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 Careers
Hacking a niverse's Worth of Data
On a Friday night in New York City you can find just about anything. And this past Friday about 130 hackers gathered in the Hayden Planetarium to participate in...
From ACM News
The Quiet Rise of the Satellite Spy Agency
As far as intelligence agencies go, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has remained relatively low profile—attracting neither the intrigue of, say, the...
From ACM Careers
How Two Men nlocked Modern Encryption
In September of 1974, when he was 30 years old, Whitfield Diffie was obsessed with cryptography.
From ACM News
Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected By Scientists
In a retired shore station for transpacific communications cables on the western coast of Vancouver Island sits a military computer in a padlocked cage.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Careers
A Rare Look Inside the Air Force's Drone Training Classroom
Learning how to drop bombs and fire Hellfire missiles is more like sitting in a regular college classroom than you might expect.
From ACM Opinion
Should .s. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes or Exploit Them?
There's a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose...
From ACM News
Everything We Know About How the Nsa Tracks People's Physical Location
Glenn Greenwald is back reporting about the NSA, now with Pierre Omidyar's news organization FirstLook and its introductory publication, The Intercept.
From ACM Opinion
What the Digital Brains of the Future Might Be Like
It is the rare entrepreneur who hits it truly big twice. Those who do—such as Ev Williams, Ted Turner, and Elon Musk—tend to stay within the original industry that...
From ACM Opinion
Paul Otellini's Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It?
Forty-five years after Intel was founded by Silicon Valley legends Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, it is the world's leading semiconductor company.
From ACM TechNews
Meet Mira, the Supercomputer That Makes niverses
One of the largest and most complex universe simulations ever attempted will be run in October by Mira, the world's third fastest supercomputer.
From ACM Opinion
Meet Mira, the Supercomputer That Makes niverses
Cosmology is the most ambitious of sciences. Its goal, plainly stated, is to describe the origin, evolution, and structure of the entire universe, a universe that...
From ACM Opinion
The Jet Propulsion Lab Is Way Weirder (and Awesomer) Than You Even Imagined
For a center of cutting-edge scientific research, Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab seems to be a pretty wacky place. Luke Johnson, a graphic designer at the lab, set...
From ACM News
How Big Data Is Changing Astronomy (Again)
Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images—like the one here—taken...
From ACM TechNews
Building a Smarter Forest
B.S. Abdur Rahman University computer scientists M.P. Sivaram Kumar and S. Rajasekaran recently published a research paper that says the existing methods for preventing...
From ACM Careers
The Future of Hiring: Human Resources, Without the Humans
Imagine a scenario where your next job interview isn't face-to-face, but face-to-screen. There are no questions about your former work experience and office habits...
From ACM News