Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Why Big Data Has Some Big Problems When It Comes to Public Policy
For all the talk about using big data and data science to solve the world’s problems—and even all the talk about big data as one of the world’s problems—it seems...
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...
From ACM Opinion
The New Editors of the Internet
Bowing to their better civic natures, and the pleas of James Foley's family, Twitter and YouTube have pulled down videos and photos of his murder.
From ACM Opinion
How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...
From ACM Opinion
Anatomy of an Air Strike: Three Intelligence Streams Working in Concert
In a fast-moving war with an elusive foe like the Islamic State militants, information is as important as guns, jet fighters and bombs.
From ACM Opinion
Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns
Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot during an encounter with police in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, was recorded by a convenience store surveillance camera...
From ACM Opinion
James Foley: Extremists Battle with Social Media
Just as Islamic State (IS) has swept across Iraq, so too has it swarmed over social media—using the platform with a sophistication never before witnessed in this...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.
From ACM Opinion
I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me
There's this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody."
From ACM Opinion
How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You
In the depths of night on August 5th 1914 the British Cable Ship Alert took the first significant action of World War I, severing the five German submarine cables...
From ACM Opinion
The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will se the Same Tech Our Phones Do
The mobile revolution has spread beyond the mini supercomputers in our hands all the way to the data center.
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
From ACM Opinion
The Next Big Thing in Hardware: Smart Garbage
There's a box on a shelf in my closet stuffed with smart smoke detectors, old smartphones, chargers, battery cases, fitness trackers, a Kindle that I sat on and...
From ACM Opinion
How to Talk About Blowing Things p in Cyberspace, According to the Military
Bombs are relatively simple, when you boil everything down.
From ACM Opinion
The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn...
From Communications of the ACM