Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Death of DRM Would Be Good News for Readers, Writers, and Publishers
At the end of April, Tor Books, the world's largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital...
From ACM Opinion
How Much Do the Internet Giants Really Know?
To briefly state the obvious, the Internet giants are seriously big: Google is not only the world's largest search engine, it's one of the top three email providers...
From ACM Opinion
The Mathematical Equation that Caused the Banks to Crash
It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial...
From ACM Opinion
Tides Are Changing For Web Surfers
David Weinberger has a new book out entitled Too Big to Know in which he argues that one of the implications of a comprehensively networked society is that the...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Desktop Degree
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the titleElectronics...
From ACM Opinion
Beware: Europe's 'unitary Patent' Could Mean nlimited Software Patents
Just as the U.S. software industry is experiencing the long-anticipated all-out software patent wars, the European Union has a plan to follow the same course....
From ACM Opinion
Steve, Please Buy S a Carrier!
What should Apple do with its $76bn in cash? It could do worse than spend some of it on acquiring its own mobile carrier.
From ACM Opinion
Why Cctv Has Failed to Deter Criminals
I've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's Internet in times of civil unrest by blocking...
From ACM Opinion
Why Lulzsec Had No Choice but to Disband
After just 50 days, the group said it was ceasing individual operations. Why, when you might have thought things were going so well?
From ACM Opinion
Networks Are Not Always Revolutionary
"For most artists," as the famous Tim O'Reilly aphorism has it "the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." To me, this is inarguably true and self-evident—the...
From ACM Opinion
Feds Versus the Hacker nderground: Army of Informers Turned By Fear
When Jeff Moss, popularly known as the Dark Tangent, started holding underground hacker conferences in Las Vegas he knew he had a problem. All previous gatherings...
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
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...
From ACM Opinion
Berners-Lee Warns Isps on Net Neutrality
The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned internet service providers (ISPs) that plans for a "two-speed" Internet go against the principles...
From ACM Opinion
Google Is Polluting the Internet
The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore.12