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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.


Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist
From ACM News

Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist

Just over five years ago, Jim Gray, a computer scientist then working for Microsoft, vanished with his sailboat somewhere in the waters beyond the Golden Gate Bridge...

Onstar Files Patents For Minority Report-Style Billboards
From ACM News

Onstar Files Patents For Minority Report-Style Billboards

Two weeks ago, a patent filing by General Motors was uncovered that proposed using data collected from its OnStar service to tailor public advertisements to individual...

Remember Stuxnet? Why the U.s. Is Still Vulnerable
From ACM News

Remember Stuxnet? Why the U.s. Is Still Vulnerable

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security revealed a rash of cyber attacks on natural gas pipeline companies. Just as with previous cyber attacks on infrastructure...

Facebook's Prospects May Rest on Trove of Data
From ACM News

Facebook's Prospects May Rest on Trove of Data

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history. Now what?

Court ­pholds Google-Nsa Relationship Secrecy
From ACM News

Court ­pholds Google-Nsa Relationship Secrecy

A federal appeals court last Friday upheld the National Security Agency's decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship...

The Education of Mark Zuckerberg
From ACM News

The Education of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is ready for his close-up.

Iran Slams Google for Leaving Persian Gulf Nameless
From ACM News

Iran Slams Google for Leaving Persian Gulf Nameless

Iran on Saturday criticized Google for leaving the body of water separating it from the Arabian peninsula nameless on its online map service, saying it would hurt...

Cyber Briefings 'scare The Bejeezus' Out Of Ceos
From ACM News

Cyber Briefings 'scare The Bejeezus' Out Of Ceos

For the CEOs of companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, talk of cyberweapons and cyberwar could have been abstract. But at a classified security briefing in...

FBI: We Need Wiretap-Ready Web Sites
From ACM News

FBI: We Need Wiretap-Ready Web Sites

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build...

Bill Would Have Businesses Foot Cost Of Cyberwar
From ACM News

Bill Would Have Businesses Foot Cost Of Cyberwar

Business executives and national security leaders are of one mind over the need to improve the security of the computers that control the U.S. power grid, the financial...

The Man Who Started the Hacker Wars
From ACM News

The Man Who Started the Hacker Wars

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a...

How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
From ACM News

How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet

Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a...

Internet Group Says Quality Over Speed in Restoring Domain-Name Expansion
From ACM TechNews

Internet Group Says Quality Over Speed in Restoring Domain-Name Expansion

A system used by ICANN to allow companies and organizations to propose new generic top-level domain names remains shut down indefinitely, three weeks after the...

From ACM News

The Giants Among ­S

The patent world is quietly undergoing a change of seismic proportions. In a few short years, a handful of entities have amassed vast treasuries of patents on an...

Osama Bin Laden Didn't Use Encryption: 17 Documents Released
From ACM News

Osama Bin Laden Didn't Use Encryption: 17 Documents Released

It appears that Osama bin Laden didn’t encrypt any of his computer files. If he had, U.S. authorities probably wouldn’t have been able to do much after confiscating...

Programming Languages Can't Have Copyright Protection, Eu Court Rules
From ACM TechNews

Programming Languages Can't Have Copyright Protection, Eu Court Rules

The European Court of Justice has ruled that the functionality of computer programs and the language they are written in cannot be protected by copyright.

Steganography: How Al-Qaeda Hid Secret Documents in a Porn Video
From ACM News

Steganography: How Al-Qaeda Hid Secret Documents in a Porn Video

When a suspected al-Qaeda member was arrested in Berlin in May of 2011, he was found with a memory card with a password-protected folder—and the files within it...

London 2012: The Importance of Olympic Timekeeping
From ACM News

London 2012: The Importance of Olympic Timekeeping

Olympic timekeepers Omega are unveiling the latest technology that will be used at the London 2012 Games. It can monitor athletes' performance to the nearest one...

Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky For Government Secrets
From ACM News

Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky For Government Secrets

Earlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground...

Data Engineer in Google Case Is Identified
From ACM News

Data Engineer in Google Case Is Identified

At the center of the uproar over a Google project that scooped up personal data from potentially millions of unsuspecting people is the company software engineer...
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