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
Your Dvr Didn't Take Down the Internet, Yet
Last week ended with a mid-level internet catastrophe. You may have noticed that for most of Friday popular sites like Netflix, Twitter, Spotify (and yes, WIRED)...
From ACM News
X-Rays Are Revealing the Mysterious Writings in Mummy Coffins
It's a sleepy summer Friday at Lawrence Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source.
From ACM News
Want to Know Julian Assange's Endgame? He Told You a Decade Ago
Amid a seemingly incessant deluge of leaks and hacks, Washington, DC staffers have learned to imagine how even the most benign email would look a week later on...
From ACM News
Meet Noto, Google's Free Font For More Than 800 Language
Something funny happens when your computer or phone can’t display a font: A blank rectangular box pops up in place of the missing glyph.
From ACM News
How to Steal an AI
In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as "black box" systems:...
From ACM News
Google's Internet-Beaming Balloon Gets a New Pilot: AI
This summer, the Google X lab launched a balloon into the stratosphere over Peru, and it stayed there for 98 days.
From ACM News
Tech Giants Team p to Fix Typography's Biggest Problem
Fonts have a serious image problem.
From ACM TechNews
Inside Google's Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls
Online forums and social media platforms are havens for trolls and bullies who launch campaigns of harassment can lead to the self-censorship of the people they...
From ACM News
How Police Trace Cellphones in Ieds Like the Ones in Nyc
A cellphone makes a convenient detonator for an improvised explosive device. But it's also one of the most conveniently trackable devices under the eye of American...
From ACM News
How the Fbi Could Have Hacked the San Bernardino Shooter's Iphone
More than six months have passed since the FBI first ordered Apple to help the agency bypass the encryption on the iPhone 5c of Rizwan Syed Farook, an ISIS supporter...
From ACM News
How Space Scientists Turn Exoplanets Into Places We Can 'see'
Do a Google image search for "exoplanet."
From ACM News
AI Can Recognize Your Face Even If You're Pixelated
Pixelation has long been a familiar fig leaf to cover our visual media’s most private parts.
From ACM News
Google's Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring Isis Recruits
Google has built a half-trillion-dollar business out of divining what people want based on a few words they type into a search field.
From ACM News
Forget Software: Now Hackers Are Exploiting Physics
Practically every word we use to describe a computer is a metaphor.
From ACM News
The Shadow Brokers Mess Is What Happens When the Nsa Hoards Zero-Days
When the NSA discovers a new method of hacking into a piece of software or hardware, it faces a dilemma.
From ACM News
Ironic Windows Vulnerability Shows Why Backdoors Can't Work
Apple's refusal to comply with a court order to help the FBI crack an iPhone highlighted the pressure tech companies face to include backdoors in their software...
From ACM News
A New Wireless Hack Can Unlock 100 Million Volkswagens
In 2013, when University of Birmingham computer scientist Flavio Garcia and a team of researchers were preparing to reveal a vulnerability that allowed them todelayed...
From ACM News
Martians Might Be Real. That Makes Mars Exploration Way More Complicated
History will note that the guy who discovered liquid water on Mars was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, a 20-year-old who played guitar in a death...
From ACM News
Hackers Hijack a Big Rig Truck's Accelerator and Brakes
When cybersecurity researchers showed in recent years that they could hack a Chevy Impala or a Jeep Cherokee to disable the vehicles' brakes or hijack their steering...
From ACM News