Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft Is Doomed, But First It's Going to Make a Ton of Money
Microsoft stock lost about 10 percent of its value in the wake of a quarterly earnings report on Thursday that investors deemed sub-par. Yet revenue for the second...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Political Battle Over Bitcoin
Given that Bitcoin first broke into mainstream attention when Gawker explained how to use it to buy drugs, perhaps the surprise is that it took federal regulators...
From ACM Opinion
Name-Brand Genes: Is Our Genetic Makeup What's Next in Personal Branding?
The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a case that could decide whether it's possible to patent specific human genes that have been "snipped" out of our DNA...
From ACM Opinion
Immigration and the Knowledge Economy
Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community.
From ACM Opinion
Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow on 'homeland,' Printed Guns, and Heart Hacking
I had the pleasure of spending some time with Cory Doctorow on Feb. 25 at the Jefferson Hotel here in the nation's capital.
From ACM Opinion
What China's Hackers Get Wrong About Washington
"Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies," report my colleagues Craig Timberg and Ellen...
From ACM Opinion
Why Mapping the Human Brain Matters
It turns out that President Barack Obama’s head-scratching mention of a project to map the human brain in his most recent State of the Union speech was more than...
From ACM Opinion
Jill and Scott Kelley on the Petraeus Scandal and Loss of Privacy
We woke up on the morning of Nov. 9 expecting the usual: for one of us, the tending to patients; for the other, the morning rush of packing lunches and getting...
From ACM Opinion
What the Baseball Hall of Fame Decision Could Mean For the Singularity
If you buy into Ray Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity, then the future is a marvelous place where we’re all physically and mentally enhanced and living longer...
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from an Iranian War Game
Perhaps it was the "fog of simulation." But the scariest aspect of a U.S.-Iran war game staged this week was the way each side miscalculated the other’s responses—and...
From ACM Opinion
Technology Can Be Harnessed to Fight Drug Cartels in Mexico
A couple of months ago we visited Juarez, Mexico, a city right across our border—yet so far away.
From ACM Opinion
A Cyber Risk to the .s.
In a recent briefing to Congress about worldwide threats, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that the danger of cyberattacks will equal or surpass the danger...
From ACM Opinion
Rethinking the Soul As the 'net Becomes More Lifelike
Does the Internet have a soul?
From ACM Careers
Dna: The Next Big Hacking Frontier
Imagine computer-designed viruses that cure disease, new bacteria capable of synthesizing an unlimited fuel supply, new organisms that wipe out entire populations...
From ACM Opinion
Apple
In his recent biography of Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson says the Apple visionary revealed to him that he had finally "cracked" the problem with TV and was...
From ACM Opinion
A Hint of Deterrence in .s. Drone-War Strategy
Here’s the trickiest counterterrorism puzzle for U.S. policymakers: How do you stop al-Qaeda from attacking the American homeland without getting bogged down...
From ACM News
.s. Cyber Approach 'too Predictable' For One Top General
The nation’s second-ranking military official said Thursday that the U.S. approach to protecting its computer systems was "too predictable" and failed to penalize...
From ACM Opinion
A Gold Standard in Cyber-Defense
The history of Internet security is both worrisome and instructive. When the first virus — the "Morris worm"—was launched in 1988, the Internet was a closed system...
From ACM Opinion
Can Tech Experts Save the .s. Postal Service?
Some of the folks responsible for developing and promoting the technologies that have undermined the U.S. Postal Service are banding together in an attempt to save...
From ACM Opinion