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
Electric Vehicles Could Rescue the Power Grid
By 2035, the batteries in California's zero-emission cars could power every home in the state for three days.
From ACM News
The Low Threshold for Face Recognition in New Delhi
Police in India's capital say they only require an 80% accuracy rate for matches, raising new alarm bells for civil liberty advocates.
From ACM TechNews
The Hacking of Starlink Terminals Has Begun
Lennert Wouters at Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven hacked SpaceX's Starlink network.
From ACM TechNews
NASA is Crowdsourcing Cloud Research--on Mars
Scientists have recruited volunteers to identify clouds on Mars through the Zooniverse, a platform that hosts crowdsourced citizen projects.
From ACM News
Crypto and the U.S. Government Are Headed for a Decisive Showdown
The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Ishan Wahi, a former product manager at the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, of insider trading and securities fraud...
From ACM News
New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser
Researchers have found a way to use the web's basic functions to identify who visits a site—without the user detecting the hack.
From ACM News
Cruise's Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco
In a series of incidents, the GM subsidiary lost contact with its autonomous vehicles, leaving them frozen in traffic and trapping human drivers.
From ACM News
The Fight Over Which Uses of AI Europe Should Outlaw
A new European Union law will set rules for what the technology can and can't do to people, like whether it's okay to deploy lie detectors at borders.
From ACM TechNews
'Supercookies' Have Privacy Experts Sounding the Alarm
Vodafone is among the German phone companies participating in the TrustPid trial.
From ACM News
The U.S. Military Is Building Its Own Metaverse
Defense tech companies have latched on to the metaverse hype—but what they're building will be a far cry from Meta's virtual world.
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Spy on Mount Etna with Fiber-Optic Cables
Scientists are monitoring Italy’s Mount Etna through fiber-optic cables, using distributed acoustic sensing to detect seismic signals that conventional sensors...
From ACM News
Spreadsheets Are Hot—and Cranking Out Complex Code
The venerable (and yes, super dull) piece of officeware is getting reinvented as a tool for non-coders to automate and simplify their lives.
From ACM News
The Hidden Role of Facial Recognition Tech in Many Arrests
The technology is spreading fast among police, and often wrong. But people charged with crimes are rarely told an algorithm came into play.
From ACM News
War Is Calling Crypto's 'Neutrality' Into Question
War in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia have made cryptocurrency a hot potato for international politics.
From ACM News
Is Firefox Okay?
Mozilla's privacy-heavy browser is flatlining. What it does next is crucial for the future of the web.
From ACM News
New Database Reveals How Much Humans Are Messing With Evolution
Some animals and plants are rapidly adapting to our warming, polluted world. How alarming that is depends on your perspective.
From ACM News
AI Finds Superbug-Killing Potential in Human Proteins
A team scoured the human proteome for antimicrobial molecules and found thousands, plus a surprise about how animals evolved to fight infections.
From ACM News
Meet the Cyberpunk Albatrosses Scanning for Secret Explosions
Acoustic waves can detect all kinds of explosions and volcanic activity, but it's hard to place sensors at sea—unless you've got a bird with a backpack.
From ACM News
It's Not Easy to Control Police Use of Tech—Even With a Law
A key backer of a 2018 Oakland law to rein in tools like automated license plate readers says the city is not following the rules.
From ACM News