Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
With Playstation 4, Sony Aims For Return to Glory
For the Sony Corporation, a tech industry also-ran, the moment of reckoning is here.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Love Beautiful Things
Great design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography—you know it when you see it.
From ACM Opinion
A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal
In January 2011, I was assigned to cover a hearing in Newark, where Daniel Spitler, then 26, stood accused of breaching AT&T's servers and stealing 114,000 email...
From ACM Opinion
Talking, Walking Objects
Meeting Simon for the first time was one of the most sublime experiences I've had. With every coy head nod, casual hand wave and deep eye gaze, I felt he already...
From ACM Opinion
Sneaky Apps That Track Cellphones
A perversion of smartphone technology called "stalking apps"—precise, secretive trackings of the movements of cellphone users—is increasingly a matter of national...
From ACM Opinion
Opening the Doors to the Life of Pi
For those of us who have been intoxicated by the powers and possibilities of mathematics, the mystery isn't why that fascination developed but why it isn't universal...
From ACM Opinion
I Am Not Big Brother
I've grown accustomed to reading inaccurate accounts of my day job. I'm in political data.
From ACM Opinion
How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away
Not long after I began writing about cybersecurity, I became a paranoid caricature of my former self.
From ACM Opinion
Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button?
Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run...
From ACM Opinion
And the Firewalls Came Tumbling Down
There's much to like about "This Machine Kills Secrets," Andy Greenberg's well-reported history of WikiLeaks and the many projects it has inspired, but one unintentionally...
From ACM Opinion
Where's the Discussion of Trojan Horses?
The Mykonos Vase, discovered in 1961 in the Cyclades, is one of the earliest accounts of the Trojan Horse, used as a subterfuge by the Greeks to enter the city...
From ACM Opinion
What Makes Google's Maps So Good
Wow. Nothing makes you appreciate something like losing it.
From ACM Opinion
The Internet? We Built That
Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political...
From ACM Opinion
Why Wi-Fi Is Often So Slow
A number of Internet service providers, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., have recently upped the maximum speeds of broadband they offer...
From ACM Opinion
When Gps Tracking Violates Privacy Rights
For the right to personal privacy to survive in America in this digital age, courts must be meticulous in applying longstanding privacy protections to new technology...
From ACM Opinion
Why 'ser Friendly' Is So Friendly: A Tribute to Bill Moggridge
Some considered it an inspired choice, others simply surprising, when Bill Moggridge was appointed director of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum...
From ACM Opinion
A New Kind of Warfare
Cybersecurity efforts in the United States have largely centered on defending computer networks against attacks by hackers, criminals, and foreign governments,...
From ACM Opinion
Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing
It has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed...
From ACM Opinion