11/2009
VOL. 52 NO. 11
Practice
42 Communications Surveillance:
Privacy and Security at Risk
As the sophistication of wiretapping
technology grows, so too do the risks
it poses to our privacy and security.
By Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau
48 Four Billion Little Brothers?
Privacy, mobile phones, and
ubiquitous data collection
Participatory sensing technologies
could improve our lives and
our communities, but at what cost
to our privacy?
By Katie Shilton
54 You Don’t Know Jack about
Software Maintenance
Long considered an afterthought,
software maintenance is easiest
and most effective when built into
a system from the ground up.
By Paul Stachour and
David Collier-Brown
Article development led by
queue.acm.orgReview Articles
Contributed Articles
60 Scratch: Programming for All
“Digital fluency” should mean
designing, creating, and remixing,
not just browsing, chatting,
and interacting.
By Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney,
Andrés Monroy-Hernández,
Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond,
Karen Brennan, Amon Millner,
Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver,
Brian Silverman, and Yasmin Kafai
68 Why I T Managers Don’t Go
for Cyber-Insurance Products
Proposed contracts tend to
be overpriced because insurers
are unable to anticipate customers’
secondary losses.
By Tridib Bandyopadhyay,
Vijay S. Mookerjee, and Ram C. Rao
Review Articles
74 Turing Lecture
Turing Lecture from the winners of
the 2007 ACM A.M. Turing Award:
Edward M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson,
and Joseph Sifakis.
Research Highlights
86 Technical Perspective
Narrowing the Semantic Gap
In Distributed Programming
By Peter Druschel
87 Declarative Networking
By Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie,
Minos Garofalakis, David E. Gay,
Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis,
Raghu Ramakrishnan,
Timothy Roscoe, and Ion Stoica
96 Technical Perspective
Machine Learning for
Complex Predictions
By John Shawe-Taylor
97 Predicting Structured Objects
with Support Vector Machines
By Thorsten Joachims,
Thomas Hofmann, Yisong Yue,
and Chun-Nam Yu
about the cover:
as if they were
assembling Lego bricks,
children snap together
Scratch graphical
programming blocks—
shaped to fit together
only in ways that make
syntactic sense—to
create their own
programs, playfully
explored in the cover
story beginning on
page 60.
Virtual Extension
as with all magazines, page limitations often
prevent the publication of articles that might
otherwise be included in the print edition.
to ensure timely publication, aCM created
Communications’ Virtual extension (Ve).
Ve articles undergo the same rigorous review
process as those in the print edition and are
accepted for publication on their merit. these
articles are now available to aCM members in
the Digital Library.
Offshoring and the New World Order
Rudy Hirschheim
If Your Pearls of Wisdom
Fall in a Forest…
Ralph Westfall
Quantifying the Benefits of
Investing in Information Security
Lara Khansa and Divakaran Liginlal
iCare Home Portal: An Extended
Model of Quality Aging E-Services
Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyer,
and Eldon Y. Li
Computing Journals
and their Emerging Roles
in Knowledge Exchange
Aakash Taneja, Anil Singh,
and M. K. Raja
And What Can Context Do For Data?
C. Bolchini, C. A. Curino, G. Orsi,
E. Quintarelli, R. Rossato,
F. A. Schrieber, and L. Tanca
Why Web Sites Are Lost (and How
They’re Sometimes Found)
Frank McCown, Catherine C.
Marshall, and Michael L. Nelson
Technical Opinion
Steering Self-Learning
Distance Algorithms
Frank Nielsen