Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2015
From ACM Opinion
Better Than Sci-Fi
Science fiction has imagined some pretty wild ideas about the universe and our place in it.
From ACM Opinion
Metadata Surveillance Didn't Stop the Paris Attacks
Since terrorists struck Paris last Friday night, the debate over whether encryption prevents intelligence services from stopping attacks has reignited.
From ACM Opinion
What Digital Trash Dumped in Games Tells S About the Players
A strawberry Christmas cake, sexy pants, a pool table, three red jet planes, a hippy bandana, a dog sled, a jetpack, a pair of Adidas trainers, a Tudor throne, a bullet stopped in mid-flight, an iced frappé, an entire shopping…
From ACM Opinion
How to Baffle Web Trackers By Obfuscating Your Movements Online
Online ad networks and search engines love it when you surf around.
From ACM Opinion
Stopping Whatsapp Won't Stop Terrorists
Is the ability to send encrypted messages making it hard to stop terrorists?
From ACM Opinion
Oh the Places We Won't Go: Humans Will Settle Mars, and Nowhere Else
Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther.
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden Explains How to Reclaim Your Privacy
Last month, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square.
From ACM Opinion
Crispr: A Path Through the Thicket
The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications in agriculture and in gene therapies involving non-reproductive…
From ACM Opinion
Get Ready For Your Digital Model
Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky.
From ACM Opinion
Leading Theory of Solar System Formation Just Disproved!
Looks like the inner planets formed *after* the gas giants moved to their current position, and Jupiter ejected a fifth giant, too!
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: 'homo Sapiens Will Be Split Into a Handful of Gods and the Rest of s'
If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Is Willing to Give Away Its Latest Machine-Learning Software
Google's move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn’t as crazy as it may appear.
From ACM Opinion
The Cyberthreat nder the Street
Within the last year there have been 16 so-called fiber cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
From ACM Opinion
I'm Going to Make Facebook's AI Predict What Happens in Videos
What are the big challenges ahead for you?
From ACM Opinion
pdate: Seti Sees No Alien Signals From Weird Star
A few weeks ago, I (and a zillion other people) reported on a star about 1,500 light-years away that was acting … weirdly.
From ACM Opinion
From Army of One to Band of Tweeters
It was the end of a long combat patrol near a district called Adhamiyah, in northwest Baghdad, in the fall of 2008.
From ACM Opinion
Informatics: Make Sense of Health Data
If you are wondering whether exposure to some chemical could increase your chances of getting colon cancer, you could easily find supportive evidence from animal experiments. You might then discover that epidemiological studies…
From ACM Opinion
America's Crypto Battles
John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe.
From ACM Opinion
Tangled Up in Entanglement
No area of physics causes more confusion, not just among the general public but also among physicists, than quantum mechanics.
From ACM Opinion
The Hot New Job in Silicon Valley Is Being a Robot's Assistant
"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." So goes the joke every time artificial intelligence threatens to supersede humans in another job.
From ACM Opinion
Wendell Brooks on Preparing to Lead Intel Capital
In an exclusive interview, he spoke to reporter Deborah Gage in San Diego, where about 1,200 of Intel's executives, portfolio companies, partners and customers have gathered for the annual Intel Capital Global Summit.
From ACM Opinion
The Master Algorithm: A World Remade By Machines that Learn
Pedro Domingos's new book is a compelling but rather unquestioning insider view of the search for the ultimate in machine learning.
From ACM Opinion
If There Is Water on Mars, Who Gets to se It?
Humans settle around water, especially in the desert.
From ACM Opinion
The Room Where the Internet Was Born
Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
The Light-Beam Rider
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity, the most beautiful theory in the history of science, and in its honor we should take a moment to celebrate the visualized "thought experiments" that…
From ACM Opinion
The Physical Origin of niversal Computing
Imagine you're shopping for a new car, and the salesperson says, "Did you know, this car doesn't just drive on the road."
From Communications of the ACM
When Technologies Manipulate Our Emotions
Implications of the Facebook emotions study.
From Communications of the ACM
Security Assurance
How can customers tell they are getting it?
From Communications of the ACM
Software Patents Are Falling Down
Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's new test for patentable subject matter.
From Communications of the ACM
Electronic Health Records and Patient Safety
Examining the effects of electronic health records on the safety of patients in medical facilities.