Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2014
From ACM Opinion
Last Call For Bad Calls
Technology will soon make officials at high-level sports events as obsolete as elevator operators, their skill set as useful as knowing how to make a wood tennis racket.
From ACM Opinion
Jawbone Is Now the Startup Apple Should Fear Most
Jawbone is ascending into the top echelon of tech startups, joining the likes of Uber, Dropbox, and Square.
From ACM News
Everything We Know About How the Nsa Tracks People's Physical Location
Glenn Greenwald is back reporting about the NSA, now with Pierre Omidyar's news organization FirstLook and its introductory publication, The Intercept.
From ACM Opinion
A Peek at Google's M&a Ambitions
Don Harrison became Google's head of mergers and acquisitions about a year ago.
From ACM Opinion
Science Inches Closer to Real Bioshock-Style Plasmids
Synthetic success. That's not to say that customized transposons are limited to the hypothetical.
From ACM Opinion
The Digital Ties That Bind: Love, Loss and Oversharing in the Internet Age
The most serious relationship of my life so far ended last summer without a trace—physically at least.
From ACM News
Baxter and the Second Machine Age
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century is not just the story of steam power, but steam started it all.
From ACM Opinion
How Cybersecurity Laws Are Outdated
Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency and of National Intelligence, talks about the details of the NSA's surveillance program and tells how Edward Snowden stole classified information from the agency…
From ACM Opinion
The Strange, Deadly Effects Mars Would Have on Your Body
We've imagined sending people to Mars since well before Gagarin's first spaceflight.
From ACM Opinion
From Windows to the Xbox: Bill Gates' 'pioneering' Impact
To ask what impact Bill Gates has had on computing is, in a way, too small a question.
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: How Amazon Thinks It Can Get You to Hit 'buy' In 2 Seconds or Less
Sam Hall, Amazon's vice president of Mobile, talks about speeding up the purchase process in the name of getting users to buy things as quickly as possible.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Nasa For?
What the heck is NASA for? It's like asking what a panda is for.
From ACM TechNews
Interview With Woz: To Innovate, Get Personal
In an interview, Apple co-founder and Fusion-io chief scientist Steve Wozniak discusses innovation and the importance of a human element in computing.
From ACM Opinion
Why Startups Should Steal Ideas and Hire Weirdos
The most consistently creative and insightful people are explorers.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin's Political Problem
Money is always political.
From ACM Opinion
Why Tech Companies and the NSA Diverge on Snowden
Is Edward Snowden a whistleblower or a traitor?
From ACM Opinion
Tim Berners-Lee: We Need to Re-Decentralise the Web
Twenty-five years on from the web's inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.
From ACM Opinion
When Will Genomics Cure Cancer?
Since the beginning of this century, the most rapidly advancing field in the life sciences, and perhaps in human inquiry of any sort, has been genomics.
From ACM Opinion
A Creator of Skynet Ponders Google
After an eight-year detour in which he served as governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned to his true calling as a cyborg assassin.
From ACM Opinion
Snowden Leaks: The Man Who Watches Over the Nsa
Whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations have revealed that a huge capability resides within America's National Security Agency to collect and analyse communications.
From ACM Opinion
Pluto Wins
It's time to stop throwing pity parties for Pluto.
From ACM Opinion
The Case of the Hacked Refrigerator—could 'the Internet of Things' Connect Everything?
Somebody hacked a refrigerator recently, and it could mark a tipping point for civilization.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin: How Its Core Technology Will Change the World
Bitcoin has been called many things, from the future of money to a drug dealer's dream and everything else in between.
From ACM Opinion
Dropbox Ceo Drew Houston
Dropbox, the popular cloud storage system that lets people drag files to an icon that puts that data in the cloud and sync new versions across multiple devices (see "Hiding All the Complexities of Remote File Storage Behind a…
From ACM Opinion
How to Create the Perfect Online Dating Profile, in 25 Infographics
Every day, millions of singles crawl dating sites and apps, flipping through photos and profiles of potential matches.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Kept Motorola's Research Lab
Google's $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC maker Lenovo might seem like lousy business, given Google's $12.5 billion purchase in 2012 and losses of $1 billion in the interim.
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft Ceo Nadella's Top Challenge: Figuring Out Mobile
Microsoft stands at a crossroads when it comes to mobile.
From ACM Opinion
Judges Poised to Hand .s. Spies the Keys to the Internet
How does the NSA get the private crypto keys that allow it to bulk eavesdrop on some email providers and social networking sites?
From ACM Opinion
Facebook Turns 10: The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't usually observe sentimental anniversaries.
From ACM Opinion
Through a Face Scanner Darkly
Anonymity forms a protective casing.