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
Cracking the Crypto War
On December 2, 2015, a man named Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on employees of the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino,...
From ACM News
A Long-Awaited IoT Crisis Is Here, and Many Devices Aren't Ready
You know by now that Internet of Things devices like your router are often vulnerable to attack, the industry-wide lack of investment in security leaving the door...
From ACM TechNews
A 200-Year-Old Idea Offers a New Way to Trace Stolen Bitcoins
Researchers are using an 1816 legal precedent to track down stolen bitcoins.
From ACM News
The Next NSA Chief Is More sed to Cyberwar Than Spy Games
After sailing through two friendly Senate hearings—one so uncontroversial that only six senators tops bothered to even show up at any given point in the hour—Lieutenant...
From ACM News
Emmanuel Macron Talks About France's AI Strategy
The French government will spend €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) over five years to support research in artificial intelligence, encourage startups, and collect data...
From ACM News
Facebook's New Data Restrictions Will Handcuff Even Honest Researchers
Last week, when news broke (again) that Cambridge Analytica had allegedly misused 50 million Facebook users' data, it immediately raised a difficult question: When...
From ACM News
Europe's New Privacy Law Will Change the Web, and More
Consumers have long wondered just what Google and Facebook know about them, and who else can access their personal data. But internet giants have little incentive...
From ACM TechNews
AI Has a Hallucination Problem That's Proving Tough to Fix
Deep neural network software driving innovation in consumer gadgets and automated driving is vulnerable to sabotage by hallucination, experts say.
From ACM News
The Decentralized Internet Is Here, With Some Glitches
I usually write in Google's online word processor Google Docs, even when noting the company's shortcomings.
From ACM News
Microsoft's Supreme Court Case Has Big Implications For Data
Five years ago, US law enforcement served Microsoft a search warrant for emails as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. In response, Microsoft handed over...
From ACM News
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook, and the World
One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook's employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks.
From ACM News
Mind the Gap: This Researcher Steals Data With Noise, Light, and Magnets
The field of cybersecurity is obsessed with preventing and detecting breaches, finding every possible strategy to keep hackers from infiltrating your digital inner...
From ACM News
Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You For Years
Perhaps you bought some illegal narcotics on the Silk Road half a decade ago, back when that digital black market for every contraband imaginable was still online...
From ACM TechNews
Meet Antifa's Secret Weapon Against Far-Right Extremists
Computer science professor Megan Squire has created an array of programs that monitor approximately 400,000 accounts of white nationalists on Facebook and elsewhere...
From ACM News
A New Way to Track Down Bugs Could Help Save Iot
On a clear day this summer, security researcher Ang Cui boarded a boat headed to a government biosafety facility off the northeastern tip of Long Island.
From ACM News
A Critical Intel Flaw Breaks Basic Security For Most Computers
One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: If you run somebody else's sketchy code as an untrusted process on your machine, you should restrict...
From ACM TechNews
The Hard Math Behind Bitcoin's Global Warming Problem
A recent report calculated that the global electricity consumption of bitcoin mining would exceed that of the U.S. by July 2019, and of the entire world by November...
From ACM News
Unprecedented Malware Targets Industrial Safety Systems in the Middle East
Since Stuxnet first targeted and destroyed uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran last decade, the cybersecurity world has waited for the next step in that digital...
From ACM News
It's Super Hard to Find Humans in the Fcc's Net Neutrality Comments
The Federal Communications Commissions''public comment period on its plans to repeal net neutrality protections was bombarded with bots, memes, and input from people...
From ACM TechNews