Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
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
Ungoogle Me: The Case For Scrubbing Search Results
The Internet has much to say about the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which determines that if a person wants some personal information...
From ACM Opinion
Who Watches the Watchers? Big Data Goes nchecked
The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life.
From ACM News
Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
From ACM Opinion
Ordering Google to Forget
In a ruling that could undermine press freedoms and free speech, the highest court of the European Union said on Tuesday that Google must comply with requests from...
From ACM Opinion
Glenn Greenwald's Pulse-Pounding Tale of Breaking the Snowden Leaks
In June 2013, Edward Snowden was sitting in his room at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong, watching the world react to the first of his explosive leaks about the NSA's...
From ACM Opinion
The Peril of Knowledge Everywhere
Thanks to advances in technology, we may soon revisit a question raised four centuries ago: Are there things we should try not to know?
From ACM Opinion
A World Digital Library Is Coming True!
In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest.
From ACM Opinion
Here's How to Learn How Much Your Data Is Worth to Facebook and Google
The anti-virus software company AVG has created PrivacyFix, an app to help you get a handle on just how much you're worth to big-time data players Facebook and...
From ACM Opinion
4 Ways the Political Elite Try (and Fail) to Avoid Leaving a Trail of Incriminating Messages
The most powerful people in the country are just not as good as teenagers when it comes to being discreet. Mostly that’s by design—there are freedom of information...
From ACM Opinion
The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing
Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his...
From ACM Opinion
The Secret Messages Inside Chinese rls
An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers, such as 62718298454@163...
From ACM News
How Cloud Storage Complicates the Supreme Court Debate Over Cell Phone Privacy
Should police be able to search the contents of your smartphone without a warrant?
From ACM News
Cyborg Angst: 5 Ways Computers Will Perplex S in 2039
Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers.
From ACM Opinion
Maths Spying: The Quandary of Working For the Spooks
For the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers of mathematicians.
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 Communications of the ACM
Robots Are Coming
Considering the societal implications of the robotics revolution.
From Communications of the ACM
Building a Virtual Community of Practice For K-12 CS Teachers
Bringing educators together and focusing their interests toward improving computer science education in high schools.
From Communications of the ACM
Tom Kilburn: A Tale of Five Computers
Reflections on a British computer engineer who influenced several important machines, including the first stored-program computer.
From Communications of the ACM