FOCI '21 - Kevin Bock’s, Gabriel Naval’s, Kyle Reese’s & Dave Levin’s 'Even Censors Have A Backup: Examining China’s Double HTTPS Censorship Middleboxes' →

via FOCI '21: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (SIGCOMM FOCI '21), and in association with the University of Maryland and censorship.ai, comes Kevin Bock’s, Gabriel Naval’s, Kyle Reese’s and Dave *Levin’s 'Even Censors Have a Backup: Examining China’s Double HTTPS Censorship Middleboxes paper and video. Hat Tip - Verification Labs**

ACM SIGSAC Dissertation Awards 2018, Call For Nominations →

Gail-Joon Ahn, Ph.D., CISSP (Dr. Ahn is also the Director, Center for Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics at Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona) has issued the Association for Computing Machinery's ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) Doctoral Dissertation Award - 2018 Call for Nominations. The requirements can be viewed at the the SIGSAC Awards Site. Enjoy the Process!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ACM A.M.Turing Laureate →

The Association of Computing Machinery has announced the 2016 A.M. Turing Laureate - Sir Tim Berners-Lee, physicist and inventor of the World Wide Web, leveraging the foundational TCP/IP Internet data deleivery protocols. We extend our hearty congratulations to Sir Tim.

Berners-Lee, who graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Physics, submitted the proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He noticed that scientists were having difficulty sharing information about particle accelerators. In 1989, interconnectivity among computers via Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) had been in existence for a decade, and while segments of the scientific community were using the Internet, the kinds of information they could easily share was limited. Berners-Lee envisioned a system where CERN staff could exchange documents over the Internet using readable text that contained embedded hyperlinks. via the ACM

Password Strength - Why It Does Not Matter →

Concisely crafted (by Dinei Florencio, Cormac Herley, and Paul C. Can Oorschot) contributed article - entitled 'Pushing on String: The 'Don't Care' Region of Password Strength' - in this month's Communications of the ACM, details research on why organizations that enforce strict password 'composition' security policies end up with flawed password-related security issues - effectively the same as those organizations that do not enforce password strength. Something to get those wheels of cogitation spinning over the weekend...

Limits of Computation →

John Pavlus, writing at Quanta Magazine regales us with the story of a 'Solution That Doesn't Exist'.

Yet in a paper presented at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forth a mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated the hometown researchers’ achievement with a headline that read “For 40 Years, Computer Scientists Looked for a Solution That Doesn’t Exist.”

Stonebreaker Awarded Turing Prize

The Association for Computing Machinery] (ACM) , has awarded Michael Stonebraker, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award for architectural contributory efforts targeting database management systems (DBMS).

"The ACM Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. “Michael Stonebraker’s work is an integral part of how business gets done today,” said ACM President Alexander L. Wolf. “Moreover, through practical application of his innovative database management technologies and numerous business start-ups, he has continually demonstrated the role of the research university in driving economic development.” - via Bruce Shriver at the Association for Computing Machinery