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
Cracking the Code of Machine Translation
University of Southern California scientists have developed a machine-translation technique that treats translation as a cryptographic challenge rather than a matter...
From ACM TechNews
Botclouds: A Cyberattacker's Dream
Delft University researchers are studying how botclouds can be used to launch attacks, send spam, and commit fraud.
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 News
The Defenders: Inside an Online Siege
In a quiet, windowless auditorium in Bristol, in the west of England, Lucy Robson and her team hunch over their laptops as the seconds on a giant clock above...
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
Quantum Trickery Could Lead to Stealth Radar
Stealthy radar systems and the ability to transmit large amounts of data over long distances are a step closer thanks to a technique that could improve the efficiency...
From ACM News
AI Lie Detection Could Help Crack Terror Cells
In A bar in Maastricht University in the Netherlands, 12 students are each given an envelope marked "Top Secret." Inside are plans for a terror attack somewhere...
From ACM News
GPS Chaos: How a $30 Box Can Jam Your Life
Signals from GPS satellites now help you to call your mother, power your home, and even land your plane – but a cheap plastic box can jam it all.
From ACM News
Augmented Reality Iphone Helps Police Track Suspects
Picture the scene: armed police officers are warned on their radios that a suspected male terrorist has been tracked to a crowded football stadium.
From ACM TechNews
The Cyberweapon That Could Take Down the Internet
University of Minnesota researchers have developed a cyberweapon that turns the structure of the Internet against itself, but ultimately could be used to make the...
From ACM TechNews
Cryptographers Chosen to Duke It Out in Final Fight
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has selected five Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) entrants as finalists for its competition to find a replacement...
From ACM News
Cryptographers Chosen to Duke It Out in Final Fight
A competition to find a replacement for one of the gold-standard computer security algorithms used in almost all secure, online transactions just heated up.
From ACM News
Criminals Find the Key to Car Immobilizers
For 16 years, car immobilisers have kept car thieves at bay, but that may now be changing.
From ACM News
Criminals Find the Key to Car Immobilizers
For 16 years, car immobilisers have kept car thieves at bay, but that may now be changing.
From ACM News
Why the Stuxnet Worm Is Like Nothing Seen Before
Stuxnet is the first worm of its type capable of attacking critical infrastructure like power stations and electricity grids: those in the know have been expecting...
From ACM News
Flawed Proof shers In Era of Wikimath
His prospects of answering one of the biggest questions in mathematics may be fading, but Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, may...
From ACM News
Hiding Files in Flickr Pics Will Fool Web Censors
Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign Websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries...
From ACM News
P ? Np? It's Bad News For the Power of Computing
Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sentdraft...
From ACM News