Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Careers
Cobol Will Outlive S All
In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages.
From ACM Opinion
DHS: Border Device Search Policy Does Not Violate Fourth Amendment
The Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has determined that the DHS’s warrantless, and often suspicion-less, search and...
From ACM Opinion
President Obama's Cybersecurity Executive Order Scores Much Better Than CISPA On Privacy
With the reintroduction of the much-maligned Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act scheduled for the day after the State of the Union, the House of Representatives...
From ACM Opinion
Stupid, Stupid xBox!!
I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name.
From ACM Opinion
Apple and Samsung, Frenemies For Life
It was the late Steve Jobs' worst nightmare. A powerful Asian manufacturer, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, uses Google Inc's Android software to create smartphones...
From ACM Careers
The Threat of Silence
For the past few months, some of the world's leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention.
From ACM Opinion
Can Machines Learn Morality?
When John Brennan, President Obama's choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at...
From ACM Opinion
Texas School Board Searching For "another Side" to Theory of Evolution
We recently reviewed the documentary The Revisionaries, which chronicles the actions of the Texas state school board as it attempted to rewrite the science and...
From ACM Opinion
nseen, All-Out Cyber War on the .s. Has Begun
There's a war going on, and it's raging here at home—not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Phreaks and Geeks
One of the most heartfelt—and unexpected—remembrances of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last month at the age of 26, came from Yale professor Edward Tufte.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Like Television? Then You're Not Going to Like the Future of Twitter Very Much
According to a number of anonymous reports, Twitter is in the process of buying Bluefin Labs, an analytics company that specializes in broadcast media—an acquisition...
From ACM Opinion
The Origins of 'big Data': An Etymological Detective Story
Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life.
From ACM Opinion
Geeks Are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties
A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most...
From ACM Opinion
The Increasingly Blurry Line Between Big Data and Big Brother
The potential benefits of "big data" have been well described, both by us and others: the ability to spot flu trends earlier and potentially save lives, for example...
From ACM Opinion
Eric Schmidt nloads on China in New Book
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt is brutally clear: China is the most dangerous superpower on Earth.
From ACM Opinion
Inside the Targeted Attack on The New York Times
The Chinese group behind the targeted attack on The New York Times was laser focused on accessing the email of a reporter and the newspaper’s former Beijing bureau...
From ACM Opinion
How to Build the Perfect Gaming Pc For 2013–and Beyond
There's little doubt that PC gaming is undergoing a renaissance at the moment.
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
The Two Classes of Cyber Threats
There is one number that matters most in cybersecurity.
From ACM News