Communications of the ACM
An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
From ACM News
Why Emergency Braking Systems Sometimes Hit Parked Cars and Lane Dividers
The National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday provided new details about a March crash in Mountain View, California, that claimed the life of engineer Walter...
From ACM News
Frozen Pluto Has Wind-Blown Dunes Made of Methane Sand
Part of the wonder of seeing new worlds is the radical difference from the planet you know.
From ACM News
NASA Asks Scientists How Its Lander Should Look for Life on Europa
NASA is in various stages of planning two multi-billion dollar missions to Jupiter's intriguing, ice-covered moon of Europa.
From ACM News
Critical PGP and S/MIME Bugs can Reveal Encrypted Emails—ninstall Now
The flaws can expose emails sent in the past and "pose an immediate threat."
From ACM News
What Lies Beneath: The Things Facebook Knows Go Beyond ser Data
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations regarding the exposure of profile data for millions of users, Facebook is now facing an investigation into its...
From ACM News
Developers Love Trendy New Languages but Earn More with Functional Programming
Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow performs an annual survey to find out more about the programmer community, and the latest set of results has just been published...
From ACM News
How Did Life Begin? It's Chemistry 101, but in Space
How did life start? There may not be a bigger question.
From ACM News
AI Trained to Spot Heart Disease Risks sing Retina Scan
The idea behind using a neural network for image recognition is that you don't have to tell it what to look for in an image.
From ACM News
Inching Closer to a DNA-Based File System
When it comes to data storage, efforts to get faster access grab most of the attention. But long-term archiving of data is equally important, and it generally requires...
From ACM News
The James Webb Space Telescope Has Emerged from the Freezer
After spending three months at a temperature of just 20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, the massive James Webb Space Telescope emerged from a large vacuum...
From ACM News
Do We Need a Tech Boom For the Elderly?
Joseph Coughlin has been director of the MIT AgeLab ever since he founded it in 1999. In his new book, The Longevity Economy, he contends that old age—much like...
From ACM News
Meltdown and Spectre: Here's What Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Others Are Doing About It
The Meltdown and Spectre flaws—two related vulnerabilities that enable a wide range of information disclosure from every mainstream processor, with particularly...
From ACM Careers
Stealth Turns 40: Looking Back at the First Flight of Have Blue
On December 1, 1977, a truly strange bird took flight for the first time in the skies over a desolate corner of Nevada.
From ACM News
'malware-Free' Attacks Mount in Big Breaches, Crowdstrike Finds
Despite the rise of massive crypto-ransomware attacks, an even more troubling trend emerged in data gathered by the security firm CrowdStrike this past year and...
From ACM News
Dubious Claim of Week: Air Force's 'emp Missile' Could Disable N. Korean Icbms
On Monday, NBC Nightly News broadcast a report claiming that White House officials had discussed using an experimental weapon to disrupt or disable a North Korean...
From ACM News
Uss mccain collision Ultimately Caused By Ui Confusion
On November 1, the US Navy issued its report on the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain this summer.
From ACM News
Inspired By Brain's Visual Cortex, New AI tterly Wrecks Captcha Security
Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people's faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large...
From ACM News
Higgs Boson ncovered By Quantum Algorithm on D-Wave Machine
Machine learning has returned with a vengeance. I still remember the dark days of the late '80s and '90s, when it was pretty clear that the current generation of...
From ACM Opinion