Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
New Ways to Crash the Market
Five years ago, on the afternoon of May 6, 2010, the Dow and the S. & P. fell more than six per cent in a matter of minutes, losing a trillion dollars in value.
From ACM Opinion
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM Opinion
Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...
From ACM Opinion
Net Neutrality: How the Government Finally Got It Right
For years, the federal government supported the principle of net neutrality: the idea that broadband providers should treat all Internet traffic the same.
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
Will Moocs Be Flukes?
On July 23rd, 1969, Geoffrey Crowther addressed the inaugural meeting of the Open University, a British institution that had just been created to provide an alternative...
From ACM Opinion
The Planning Machine
In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile’s leading folksinger, wrote a song titled "Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born."
From ACM Opinion
The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
At 9:18 P.M. on February 12, 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, took off from Newark International Airport.
From ACM Opinion
What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.
From ACM Opinion
Spy vs. Spy
Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the United States was charging members of the Chinese military with economic espionage.
From ACM Opinion
Putin's Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev's Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent.
From ACM Opinion
Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination
In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion
The Internet's Telltale Heartbleed
The cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has been writing about computer security for more than fifteen years, is not given to panic or hyperbole.
From ACM Opinion
Anger on Weibo Over Flight 370
Tragedy, when its cause and the fate of its victims are still unknown, is supposed to occasion solidarity.
From ACM Opinion
One-Hit Wonders
For more than a year now, tens of millions of Americans have found time each day to devote themselves to an essential task: swiping at their phones and tablets...
From ACM Opinion
The Interstellar Contract
Last September, the Times reported that Voyager 1, the hardy spacecraft launched in 1977, had exited the solar system and entered the interstellar void.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Robot Army
A couple of weeks ago, shortly after the Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos unveiled, on "60 Minutes," that his company plans to deliver packages to customers with a swarm...
From ACM News
The Daunting Challenge of Secure Email
When users of Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service, logged on to the site this past August, they found a bewildering letter on the site's main page.
From ACM Opinion