Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the .s. Government?
The real capabilities and behavior of the U.S. surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done...
From ACM Opinion
It's Not About New Icons: What Jony Ive Needs to Do For Apple's Ios
iOS 7 will be flat, as in flat design.
From ACM Opinion
Digital Tattoos, Mind-Reading Headphones: The Shape of Things to Come?
Forecasting future technology has never been easy. In the 1950s, scientists and technologists envisaged that by now the world would be free from disease, traversed...
From ACM Opinion
Why I Love the National Internet Sales Tax Plan
The Internet, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be free—"the last bastion of our economy untouched by the government," as they say on Fox News.
From ACM Opinion
Governments Won't Need to Issue Ids: Data Brokers Will Identify You For Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received—it's all in databases...
From ACM Opinion
20 Years On, the Open Web Faces Challenges
For people of a certain age in the technology industry, one of the ways of establishing a connection with someone is by asking some version of the following question...
From ACM Opinion
Here's Why Bitcoin Is the Future of Money
The interesting thing about Bitcoin isn't what it is today. What's interesting is that this experiment is turning into a serious proving ground for the idea of...
From ACM Opinion
The Medium of the Moment
After the Boston Marathon bombings, the process by which breaking news and information are generated and disseminated looked more ragged and exposed than ever: ...
From ACM Opinion
How Boston Police Won the Twitter Wars During the Marathon Bomber Hunt
The first official announcement that law enforcement agencies had concluded their manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't come at a...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Next Big Thing
The iPad has always labored under the shadow of its little brother the iPhone.
From ACM Opinion
nraveling Boston Suspects' Online Lives, Link By Link
It is America's first fully interactive national tragedy of the social media age.
From Communications of the ACM
Moving from Petaflops to Petadata
The race to build ever-faster supercomputers is on, with more contenders than ever before. However, the current goals set for this race may not lead to the fastest...
From Communications of the ACM
Max Newman: Forgotten Man of Early British Computing
Reflections on a significant, yet often overlooked, computing pioneer.
From ACM Opinion
The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution
How do you explain to people that they are a YouTube sensation, when they have never heard of YouTube or the Internet?
From ACM Opinion
The Flattening of Design
It might sound audacious to think that Microsoft, the arbiter of uncool, was at the forefront of design a few years ago. But it was.
From ACM Opinion
'total Noise,' Only Louder
Kids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there's a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every...
From ACM Opinion
We Need More Cameras, and We Need Them Now
On Thursday afternoon, the FBI released photos and video of two persons of interest in the Boston Marathon bombing.
From ACM Opinion
Mars vs. Europa: Are We Looking in the Wrong Place For Alien Life?
A British astrobiology conference has revived a years-old debate over the best place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system: Mars, or the moons of Jupiter...
From ACM Opinion