Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a lockedSan...
From ACM Opinion
Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!
On April 1, 2009, Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a plug-in that promised to read and generate contextually relevant replies to the messages piling up in users'...
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
This summer, American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, released a special issue on the topic of bullying and victimization...
From ACM Opinion
Why Larry Page Is Stepping Away
In the ten years that I’ve been watching him, Larry Page has always wanted to play by his own rules.
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
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first...
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
Do We Really Need to Learn to Code?
"Learn to Code!" This imperative to program seems to be everywhere these days. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg recently donated ten million dollars to Code.org,...
From ACM Opinion
How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati.
From ACM Opinion
Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter's Credibility Problem?
On October 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall, I was in my Brooklyn apartment, refreshing Twitter.
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