Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM Opinion
Spy vs. Spy
Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the United States was charging members of the Chinese military with economic espionage.
From ACM Opinion
How the Nsa Could Bug Your Powered-Off Phone, and How to Stop Them
Just because you turned off your phone doesn't mean the NSA isn't using it to spy on you.
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Robots Seem Less Creepy
Robots may be poised to enter a new frontier in the workplace—but that doesn't mean the public is ready for it.
From ACM Opinion
Four Technology Fallacies That Need to Die
As any historian, psychologist, sociologist, or scientist will tell you, the truth of an idea has very little to do with how fast it spreads and how well it's believed...
From ACM Opinion
Why Did the Justice Department Indict Five Chinese Military Officers?
At first glance, the Justice Department's 31-count indictment of five Chinese military officers for hacking into the computers of six American corporations, in...
From ACM Opinion
China's Cyber-Generals Are Reinventing the Art of War
The conventional wisdom is that the future of war will involve private robot armies, predator drones carrying out precision strikes, and maybe even the militarization...
From ACM Opinion
The End Is A.i.: The Singularity Is Sci-Fi's Faith-Based Initiative
In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote a paper about the end of the world.
From ACM Opinion
Time Machines Would Run Afoul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
We've all seen those movies where someone goes back in time and tries to change something (the classic "Grandfather Paradox": what happens if you go back in time...
From ACM Opinion
Man Behind the First Computer Password: It's Become a Nightmare
In the early 1960s, Fernando Corbató helped deploy the first known computer password.
From Communications of the ACM
EMV: Why Payment Systems Fail
What lessons might we learn from the chip cards used for payments in Europe, now that the U.S. is adopting them too?
From ACM Opinion
Secrets, Lies and Snowden's Email: Why I Was Forced to Shut Down Lavabit
My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation...
From ACM Opinion
Should .s. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes or Exploit Them?
There's a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose...
From ACM Opinion
The Internet's History Isn’t As "open" As You Think
This spring, the Federal Communications Commission is deciding how to regulate the "Open Internet"—a term it uses to refer to the movement for net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion
Every Little Byte Counts
In "On What We Can Not Do," a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates...
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 News
How Google Built Its 3-D Interactive Rubik's Cube Doodle
Today Google launched one of its coolest doodles yet: a 3-D interactive Rubik's Cube.
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
Forget 'the Cloud'; 'the Fog' Is Tech's Future
I'm as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing as anyone you'll meet.
From ACM Opinion