Communications of the ACM
Blinding the Watchman
Internet constellations could thwart killer asteroid discovery algorithms.
From ACM NewsAn edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
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We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Powerpoint
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray...
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Spammers Pay Others to Answer Security Tests
Faced with stricter Internet security measures, some spammers have begun borrowing a page from corporate America’s playbook: they are outsourcing. The going rate...
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Apple Removes Teaching App From App Store, and Educators Complain
Apple generally makes news by publishing new apps, not by unpublishing them. But last week, it made some educators upset when it removed an app, Scratch Viewer,...
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Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell
For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers. A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or...
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Sas Seeks to Improve Data Mining of Social Media
No one doubts that social media--all the stuff on Facebook, Twitter and other online forums--provides a rich lode of user sentiment that companies ought to be able...
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Iphone App to Sidestep At&t
For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry. It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak,...
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Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past
Artists are still painting things they cannot see in real life. Rather than being separated from their subjects by thousands of miles, though, today’s artists are...
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How Privacy Vanishes Online
If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address? Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal...
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Telling Friends Where You Are (or Not)
As Jordan Viator roams the conference rooms, dimly lit bars and restaurants here at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, she often pulls out her cellphone...
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Instant Ads Set the Pace on the Web
Advertisers have been able to direct online messages based on demographics, income and even location, but one element has been largely missing until recently:...
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A Little Black Box to Jog Failing Memory
On a cold, wet afternoon not long ago, Aron Reznick sat in the lounge of a home for the elderly here, his silver hair neatly combed, his memory a fog. He couldMicrosoft’s...
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Google
In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran...
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Computers Turn Flat Photos Into 3-D Buildings
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but in cyberspace it might be. Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a...
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For Chip Makers, the Next Battle Is in Smartphones
The going rate for a state-of-the-art chip factory is about $3 billion. The plants typically take years to build. And the microscopic size of chip circuitry requires...
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Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering
It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a...
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Google Set to Showcase Fast Internet
Google said Wednesday that it would offer ultrahigh-speed Internet access in some communities in a test that could showcase the kinds of things that would be possible...
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.s. Scientists Given Access to Cloud Computing
The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing...
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Smart Dust? Not Quite, but We
In computing, the vision always precedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time...
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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. ...
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