Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2011
From ACM Opinion
Sony Hack Highlights Importance of Breach Analysis
Sony's apparent difficulty in figuring out the extent of the damage from the recent intrusion into its PlayStation Network, while frustrating for those affected by it, is not too surprising, given the bag of tricks that hackers…
From ACM Opinion
Jobs and Apple Execs on Tracking Down the Facts About Iphones and Location
Although Apple was silent for several days after researchers raised issues about location information being stored on the iPhone, that wasn’t because it was ignoring the issue.
From ACM Opinion
Will Amazon's Recent Server Failures Slow the Rise of Cloud Computing?
Last Thursday morning around 5 a.m. eastern time, Amazon suffered a major data center outage. These sorts of outages happen now and then, but they seldom make news. This time, though, mainstream outlets took notice, with CNN…
From ACM Opinion
Iran's Answer to Stuxnet
Might a "halal Internet" be in the wings?
From ACM Opinion
Video Game Shapes Leadership Style of the New Head of Mit's Media Lab
Joi Ito has a knack for leading people, which he demonstrated, of all places, in World of Warcraft.
From ACM Opinion
Your Iphone Is Tracking You. So What.
Have you heard the news? Two researchers have discovered that the iPhone keeps a minute-by-minute, time-stamped log of everywhere you go. That’s right: Your phone is tracking you. So is the cellular version of the iPad.
From ACM News
Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones
In medicine, there's the patient and there's the chart. And the chart is paper.
From ACM Opinion
In the Digital Era Free Is Easy, So How Do You Persuade People to Pay?
To compete with piracy, content providers need clear value propositions that don't conflict with the product.
From ACM Opinion
Misleading Government Stats on It Employment
David Foote, CEO of IT workforce analyst firm Foote Partners, says that U.S. government statistics on IT employment are misleading because they do not track 16 million workers with IT jobs and skills who work outside of traditional…
From ACM Opinion
Are You Following a Bot?
How to manipulate social movements by hacking Twitter.
From ACM Opinion
Got an Iphone or 3g Ipad? Apple Is Recording Your Moves
A hidden file in iOS 4 is regularly recording the position of devices.
From ACM Opinion
Web Creator's Net Neutrality Fear
The inventor of the Web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed.
From ACM Opinion
Patently Obvious
On Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise unremarkable patent dispute, the Court has promised to decide…
From ACM Opinion
The Web's Trust Issues
The most dubious phrase in English after "act natural" is "trust me." A party asking for trust without offering a reason why is probably untrustworthy. And yet the Internet's entire security ecosystem relies on precisely that…
From ACM News
Just How Creepy Is 'creepy'? A Test-Drive
You probably know that some Internet and cell phone applications like Foursquare or Twitter can broadcast your location to the world. And you might know that Web sites with names like PleaseRobMe and ICanStalkYou have been…
From ACM News
How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
Computers used to be blind, and now they can see. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms, computers today can recognize and identify the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, and a can of Budweiser. Still, despite huge technological…
From ACM Opinion
Forget Space Travel: It's Just a Dream
The clash of two titans—physics and chemistry—are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible... at least with current technologies.
From ACM Opinion
Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada
Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft have been built for launch in late…
From ACM News
Why Cisco's Flip Flopped in the Camera Business
Cisco is shutting down a business unit that it bought for over half-a-billion dollars: the Flip camcorder division. That's a shame, considering how high the Flip was flying a few short years ago. It's also a waste, considering…
From ACM Opinion
Disappearing Act
Jack Dorsey is the creator and executive chairman of the popular communications network Twitter. In 2009, he cofounded another company, called Square, which lets people accept credit-card payments with their smart phones.…
From ACM Opinion
Matt Cutts, Google Engineer
It was the usual standing-room-only crowd as Google's Matt Cutts appeared at the South By Southwest technology conference to talk about the inner workings of the world's leading search engine. Hundreds of webmasters and people…
From ACM Opinion
No More Privacy Paranoia
Want Web companies to stop using our personal data? Be ready to suffer the consequences.
From ACM Opinion
biquity Symposium: What Have We Said About Computation?
A recent ACM Ubiquity symposium considered the question: “What is computation?” In this closing article, Ubiquity's editor-in-chief Peter J. Denning shares what he has learned from the 14 contributors to the symposium.
From ACM Opinion
Why I Don't Own a Kindle
I've done my part to prop up the consumer-electronics industry in recent years: a flat-panel TV downstairs and one upstairs, his and hers smartphones, not-too-obsolete digital cameras, a desktop computer upstairs and an iPad…
From ACM Opinion
The Problem with Design Education
University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science or technology. That bothers Don Norman, former head of research…
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Distraction
For many Americans, March Madness has been a time to worry about office pools, busted brackets, and buzzer beaters. For American businesses, though, the N.C.A.A. tournament is just an occasion to worry about distracted and…
From ACM Opinion
Patents and Innovation
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Where Will Larry Page Lead Google?
In the 10 years since the last time Larry Page was Google's chief executive, the company has changed a bit. It has gone from an ambitious startup to a publicly listed giant of the Internet which generates cash and has 24,000…
From ACM Opinion
When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second?" he said. "I used to watch 'Flash Gordon.' "
From ACM Opinion
China's War in Cyberspace, August
Strategic theorists frequently lament that military planners are very effective at preparing for the last war, not the next one. Planners today must cope with what conflict may look like in a new domain: cyberspace, the virtual…