Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
World Web War I: Why Egypt's Digital prising Is Different
We've seen cyberwar declared before, but the one playing out in Egypt is my own candidate for World Web War I.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM Opinion
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...
From ACM News
Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled
This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication....
From ACM Opinion
Careful When Shooting the Messenger
In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph set off a political storm in Britain when it detailed widespread expense-account abuse by members of Parliament. Among the claims...
From ACM Opinion
Assange on Secrecy, China, and Wikileaks' Growth
"Secrecy is important for many things," said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with Time over Skype on Monday. Managing editor Richard Stengel...
From ACM News
Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt
There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section...
From ACM Opinion
The Lessons of 10 Years of Talking Tech
It’s a special week in America. All over the country, families are gathering in warmly lighted homes. They’re sitting down to fancy feasts at decorated tables...
From ACM Opinion
A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media
Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of...
From ACM Opinion
Web
The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
Could Terrorists Launch America's Nuclear Missiles?
The Air Force calls the situation "Launch Facilities Down." On Oct. 23, a Wyoming-based squadron of 50 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—enough...
From ACM Opinion
What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness
The saga of Steven P. Jobs is so well known that it has entered the nation’s mythology: he’s the prodigal who returned to Apple in 1997, righted a listing ship...
From ACM Opinion
Finally, a 21st Century Browser from Microsoft
Like many of us, Microsoft does its best work when it's running scared.
From ACM Opinion
The School of Hard Drives
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan answers questions pertaining to education and technology.
From ACM Opinion
The Snoop In Your Browser
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life—online and off. Search...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Earth
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial...
From ACM Opinion
The Government Can se Gps to Track Your Moves
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This...
From ACM Opinion
The First Church of Robotics
This constant stream of stories about artificial intelligence suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should...
From ACM Opinion