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subjectCommunications / Networking
authorThe New Yorker
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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


What Are the Colors of Alien Life?
From ACM News

What Are the Colors of Alien Life?

Just before it became the first man-made vessel to leave the solar system, in 1990, Voyager 1 took a portrait of Earth, some four billion miles away.

Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
From ACM Opinion

Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust

Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...

What Your Tweets Say About You
From ACM News

What Your Tweets Say About You

How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I'm about average when it comes to feeling...

Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
From ACM Opinion

Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality

Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...

This Is Your Avatar Speaking
From ACM News

This Is Your Avatar Speaking

Last year, in a lab at the University of Barcelona, an anonymous woman was fitted with headphones, a microphone, a head-mounted virtual-reality display, a motion...

The Shape of Things to Come
From ACM Opinion

The Shape of Things to Come

In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has...

Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
From ACM Opinion

Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human

On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.

We Know How You Feel
From ACM News

We Know How You Feel

Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963.

Material Question
From ACM News

Material Question

 Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment...

Print Thyself
From ACM News

Print Thyself

In February of 2012, a medical team at the University of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital, in Ann Arbor, carried out an unusual operation on a three-month...

A Print Magazine For Hackers
From ACM News

A Print Magazine For Hackers

On a Saturday afternoon earlier this summer, dozens of hackers, journalists, and activists sat on the floor in a darkened hallway of the Pennsylvania Hotel in Midtown...

The Solace of Oblivion
From ACM News

The Solace of Oblivion

October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father's sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California...

The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
From ACM Opinion

The Hazards of Going on Autopilot

At 9:18 P.M. on February 12, 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, took off from Newark International Airport.

Sleeping with the Enemy
From ACM News

Sleeping with the Enemy

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, is a large, mostly glass building shaped a bit like a banana.

What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
From ACM Opinion

What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police

On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.

What Comes After the Turing Test?
From ACM Opinion

What Comes After the Turing Test?

Over the weekend, the news broke that a "supercomputer" program called "Eugene Goostman"—an impersonation of a wisecracking, thirteen-year-old Ukranian boy—had...

"we're at Greater Risk": General Keith Alexander
From ACM Opinion

"we're at Greater Risk": General Keith Alexander

Since Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillence, we know more about how the National Security Agency has been interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot...

What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
From ACM News

What Makes an Alien Intelligent?

On Thursday, astronomers announced that they'd reached a new milestone in the search for Earth's "twin," or a planet much like ours that orbits in what's known...

The Electronic Holy War
From ACM News

The Electronic Holy War

In May, 1997, I.B.M.'s Deep Blue supercomputer prevailed over Garry Kasparov in a series of six chess games, becoming the first computer to defeat a world-champion...

Building the Google of Blood, One Tube at a Time
From ACM News

Building the Google of Blood, One Tube at a Time

The first shipment arrives at 4 A.M.
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