October 2020 - Vol. 63 No. 10

Features

Opinion Cerf's up Oct 1 2020

It is apparent that the world needs thoughtful and technically credible debate on alternatives for containing the problem of harmful behavior on the Internet.

Vinton G. Cerf

Computing Profession

BLOG@CACM Oct 1 2020

Protecting Computers and People From Viruses

Robin K. Hill considers why the comparison of organic viruses and computer viruses is so compelling.

Robin K. Hill

Computing Profession

News Oct 1 2020

Bouncing Balls and Quantum Computing

A lighthearted method for calculating π is analogous to a fundamental algorithm for quantum computing.

Don Monroe

Architecture and Hardware

News Oct 1 2020

Thwarting Side-Channel Attacks

Deep learning challenges chip security.

Chris Edwards

Security and Privacy

News Oct 1 2020

Who Has Access to Your Smartphone Data?

ISPs, app developers, and even the government may know more about you than you think.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2020

Fran Allen: 1932-2020

Frances E. Allen was the first woman recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Simson Garfinkel and Eugene H. Spafford

Computing Applications

Opinion Technology strategy and management Oct 1 2020

Self-Driving Vehicle Technology: Progress and Promises

Seeking the answer to the elusive question, 'Are we there yet'?

Michael A. Cusumano

Computing Applications

view from inside a self-driving vehicle, illustration

Opinion Inside risks Oct 1 2020

A Holistic View of Future Risks

Almost everything is somehow interrelated with everything else—and that should not surprise us.

Peter G. Neumann

Computing Applications

Opinion Kode Vicious Oct 1 2020

Sanity vs. Invisible Markings

Tabs vs. spaces

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

programming code surrounded by white space

Opinion Viewpoint Oct 1 2020

We Need to Automate the Declaration of Conflicts of Interest

Leveraging existing data sources to improve the declaration and management of authorship conflicts of interest.

Richard T. Snodgrass and Marianne Winslett

Computing Profession

Opinion Viewpoint Oct 1 2020

Using Computer Programs and Search Problems for Teaching Theory of Computation

Recognizing the significance of a cornerstone of computer science.

John MacCormick

Computing Profession

Practice Oct 1 2020

The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs

Hitting a nerve with field-programmable gate arrays.

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Oct 1 2020

Debugging Incidents in Google’s Distributed Systems

How experts debug production issues in complex distributed systems.

Charisma Chan and Beth Cooper

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2020

What Do Agile, Lean, and ITIL Mean to DevOps?

The value of learning skillsets within a trio of disciplines and the role each plays in DevOps.

Stuart Galup, Ronald Dattero, and Jing Quan

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2020

Real Time Spent on Real Time

The story of the development of a sound, static method for worst-case execution-time analysis.

Reinhard Wilhelm

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Oct 1 2020

Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure in Cryptocurrencies

Software weaknesses in cryptocurrencies create unique challenges in responsible revelations.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Review articles Oct 1 2020

A Decade of Social Bot Detection

Bots increasingly tamper with political elections and economic discussions. Tracing trends in detection strategies and key suggestions on how to win the fight.

Stefano Cresci

Computing Applications

robot with phone 'like' 'like' 'like', illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2020

Technical Perspective: Analyzing Smart Contracts with MadMax

"MadMax: Analyzing the Out-of-Gas World of Smart Contracts," by Neville Grech et al., effectively discovers a new smart contract vulnerability, and proposes a detection approach based on a static analysis.

Benjamin Livshits

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2020

MadMax: Analyzing the Out-of-Gas World of Smart Contracts

We identify gas-focused vulnerabilities and present MadMax: a static program analysis technique that automatically detects gas-focused vulnerabilities with very high confidence.

Computing Applications

Mad Max Fury Road gas truck, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2020

Technical Perspective: Two for the Price of One

"Lower Bounds for External Memory Integer Sorting via Network Coding" proves a remarkable connection between how efficiently computers can perform sorting and transmitting.

Paul Beame

Systems and Networking

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2020

Lower Bounds for External Memory Integer Sorting via Network Coding

In this paper, we present a tight conditional lower bound on the complexity of external memory sorting of integers.

Alireza Farhadi, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Kasper Green Larsen, and Elaine Shi

Systems and Networking

Opinion Last byte Oct 1 2020

Privacy-Preserving Polling

Can you answer a poll without revealing your true preferences and have the results of the poll still be accurate?

Dennis Shasha

cellphone display showing a donkey and elephant, illustration

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