Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Roger Stone Indictment Shows a Conspiratorial Comedy of Opsec Errors
Former Trump advisor and self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" Roger Stone—the man with a Richard Nixon tattoo on his back and a penchant for playing the evil genius—was...
From ACM Opinion
Google Isn't the Company that We Should Have Handed the Web Over To
With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google....
From ACM Opinion
Honoring the '80s, Def Con's Badge Is also a Text Adventure
Nearly 30,000 people came to Las Vegas last week for the 26th edition of DEF CON, the iconic security conference. And no small amount of the mental energy of that...
From ACM Opinion
We Know You Hate the Internet of Things, but It's Saving Megafauna from Poachers
For much of this decade, organizations seeking to protect wildlife have attempted to use emerging technology as a conservation tool, allowing small numbers of people...
From ACM Opinion
The Internet Has Serious Health Problems, Mozilla Foundation Report Finds
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepared to face nearly half of the Senate today to explain what went wrong with his company's handling of personal data for millions...
From ACM Opinion
Why Cops Won't Need a Warrant to Pull the Data Off Your Autonomous Car
Lt. Saul Jaeger, who commands the traffic unit at the Mountain View Police Department, remembers the first time a few years ago when he was given a demo of Waymo's...
From ACM Opinion
License Expired: The Ars Technica 2018 Deathwatch
Wow, that 2017, though. Quite a year. Let's grab a Juicero and take a moment to reflect on the utter dumpster fires that we've witnessed over the past 12 months...
From ACM Opinion
The Real Lesson of that Self-Driving Shuttle's First-Day Accident
Wednesday was supposed to be the triumphant launch of a free, driverless shuttle in downtown Las Vegas.
From ACM Opinion
Hacking the Vote: Threats Keep Changing, but Election It Sadly Stays the Same
The outcome of the 2016 presidential election is history. But allegations of voter fraud, election interference by foreign governments, and intrusions into state...
From ACM Opinion
The End of an Era Came Long Before the End of Cassini
I have now been writing about science for nearly a dozen years, which means my career more or less overlaps with that of the Cassini probe.
From ACM Opinion
Is Beaming Down In star Trek a Death Sentence?
In the 2009 movie Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Sulu plummeted down toward the planet Vulcan without a parachute. "Beam us up, beam us up!" Kirk shouted in desperation...
From ACM Opinion
Tracking the Spread of Culture Through Folktales
There's a reason why the premise of American Gods is so alluring: the US is home to a wild and glorious mishmash of gods, folktales, and cultural heritage.
From ACM Opinion
Zuckerberg and Musk Are Both Wrong About AI
Back in 2015, a group of business leaders and scientists published an "open letter" about how controlling artificial superintelligence might be the most urgent...
From ACM Opinion
First the Cloud, Now AI Takes on the Scientific Method
Back when I was doing research, one of my advisors once joked that, if you wait long enough, you can produce an old result using new methods, manage to get it published...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Mars, Let's Go Colonize Titan!
For a while now, there's been a debate in the US over how to direct NASA's next major human spaceflight initiative.
From ACM Opinion
Explaining the pside and Downside of D-Wave's New Quantum Computer
D-Wave, a company based in British Columbia, has announced a new version of its quantum annealer: the D-Wave 2000Q. As the name suggests, the number of bits has...
From ACM Opinion
Here's What a 'digital Miranda Warning' Might Look Like
Anyone who has ever watched an American crime movie or television show can practically recite the Miranda warning by heart, even if they don't know its official...
From ACM Opinion
What the Trump Win Means For Tech, Science, and Beyond
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump will now become the 45th president, succeeding President Barack Obama.
From ACM Opinion
George Orwell Never Dreamed of Advertising as Invasive as Yahoo's Proposal
Yahoo wants to take advertising to the next level—that is, the Orwellian level—bombarding people in public places with targeted advertising served up by the surveillance...
From ACM Opinion