The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear to be behind attacks on voter databases in Arizona and Illinois.
Reports this week of Russian intrusions into U.S. election systems have startled many voters, but computer experts are not surprised.
Oliver Stone wants you to know he's not an activist.
It's 2016: What possible reason is there to vote on paper? When we use touchscreens to communicate, work, and shop, why can't we use similar technology to vote?
Earlier this month, on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver skewered media companies' desperate search for clicks.
City dwellers spend nearly every moment of every day awash in Wi-Fi signals.
1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth?
Early last week, Twitter announced that it would be using new tools to curb hate speech and harassment on its site.
Twenty-five years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee unleashed the World Wide Web, publishing the first public webpage. Well, maybe.
When we think of AI as one particular thing, we drag the whole field down.
When president-elect Barack Obama chose physicist John Holdren as his top science adviser in December 2008, some biomedical researchers worried that the pick signalled a White House bias towards physical science.
I used to be an astronaut, a spacewalker on the International Space Station.
Ads can seem like the bane of the Internet.
Patients paralyzed by a spinal cord injury can face a grim and grueling recovery process—one in which regaining function is far from a sure thing. But a new study published last week in Scientific Reports may provide some hope…
To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far. But what he didn’t say is just as interesting as what he did.
On a sleek white coffee table in Apple CEO Tim Cook's fourth-floor office in late July, beneath framed posters of Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, a rose gold iPhone 6s sits in its original…
Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States—driven not by foreign competition…
After years as a punchline, virtual reality is enjoying a renaissance. Venture capitalists plowed $1.2 billion into virtual-reality and augmented-reality startups in the first quarter of 2016, according to a report by Digi-Capital—more…
If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary game-design parlance, a persistent one.
The world should consider ways to limit data growth on the internet to prevent run-away energy consumption and help limit carbon emissions, say leading computer scientists.
At Guglielmo Marconi's grand state funeral in Rome in 1937—orchestrated with military-style pomp by the black-shirted Benito Mussolini—the largest wreath on the hearse, adorned with a Nazi swastika, was sent by Adolf Hitler.
We are at the beginning of a revolution. I've been going on about quantum computing for as long as I've been writing, but it has always been in the future tense.
On average, 82,000 new malware threats are created each day.
While U.S. presidential candidates are talking about tax rates, tax breaks, and trade — they are ignoring an economic issue that soon may matter far more to working Americans: robots.
The release of a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee by WikiLeaks last month has raised a great many questions—about the role of the D.N.C. in trying to influence the primary and about the alleged interference…
The world has witnessed enormous advances in autonomous passenger vehicle technologies over the last dozen years.
The world is producing ever more electrical and electronic waste.
The field of educational technology is mourning a visionary whose work was considered 50 years ahead of its time.
National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers' possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
You devoted your life to human-driven transportation, engineering SUVs at Ford and taking Hyundai (as U.S. CEO and president) to record levels of sales in the U.S. Why did you go driverless?