Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2015
From ACM Opinion
Obama Orders Effort to Build First Exascale Computer
The United States is now committed to building an exascale computer, some 30 times more powerful than today’s top machine.
From ACM Opinion
Implementing a European, Not Global, Right to Be Forgotten
In a landmark ruling in May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) established a "right to be forgotten", or more accurately, a "right to delist", allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links…
From ACM Opinion
16 Trends That Will Define the Future of Video Games
Hundreds of game developers, publishers and analysts recently descended on Brighton for the annual Develop conference.
From ACM Opinion
Genomics Pioneer Jun Wang on His New AI Venture
Jun Wang is one of China's most famous scientists.
From ACM Opinion
Tony Fadell: What Will Google's $3.2bn Guru Do Next?
When Google paid $3.2bn (£2.1bn) to buy Tony Fadell's start-up Nest in 2014, it got much more than just an internet-connected thermostat and smoke detector.
From ACM Opinion
Kepler-452b: What It Would Be Like to Live On Earth's 'cousin'
Kepler-452b may be Earth's close cousin, but living on the newfound world would still be an alien experience.
From ACM Opinion
The Truth About the Turing Test
Alan Turing made many predictions about artificial intelligence, but one of his lesser known may sound familiar to those who have heard Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk warn about AI’s threat in 2015.
From ACM Opinion
The Web-Connected Car Is Cool, ntil Hackers Cut Your Brakes
When the history of the connected car is written, this week may go down as a pivotal moment for consumers worried about security.
From ACM Opinion
Why I'm Addicted to Browsing Sepia Photos of Old-School Nyc
It's not a game or social media site, but OldNYC.org is as addictive as Angry Birds and as time consuming as Facebook.
From ACM Opinion
Decoding the Remarkable Algorithms of Ants
Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination.
From ACM Opinion
What Edward Snowden Has Wrought
Think of Edward Snowden's vast leaks as a how-to guide for head-choppers looking to keep their own heads far from U.S. bombs.
From ACM Opinion
We Are Data: The Future of Machine Intelligence
I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture—by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data—and I can't help but wonder why there isn't an app…
From ACM Opinion
The Martian's Andy Weir Is All Buddy-Buddy with Nasa
When sci-fi author Andy Weir went to visit mission control at NASA's Johnson Space Center, the International Space Station was going through a crisis—an air leak, to be precise.
From ACM Opinion
What Is a 'computer' Anymore?
People used to be computers.
From ACM Careers
The Future, as Told By 'call of Duty: Black Ops 3'
If you've played just one first-person shooter game it was probably in the Call of Duty series.
From ACM Opinion
Ad Tech Is Killing the Online Experience
There's something so wonderfully easy about reading this column in a physical newspaper.
From ACM Opinion
Pluto Is Just a Baby Step For Humankind
As it advances now beyond Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is sending back data from its historic encounter with the dwarf planet like a long sigh of relief.
From ACM Opinion
Cli-Fi—That's Climate Fiction—Is the New Sci-Fi
Extreme weather events, changes in precipitation levels, species migration and extinction—climate change promises so many fun things. But why wait?
From ACM Opinion
The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car, Chapter 2
Summer is one of the most dangerous times of the year on U.S. streets, as many of us spend more time behind the wheel, heading out for long road trips or local barbecues.
From ACM Opinion
A Team Member's View of All the Work on Earth It Took to Get New Horizons to Pluto
Science is hard and good science is harder—it takes persistence and tons of patience.
From ACM News
Here Are Eff's Most Influential Cases from Its First 25 Years
On Friday, July 10, the Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrated its 25th anniversary.
From ACM Opinion
Passing Pluto
Soon after the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, at 7:49 A.M. on Tuesday—seventy-two seconds ahead of schedule, after a nine-and-a-half-year journey—Bonnie Buratti, one of the mission's scientists, told…
From ACM Opinion
How Worried Should You Be About Artificial Intelligence?
Intelligent machines come in myriad forms, so which ones pose a danger to us, and how likely are they to actually happen?
From ACM Opinion
The Reality of Cyberwar
When a series of technical glitches hit companies that ranged from United to the New York Stock Exchange this week, suspicions immediately ran to a cyber attack.
From ACM Opinion
The Social Security Number's Insecurities
In both the Anthem insurance hack and the two Office of Personnel Management hacks this year, attackers gained access to Social Security numbers, affecting 80 million and more than 22 million people, respectively.
From ACM Opinion
Google Search Chief Amit Singhal Talks Searching Apps
Amit Singhal, Google's search chief, has spent the past 15 years creating the miracle that is the Google search box.
From ACM Opinion
The Rise of the New Crypto War
James B. Comey, Jr., the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is afraid of the dark.
From ACM Opinion
Here Are the 12 Most Influential Programmers Working Today
The apps and games you use every day don't exist in a vacuum—someone, somewhere, wrote the code.
From ACM Opinion
There May Be Infinite niverses—and Infinite Versions of You
In another universe you might have become the president of Micronesia. Or a pauper, subsisting on ketchup.
From ACM Opinion
Moxie Marlinspike: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts
In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned the enmity of government officials for writing software.