Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2013
From ACM Opinion
Virtual Reality For Your Hands
Computers already have keyboards. They have mice and touch pads. They even have touch screens. But is there room for a totally new interface?
From ACM Opinion
Bradley Manning 'aiding the Enemy' Charge Is a Threat to Journalism
Thursday, Colonel Denise Lind, the judge in the Bradley Manning court martial, refused to dismiss the "aiding the enemy" charge.
From ACM Opinion
Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-driving cars and Google Glass, and, most recently, passionate advocate for…
From ACM Opinion
How to Be an Email Survivalist
In the early 2000s it was the height of geek fashion to run your own email server—then along came Gmail with two gigabytes of free storage and excellent spam filtering.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Designer Behind Some of the Web’s Newest Killer Fonts
Thanks to newer browsers and greater bandwidth, there's been an explosion of new Web fonts—tens of thousands of them over the last decade.
From ACM Opinion
Who Scores Games By Hand Anymore?
The first thing Bruce Levy did upon recent entry into Yankee Stadium while accompanied by his in-laws and teenage son was to purchase a program in the area of the concourse behind home plate.
From ACM Opinion
Responding to Government Legal Demands For Customer Data
Today we have asked the Attorney General of the United States to personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to share publicly more complete information about how we handle national security requests for customer…
From ACM Opinion
The End of Digital Tyranny: Why the Future of Computing Is Analog
Our world is ruled by 1s and 0s.
From ACM Opinion
The Pros and Cons of a Surveillance Society
Here are three topics much in the news these days: Prism, the surveillance program of the national security agency; the death of Trayvon Martin; and Google Glass and the rise of wearable computers that record everything.
From ACM Opinion
Hugh Herr and the Liberating Age of Bionics
"It's extraordinary that we live in this day and age with all our wonderful modern technology, and still we have shoes that give us blisters," says Hugh Herr, with more than a little incredulity and perhaps even fresh anger at…
From ACM Opinion
Your Brain at Work
When Apple fanatics lined up to get the new iPhone in 2011, the New York Times published an op-ed titled "You Love Your iPhone. Literally." It described an unpublished experiment in which the author scanned the brains of 16 people…
From ACM Opinion
Why Microsoft's Reorganization Closes the Books on an Era of Computing
Nothing ever stays the same. On more than one occasion, it has taken Microsoft, one of the most important engines powering the rise of the technology industry, years to understand that.
From ACM Opinion
Censoring the News Before It Happens
Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices to website editors around the country that say things like, "Report on the new provincial budget tomorrow, but do not feature it on the front page, make…
From ACM Opinion
Free Online MIT Courses Are An Education Revolution
Online learning is the biggest shake-up of education since the advent of the printing press, says Anant Agarwal, an MIT computing specialist.
From ACM Careers
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
Q. How is Big Data being used more in the leadership and management field?
From ACM Opinion
Lost (and Gained) in Translation
The international movement of scientists and the internationalization of science rank among the most striking trends in today's scientific world.
From ACM Opinion
The Hut Where the Internet Began
Let's start at the end point: what you're doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines.
From ACM Opinion
The Crypto-Currency Ecosystem
Just like the IP protocol, bitcoin is the culmination of several important advancements, all combining to form a paradigm-changing innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Internet Inventor: No Technological Cure For Privacy Ills
Is there technological solution for protecting people from online surveillance?
From ACM Opinion
What Your Metadata Says About You
As recently as a few weeks ago, "metadata" was an obscure term known mainly to techies and academics.
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden's Nightmare Comes True
Snowden's worst fear, by his own account, was that "nothing will change."
From ACM Opinion
A Eulogy For Altavista, the Google of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this.
From ACM Opinion
Social Media Free Speech Rights Complicated For Workers
An anonymous "Suzy Citizen" leaves fliers criticizing management in a public area of the St. Cloud Public Library, and the Great River Regional Library board of trustees hires an investigator to find out if an employee is the…
From ACM Opinion
Intel's Justin Rattner on New Laser Chip Business
Intel came to dominate computing by consistently beating others at packing transistors ever more densely onto chips for desktop computers and servers.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Most Important Tech Company You've Probably Never Heard Of
Never trust gadget-makers’ claims about battery life.
From ACM Opinion
What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read Kafka’s "The Trial" and commented on it at his Web site.
From ACM Opinion
Social Media Images Form a New Language Online
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, had an epiphany about the simplicity of communication through images while wearing Google Glass, the company’s controversial high-tech glasses.
From ACM Opinion
The 12 Best Designs from the Past 100 Years
Is the much-loved Piaggio Vespa more iconic than the floppy disk? Is the iPod more of a design classic than the Airbus A380?
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Power Over Design, in 4 Words
"Apple just permeates everything."
From ACM Opinion
The Taming of the Spook
On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since…