Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
The Ar-15 Is More Than a Gun. It's a Gadget
I was shaking as I shouldered the rifle and peered through the scope at the small steel target 100 yards downrange.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook
Jay Parikh sits at a desk inside Building 16 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and his administrative assistant, Genie Samuel, sits next to...
From ACM Opinion
The Fbi Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors
Just imagine if all the applications and services you saw or heard about at CES earlier this month had to be designed to be "wiretap ready" before they could be...
From ACM Opinion
Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—take Our Jobs
It's hard to believe you'd have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force.
From ACM Opinion
Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like S
The U.S. patent system borrowed from mainland Europe a concept that had evolved over hundreds of years: the "moral right" for inventors to protect their ideas....
From ACM Opinion
Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can't Protect S Anymore
You have a secret that can ruin your life.
From ACM Opinion
Cybercrime: Mobile Changes Everything—and No One's Safe
The FBI recently put out a mobile malware alert, providing us with a sobering reminder of this "evil software" for phones and tablets.
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter Imagines a World with Printable Life Forms
Craig Venter imagines a future where you can download software, print a vaccine, inject it, and presto! Contagion averted.
From ACM Opinion
Why Everyone (not Just Geeks) Should Care About Big Data
Hugo Campos has a cardiac defibrillator implanted in his body. It sends data about his heart to his doctors and back to the manufacturer, but it takes days to get...
From ACM Opinion
Air Force Video Compares Facebook, Iphone to Atom Bombs
The world of tomorrow is going to be a dark and sinister place, according to a group of Air Force futurists. One reason why it'll be so scary: Facebook.
From ACM Opinion
William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (thankfully) Almost Always Wrong
William Gibson, one of science fiction's most visionary and distinctive voices, maintains that he and his fellow writers don't possess some mystical ability to...
From ACM Opinion
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed.
From ACM Opinion
Russia's Top Cyber Sleuth Foils S Spies, Helps Kremlin Pals
It's early February in Cancun, Mexico. A group of 60 or so financial analysts, reporters, diplomats, and cybersecurity specialists shake off the previous night's...
From ACM News
Google Shaman Explains Mysteries of 'compute Engine'
Google started work on the Google Compute Engine over a year and a half ago, and it was all Peter Magnusson could do to keep his mouth shut.
From ACM Opinion
Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the reason you're reading this story in a web browser, complete with hypertext like this and an internet address that looks like this: ...
From ACM Opinion
Why Antivirus Companies Like Mine Failed to Catch Flame and Stuxnet
A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Iran. It was sent by an analyst from the Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team, and it was informing me about...
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World's Energy Crisis
There is one version of Craig Venter's life story where he would’ve been a dutiful scientist at the National Institutes of Health, a respected yet anonymous researcher...
From ACM Opinion
Nah, Iran Probably Didn't Hack Cia's Stealth Drone
Four months after capturing a crashed U.S. stealth drone near the Iran-Afghanistan border, Tehran claims it has hacked into the ‘bot’s classified mission-control...
From ACM Opinion
Jeff Bezos Should Send Eric Holder a Christmas Card
I can imagine Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in Seattle Wednesday morning, reading the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit on a gigantic Kindle Fire XL prototype, and...
From ACM Opinion