Communications - January 2013

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

11 ACM’s FY12 Annual Report

16 BLOG@CACM

Lost in Translation

Daniel Reed on straddling the intellectual divide between technology experts and policymakers.

49 Calendar

125 Careers

Last Byte
News Viewpoints
Departments

5 Editor’s Letter

Who Begat Computing? By Moshe Y. Vardi

7 From the President What’s a Robot? By Vinton G. Cerf

28 Technology Strategy and Management The Apple-Samsung Lawsuits

In search of a middle ground in the intellectual property wars. By Michael A. Cusumano

8 Letters to the Editor

Computer Science Is Not a Science

32 The Business of Software

How We Build Things

…and why things are 90% complete. By Phillip G. Armour

19 Stopping the Leaks

Side channels give out information that can be used to crack secrets, but researchers are identifying the holes and trying to close them. By Neil Savage

34 Law and Technology

Beyond Location: Data Security in the 21st Century

Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved.

By Deven Desai

22 Beyond Hadoop

The leading open source system for processing big data continues to evolve, but new approaches with added features are on the rise.

By Gregory Mone

37 Historical Reflections

Five Lessons from Really Good History

Lessons learned from four award-winning books on the history of information technology.

By Thomas Haigh

136 Future Tense

Share My Enlightenment

I self-publish, and you get to sail my aether wave for free. By Rudy Rucker

25 Just the Facts

In repackaging other companies’ news, some news aggregators are diverting readers and ad dollars, and, critics argue, undercutting the incentive to spend money on original reporting. It is an economic and ethical problem without a clear legal fix.