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 TechNews
Internet Responsible For 2 Percent of Global Energy sage
The Internet is responsible for 170 to 307 gigawatts of global energy consumption, according to the University of California, Berkeley's Justin Ma and the International...
From ACM News
Revealed
As protests against financial power sweep the world, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational...
From ACM News
Cops on the Trail of Crimes that Haven't Happened
The patrol car comes to a stop in a sleepy neighbourhood of small, earth-coloured homes. A woman saunters past pushing a stroller. It is daytime in the artsy beach...
From ACM TechNews
Electronic Elections: One App, One Vote
Rice University researchers led by Bryan Campbell have designed an iPhone app that will allow voters to cast their ballots with their smartphones.
From ACM TechNews
Wireless Network Can Watch Your Breathing
University of Utah researchers have found that wireless signals can indicate if people in the area are breathing. The researchers surrounded a volunteer with...
From ACM TechNews
Air Traffic System Vulnerable to Cyber Attack
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology uses unencrypted global positioning system signals to broadcast a plane's position to networks. The...
From ACM TechNews
Smart Software Spots Swaying Risk of a Crushing Crowd
The Fraunhofer Institute's Barbara Krausz has developed a system for determining when crowds have become too large by observing the way people sway slowly from...
From ACM News
Ok, Climate Skeptics: Here's the Raw Data You Wanted
Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of last year's "climategate" scandal.
From ACM News
Welcome to the Age of the Splinternet
Openness is the Internet's great strength—and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end?
From ACM TechNews
Protecting Protestors With Photos That Never Existed
In a response to protestors getting arrested for taking pictures of government-instigated violence, researchers have developed a method that uses graphics processors...
From ACM News
Interview with Key Lulzsec Hacker
It was early May when LulzSec's profile skyrocketed after a hack on the giant Sony corporation. LulzSec's name comes from Lulz, a corruption of LOL, often denoting...
From ACM TechNews
Rag-Trade Robots: From Body Scan to Bespoke Suit
The Leapfrog project, a collaboration of 35 industrial and academic partners from 11 countries, aims to develop completely automated clothing-production systems...
From ACM News
Spies Can Send Messages Hidden in a Google Search
The peculiar list of search options that Google suggests as you type in a query could be hijacked to let people communicate secretly.
From ACM TechNews
Gender-Spotting Tool Could Have Rumbled Fake Blogger
A gender analysis program developed by Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Na Cheng could have determined the sex of a 40-year-old U.S. man writing online...
From ACM TechNews
Future of Virtual Reality: What Pregnancy Feels Like
Men can gain a better understanding of what women experience during pregnancy by wearing a new device developed at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology...
From ACM TechNews
Earthquake? Terrorist Bomb? Call in the AI
Durham University researchers are developing a training simulation system designed to help emergency services workers adapt to chaotic situations. The system takes...
From ACM TechNews
Seven Technologies to Disrupt the Next Decade
Among the technologies expected to appear in the next decade is augmented reality effected by eyewear and cameras that can add an informational overlay to the wearer's...
From ACM News
Covert Hard Drive Fragmentation Embeds a Spy's Secrets
Good news for spies. There is now a way to hide data on a hard drive without using encryption. Instead of using a cipher to scramble text, the method involves...
From ACM News
Internet Probe Can Track You Down to Within 690 Metres
Online adverts could soon start stalking you. A new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down your current location...
From ACM TechNews