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
tah's Online Caucus Gives Security Experts Heart Attacks
Security researchers pretty much uniformly agree that letting people vote online is a very bad idea, one that is fraught with risks and vulnerabilities that could...
From ACM News
Long Before the Apple-Fbi Battle, Lavabit Sounded a Warning
Three years ago, Ladar Levison, the founder of the now-defunct secure email service known as Lavabit, was in the same position Apple finds itself today: facing...
From ACM News
The Fbi Warns That Car Hacking Is a Real Risk
It's been eight months since a pair of security researchers proved beyond any doubt that car hacking is more than an action movie plot device when they remotely ...
From ACM News
How Google's AI Viewed the Move No Human Could nderstand
The move didn't make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul's Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently.
From ACM News
Biometrics Are Coming, Along With Serious Security Concerns
You're buying a pair of jeans. At the register, instead of reaching for your wallet or phone, you pull back your hair.
From ACM News
Inside the Cunning, Unprecedented Hack of Ukraine's Power Grid
It was 3:30 p.m. last December 23, and residents of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Western Ukraine were preparing to end their workday and head home through the...
From ACM News
How the Feds Could Get Into Iphones Without Apple's Help
It's a showdown that has the country mesmerized.
From ACM News
Apple's Fbi Battle Is Complicated. Here's What's Really Going On
The news this week that a magistrate ordered Apple to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooter suspects has polarized the nation—and...
From ACM News
The Best AI Still Flunks 8th Grade Science
In 2012, IBM Watson went to medical school. So said The New York Times, announcing that the tech giant’s artificially intelligent question-and-answer machine had...
From ACM News
Football Coaches Are Turning to AI For Help Calling Plays
In 1996, IBM'S Deep Blue became the first supercomputer to defeat a chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, in a game.
From ACM News
Scientists Capture Crispr's Gene-Cutting in Action
For all the furious hype around the gene-editing tool Crispr/Cas9, no one has ever really seen it in action. Like really seen it.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Neural Net Shows Deep Learning Can Get Way Deeper
A Microsoft researcher team won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in December with a new approach to deep learning.
From ACM News
An Easy Way For Hackers to Remotely Burn Industrial Motors
Hacks that cause physical destruction are so rare they can be counted on one hand.
From ACM News
MIT Researchers Want to Teach Robots How to Wash Dishes
The robots arrived years ago. They help build stuff in factories. They shuttle packages and products across the massive warehouses that drive Amazon’s worldwide...
From ACM News
Science Can Tell If North Korea's Test Was Really an H-Bomb
It was the whomp felt 'round the world.
From ACM News
How the Internet of Things Got Hacked
There was once a time when people distinguished between cyberspace, the digital world of computers and hackers, and the flesh-and-blood reality known as meatspace...
From ACM News
Nobody Knew How Big a Deal the Cloud Would Be—they Do Now
Ten years ago, Amazon unleashed a technology that we now call, for better or for worse, cloud computing.
From ACM News
The Secret History of World War Ii-Era Drones
Drones are the hallmark of tech-y modern warfare, but weapons piloted from afar have been around for more than a century.
From ACM News
For Google, Quantum Computing Is Like Learning to Fly
At a NASA lab in Silicon Valley, Google is testing a quantum computer—a machine based on the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics, the physics of things...
From ACM News