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Google's New Brain Could Have a Big Impact
From ACM News

Google's New Brain Could Have a Big Impact

A store of information dubbed the "Knowledge Graph" now adds useful context and detail to the list of links that Google serves up.

Linus Torvalds: Linux Succeeded Thanks to Selfishness and Trust
From ACM Opinion

Linus Torvalds: Linux Succeeded Thanks to Selfishness and Trust

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy...

Desktop Computers Look More and More Like Smartphones
From ACM Opinion

Desktop Computers Look More and More Like Smartphones

If you're an experienced computer user, you probably remember explaining to newbies how a desktop computer worked: Your photos should go in this folder; your documents...

From ACM Opinion

Apple's Strategy of Built-In Obsolescence

Ross Miller made a good point about Apple's new flagship laptop, in his review for the Verge. Once you take into account that it has a solid-state drive, it's actually...

Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon
From ACM News

Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon

That little iPhone in your pocket is perfectly positioned to become a clone of the credit cards in your wallet or purse.

Is Flame Virus Fallout a Chinese, Russian Plot to Control the Internet?
From ACM Opinion

Is Flame Virus Fallout a Chinese, Russian Plot to Control the Internet?

Has the U.S. government been caught with its virtual hands in the world's cookie jar? And might it lose control of the Internet as a consequence?

Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One
From ACM Opinion

Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the reason you're reading this story in a web browser, complete with hypertext like this and an internet address that looks like this: ...

How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web
From ACM Opinion

How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web

Despite the massive amounts of computing power dedicated by search engine companies to crawling and indexing trillions of documents on the Internet, search engines...

Bionic Brains and Beyond
From ACM News

Bionic Brains and Beyond

The National Spelling Bee of 2023 started out like any other, but controversy enveloped the contest when Suzy Hamilton, an 8-year-old from Tulsa, emerged as the...

Why Attack When We Can't Defend?
From ACM Opinion

Why Attack When We Can't Defend?

In December 2010, after we had reverse engineered the Stuxnet virus, I argued that the attackers must have known they would open Pandora's box. Others suggested...

Stuxnet Expert Calls ­.s. the 'good Guys' in Cyber-Warfare
From ACM Opinion

Stuxnet Expert Calls ­.s. the 'good Guys' in Cyber-Warfare

Sitting in the front row for the first full day of the International Conference on Cyber Conflict was one of the industry’s foremost "rock star" researchers, ...

Nations Must Talk to Halt 'cyber Terrorism': Kaspersky
From ACM Opinion

Nations Must Talk to Halt 'cyber Terrorism': Kaspersky

Eugene Kaspersky, whose lab discovered the Flame virus that has attacked computers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, said on Wednesday only a global effort...

Where Speech Recognition Is Going
From ACM Opinion

Where Speech Recognition Is Going

Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was...

Why Antivirus Companies Like Mine Failed to Catch Flame and Stuxnet
From ACM Opinion

Why Antivirus Companies Like Mine Failed to Catch Flame and Stuxnet

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Iran. It was sent by an analyst from the Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team, and it was informing me about...

Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World's Energy Crisis
From ACM Opinion

Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World's Energy Crisis

There is one version of Craig Venter's life story where he would’ve been a dutiful scientist at the National Institutes of Health, a respected yet anonymous researcher...

Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms
From ACM Opinion

Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms

Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals. EFF supports...

From ACM Opinion

What's the Meaning of This: Flame Malware

From all indications, it would appear that attackers are continuing to attack and malware authors are carrying on writing malware.

The Remote Control as Subversive Technology
From ACM Opinion

The Remote Control as Subversive Technology

Television began as a box.

Jonathan Ive: Simplicity Isn't Simple
From ACM Opinion

Jonathan Ive: Simplicity Isn't Simple

"Design is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing. We don't really talk about design, we talk about developing ideas...

Q&A: A Sure Thing
From Communications of the ACM

Q&A: A Sure Thing

Artificial intelligence pioneer Judea Pearl discusses probability, causation, the calculus of intervention, and counterfactuals.
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