Communications of the ACM
A Healthy Dose of AI
Building artificial intelligence into medical devices can speed diagnoses and potentially improve treatments and outcomes.
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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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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AI Has a Hallucination Problem That's Proving Tough to Fix
Tech companies are rushing to infuse everything with artificial intelligence, driven by big leaps in the power of machine learning software. But the deep-neural...
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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.
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Spoof, Jam, Destroy: Why We Need a Backup for GPS
Earth got a warning shot on January 25, 2016. On that day, Air Force engineers were scheduled to kill off a GPS satellite named SVN-23—the oldest in the navigation...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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Triple Meltdown: How So Many Researchers Found a 20-Year-Old Chip Flaw At the Same Time
Four groups of researchers independently found the vulnerabilities behind the devastating Meltdown and Spectre attacks within months of each other.
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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...
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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...
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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
Captcha Is Dying. This Is How It's Being Reinvented For the AI Age
Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) appear to be heading toward obsolescence.
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