Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Your Creative, Open Hackathon Is Ripe For Legal Challenges
NASA's Space Apps Challenge recently became the world's largest open hackathon, with over 8,000 participants spanning 44 countries.
From ACM Opinion
Virtual Reality For Your Hands
Computers already have keyboards. They have mice and touch pads. They even have touch screens. But is there room for a totally new interface?
From ACM Opinion
Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-drivingUdacity...
From ACM Opinion
How to Be an Email Survivalist
In the early 2000s it was the height of geek fashion to run your own email server—then along came Gmail with two gigabytes of free storage and excellent spam filtering...
From ACM Opinion
Who Scores Games By Hand Anymore?
The first thing Bruce Levy did upon recent entry into Yankee Stadium while accompanied by his in-laws and teenage son was to purchase a program in the area of the...
From ACM Opinion
Responding to Government Legal Demands For Customer Data
Today we have asked the Attorney General of the United States to personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to share publicly more complete...
From ACM Opinion
Your Brain at Work
When Apple fanatics lined up to get the new iPhone in 2011, the New York Times published an op-ed titled "You Love Your iPhone. Literally." It described an unpublished...
From ACM Opinion
Why Microsoft's Reorganization Closes the Books on an Era of Computing
Nothing ever stays the same. On more than one occasion, it has taken Microsoft, one of the most important engines powering the rise of the technology industry,...
From ACM Opinion
The Hut Where the Internet Began
Let's start at the end point: what you're doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication...
From ACM Opinion
A Eulogy For Altavista, the Google of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Most Important Tech Company You've Probably Never Heard Of
Never trust gadget-makers’ claims about battery life.
From ACM Opinion
Social Media Images Form a New Language Online
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, had an epiphany about the simplicity of communication through images while wearing Google Glass, the company’s controversial high...
From ACM Opinion
The Taming of the Spook
On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority...
From ACM Opinion
A Eulogy For Altavista, the Google of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this. Better than the one-sentence send-off Yahoo gave you today, when announcing your July 8 closure date.
From ACM Opinion
Will Facebook's Robot Censors Know Porn When They See It?
The old trope about pornography is that you’ll know it when you see it. Facebook is betting that not only will it know it, but that the social network will be able...
From ACM Opinion
'maker Movement' Taps Deep and Rich Tradition
Sometimes I worry we're becoming a culture of technology consumers, instead of creators.
From ACM Opinion
Software Recognition Technology Is Amazing, but Not Amazing Enough
The gadget blogs may work themselves into a frenzy over megapixels and processor speed. But if you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider a feature...
From ACM Opinion
Snowden, Through the Eyes of a Spy Novelist
For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism—can anyone ever distinguish the two?—leaves his job and...
From ACM Opinion