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
The Web Way to Learn a Language
The young woman seated next to us at the sushi bar exuded a vaguely exotic air; her looks and style, we thought, made it likely that she was not American born. ...
From ACM News
Eff Reveals How Your Digital Fingerprint Makes You Easy to Track
Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched...
From ACM News
Innovative Technique Can Spot Errors in Key Technological Systems
An innovative computational technique that draws on statistics, imaging, and other disciplines has the capability to detect errors in sensitive technological systems...
From ACM News
Quantum Computer Simulates Hydrogen Molecule Just Right
Almost three decades ago, Richard Feynman — known popularly as much for his bongo drumming and pranks as for his brilliant insights into physics — told an electrified...
From ACM News
Networking Formula Could Predict Research Success
A Texas Tech University economist Miaomiao Wang has found that a fairly simple networking formula could increase the odds that policymakers will fund dynamic and...
From ACM News
Apple Wins Patent For "proximity Sensing" Multi-Touch Display
Apple has been granted a patent for a multi-touch display that can sense when and where a finger is near the screen. The patent was one of 13 granted to Apple,U...
From ACM News
Pentagon Searches For
One of the trickiest problems in cyber security is trying to figure who’s really behind an attack. Darpa, the Pentagon agency that created the Internet, is trying...
From ACM News
In Digital Combat, U.s. Finds No Easy Deterrent
On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the...
From ACM News
Breakthrough Could Change Sampling Technology Forever
Research scientists from the Technion-Israel institute of Technology have made a breakthrough that could revolutionize the way broadband signals are sampled, recorded...
From Communications of the ACM
Type Theory Comes of Age
Type systems are moving beyond the realm of data structure and into more complex domains like security and networking.
From ACM News
New Life For Magnetic Tape
Music lovers may have long forsaken them, but magnetic tapes still reign supreme when it comes to storing vast amounts of digital data. And new research from IBM...
From ACM News
Spasers Set to Sum: A New Dawn For Optical Computing
It's a laser, but not as we know it. For a start, you need a microscope to see it. Gleaming eerily green, a "spaser" is a single spherical particle just a few tens...
From ACM News
Touchscreen Merges the Real and Digital Worlds
For all the advances in table-top and tablet computing, some design professionals will always prefer the feel of pen on paper to stylus on glass. A new device could...
From ACM News
Grid Computing and the Future of Cloud Computing
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of grid computing, a type of distributed computing that harnesses the power of many computers to handle large computational...
From ACM News
Watching Crystals Grow May Lead to Faster Electronic Devices
The quest for faster electronic devices recently got something more than a little bump up in technological knowhow. Scientists at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)...
From ACM News
If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It Hackme
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.” Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.” Despite all the reports...
From ACM TechNews
Cmu, Intel Collaborate to Improve Energy Costs and Efficiency in Chip Making
Researchers at Intel and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed a new class of materials called solder magnetic nanocomposites, which could help streamline...
From ACM News
Google Patents Mapreduce
Google has received a patent for the technique known as MapReduce. The patent, number 7,650,331, applied for in 2004, is entitled "System and method for efficient...
From ACM News
Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make...
From ACM News