Communications of the ACM
What Would the Chatbot Say?
Seeking to explain the unanticipated abilities of large language models.
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.
From ACM News
Forget Software: Now Hackers Are Exploiting Physics
Practically every word we use to describe a computer is a metaphor.
From ACM News
Linux Took Over the Web. Now, It’s Taking Over the World
The roots of Linux stretch all the way back to the creation of Unix at AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1969.
From ACM News
The Shadow Brokers Mess Is What Happens When the Nsa Hoards Zero-Days
When the NSA discovers a new method of hacking into a piece of software or hardware, it faces a dilemma.
From ACM News
Ironic Windows Vulnerability Shows Why Backdoors Can't Work
Apple's refusal to comply with a court order to help the FBI crack an iPhone highlighted the pressure tech companies face to include backdoors in their software...
From ACM News
A New Wireless Hack Can Unlock 100 Million Volkswagens
In 2013, when University of Birmingham computer scientist Flavio Garcia and a team of researchers were preparing to reveal a vulnerability that allowed them todelayed...
From ACM News
Martians Might Be Real. That Makes Mars Exploration Way More Complicated
History will note that the guy who discovered liquid water on Mars was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, a 20-year-old who played guitar in a death...
From ACM News
Hackers Hijack a Big Rig Truck's Accelerator and Brakes
When cybersecurity researchers showed in recent years that they could hack a Chevy Impala or a Jeep Cherokee to disable the vehicles' brakes or hijack their steering...
From ACM News
America's Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets
This week, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump openly speculated that this election would be "rigged." Last month, Russia decided to take an active role in...
From ACM News
How To Fool AI Into Seeing Something That Isn't There
Our machines are littered with security holes, because programmers are human.
From ACM News
Radio Hack Steals Keystrokes from Millions of Wireless Keyboards
You should be able to trust your wireless keyboard.
From ACM News
Snowden Designs a Device to Warn If Your Iphone's Radios Are Snitching
When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA's secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any...
From ACM News
Europe Is Going After Google Hard, and Google May Not Win
Microsoft pulled the strings. At least, that’s what Google and so many business and tech journalists said when the search giant first faced antitrust complaints...
From ACM News
Clever Tool Shields Your Car From Hacks By Watching Its Internal Clocks
Car-hacking demonstrations tend to get all the glory in the security research community—remotely paralyzing a Jeep on the highway or cutting a Corvette’s brakes...
From ACM News
Artificial Intelligence Is Setting p the Internet For a Huge Clash With Europe
Neural networks are changing the Internet.
From ACM News
Google Tests New Crypto in Chrome to Fend Off Quantum Attacks
For anyone who cares about Internet security and encryption, the advent of practical quantum computing looms like the Y2K bug in the 1990s: a countdown to an unpredictable...
From ACM News
Researchers Sue the Government Over Computer Hacking Law
In the age of big data analytics, the proprietary algorithms web sites use to determine what data to display to visitors have the potential to illegally discriminate...
From ACM News
Clever Attack ses the Sound of a Computer's Fan to Steal Data
In the past two years a group of researchers in Israel has become highly adept at stealing data from air-gapped computers—those machines prized by hackers that,...
From ACM News
China's New Supercomputer Puts the S Even Further Behind
This week, China's Sunway TaihuLight officially became the fastest supercomputer in the world. The previous champ? Also from China.
From ACM News
The Quest to Make Code Work Like Biology Just Took A Big Step
In the early 1970s, at Silicon Valley's Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells...
From ACM News