Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Eyes in the Sky
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page built the search engine that would become Google, they started by making maps.
From ACM Opinion
Four Technology Fallacies That Need to Die
As any historian, psychologist, sociologist, or scientist will tell you, the truth of an idea has very little to do with how fast it spreads and how well it's believed...
From ACM Opinion
Why Did the Justice Department Indict Five Chinese Military Officers?
At first glance, the Justice Department's 31-count indictment of five Chinese military officers for hacking into the computers of six American corporations, in...
From ACM Opinion
The Fuzzy Math Behind the Search For Mh370
Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean.
From ACM Opinion
Can We Really pload Johnny Depp's Brain?
When Wally Pfister's Transcendence is released on April 17, millions of moviegoers will be asking themselves, "Could we really upload Johnny Depp into a computer...
From ACM Opinion
Language Barriers
The British scientist and polymath Stephen Wolfram has always had big ambitions.
From ACM Opinion
Pretty Good Privacy
Few critics of the NSA will find much satisfaction in President Obama's speech this morning or in the set of reforms that he announced.
From ACM Opinion
Why Snowden Won't (and Shouldn't) Get Clemency
I regard Daniel Ellsberg as an American patriot.
From ACM Opinion
In Search of Planetary Intelligence
It is said that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about Western civilization, remarked, "I think it would be a good idea."
From ACM Opinion
WikiLeaks' Teenage Benedict Arnold
When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder's attitude and quickly signed up to the cause.
From ACM Opinion
Justice For Alan Turing?
What do we do with the knowledge that people not all that different from ourselves have behaved with astounding stupidity and cruelty, over and over again, in the...
From ACM Opinion
Why Americans Don't Fear the Nsa
Cybersnooping was always scheduled to be an important topic during President Obama’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
From ACM Opinion
Who's Watching You? Not Just the Nsa.
While you were tweeting an Instagram of your home-cooked tikka masala last night, we learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting data on...
From ACM Opinion
Our Guts May Hate Mars
Eighty thousand people recently applied for a trip to Mars, an excursion that will allegedly be funded by selling reality-TV show rights for the voyage.
From ACM Opinion
Government Plan to Build 'back Doors' For Online Surveillance Could Create Dangerous Vulnerabilities
Recently, the FBI has been attacking the "going dark" problem—that is, its inability to read all electronic communications—from both legal and technological angles...
From ACM Opinion
We Need More Cameras, and We Need Them Now
On Thursday afternoon, the FBI released photos and video of two persons of interest in the Boston Marathon bombing.
From ACM Opinion