to thousands of scientists to manage their swelling data sets is a network design model, the Science DMZ…
From ACM News
Smartphone Patent Wars: The Coming Sequel
Billions of dollars are being spent to amass patent arsenals, and lawsuits are flying worldwide.
From ACM News
Iranian Oil Ministry Discovers Hackers' Target
The Iranian oil ministry's cyber team has identified the main and hidden agenda of the recent cyber attack on the ministry, a senior Iranian official announced on Saturday.
From ACM News
Drone se Takes Off on the Home Front
With little public attention, dozens of universities and law-enforcement agencies have been given approval by federal aviation regulators to use unmanned aircraft known as drones, according to documents obtained via Freedom of…
From ACM TechNews
Papers From Collective Intelligence 2012 Conference Now Online
MIT recently hosted the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference, which gave collective intelligence experts an opportunity to review papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent, as well as lay the groundwork…
From ACM News
The New Science of Online Persuasion
The Web has fundamentally changed the business of advertising in just a few years. So it stands to reason that the process of creating ads is bound to change, too.
From ACM TechNews
Voting Information Project Takes Aim at Open Data, Social Media
The Pew Center on the States and several technology companies recently launched the Voting Information Project, which enables Foursquare users to receive an "I Voted" badge when they visit their polling places.
From ACM TechNews
Nsf, Src Partner on Failure-Resistant Systems
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corp. recently announced Failure-Resistant Systems, a joint initiative that seeks proposals for new techniques that would ensure the reliability of systems.…
From ACM News
Could Iran Wage a Cyberwar on the .s.?
Security professionals in both the U.S. government and in private industry have long feared the prospect of a cyberwar with China or Russia, two states capable of launching destructive attacks on the computer networks that control…
From ACM News
The World's Five Biggest Cyber Threats
Criminals do not stop at stealing someone's personal data.
From ACM News
What Will Nasa's Rover of the Future Look Like?
NASA recently announced the formation of the Mars Program Planning Group, which—as its title would suggest—is aimed at getting us back to Mars. The hope is to get another robotic rover on the surface of the Red Planet by as early…
From ACM TechNews
A Further Boost For Quantum Cryptography
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid researchers say they have developed an efficient information reconciliation technique for quantum key distribution that could further the development of quantum cryptography.
From ACM TechNews
Engineering a Safer World
MIT professor Nancy Leveson recently hosted a workshop to educate more than 250 safety engineering professionals from around the world about System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, which addresses the impacts of human,…
From ACM TechNews
Network Your Stuff: Amateurs Inventing a New Internet
A growing number of computer hobbyists are merging the online and physical worlds in new ways.
From ACM News
Voyagers' Never-Ending Journey
Exploration is one thing, science another—but they've come together rather nicely in the Voyager mission to the outer planets, outbound for the past 35 years yet still making discoveries.
From ACM TechNews
Scanning the Brain For Impending Error
University of Arizona researchers are using new technology to predict in advance when people will make a mistake on the standard math section of the College Board's SAT exam with about 80 percent accuracy.
From ACM TechNews
Nasa's Space Apps Competition Takes on Big Ideas
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently held its first International Space Apps Challenge, attracting participants from 24 countries for the opportunity to help find solutions for some of the space agency's…
From ACM TechNews
Turing's Rapid Nazi Enigma Code-Breaking Secret Revealed
Two papers written by Alan Turing that detail his mathematical analysis for code breaking now can be viewed on request at Britain's National Archives.
From ACM News
The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning
When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines—computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive…
From ACM News
High-Speed Trading: My Laser Is Faster Than Your Laser
According to its New Jersey-based operator, Hibernia Atlantic, the $300 million Project Express will be 5.2 milliseconds faster than the AC-1, with an execution time of 59.6 milliseconds.
From ACM News
The Guardian's Open 20: Fighters For Internet Freedom
From politicians and professors to computer scientists and the first programmer, champions of the open Internet.
From ACM News
Hackers Turn MIT Building Into Giant Tetris Game
Hackers overrode the tallest building in Cambridge, Mass., last week, turning the 21-story Green Building at MIT into a giant Tetris puzzle game controllable from a nearby joystick attached to a podium.
From ACM News
Are Two Monitors Better Than One?
Whether workers in a data-intensive environment are more productive with a single monitor or with multiple monitors can depend on the size of the single monitor, a person's ability to be undistracted, and the number of pixels…
From ACM TechNews
Tim Berners-Lee: We Don't Need Arbitrary New Tlds
World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is criticizing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' plan to create arbitrary new top-level domains.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Work to Make Future Smart Grid Safe and Secure
Missouri University of Science and Technology researchers led by Bruce McMillin are using cybersecurity techniques to prevent attackers on a future power network from causing disruptions that could disable portions of the future…
From ACM TechNews
An Algorithm For Preserving Art
Technology ReviewThe Metropolitan Museum of Art's Paolo Dionisi and IBM researchers have deployed 120 low-power temperature and humidity sensors in an attempt to determine the ideal environmental conditions to help preserve the…