Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition
Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware...
From ACM Opinion
Turing's Spirit Hovers at a Restored Estate
When "Captain Ridley's shooting party" gathered here in late August 1938 as weekend guests at Bletchley Park, a Buckinghamshire country house, they were accompanied...
From Communications of the ACM
The Internet That Facebook Built
The on-ramp might appear free but exiting takes a toll.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Surveillance State Lives On
Once upon a time, Glenn Greenwald was a lonely voice in the blogging wilderness, and Edward Snowden was an isolated functionary at the heart of the American national...
From ACM Opinion
North Korea: Surfing the Net in the World's Most Isolated Nation
What's the point of a computer in a hermit country sealed off from the internet?
From ACM Opinion
Christine Kenneally's 'invisible History of the Human Race'
Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father—a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished—she...
From ACM Opinion
Okcupid's Xoxo For Big Surveillance
Christian Rudder is a good writer—so good, in fact, it's easy for readers of Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) to be smitten by his engaging...
From ACM Opinion
How Big Data Algorithms See s—while They Eat S p
Four years ago I interviewed Sam Yagan, then CEO of OKCupid, about the mathematics underlying his free matchmaking site.
From ACM Opinion
Why Germans Are Afraid of Google
These days Germany is known for being many things: a leader in clean technology, a manufacturing powerhouse, Europe's foreign policy center.
From ACM Opinion
Find Out What Your Zip Code Predicts You'll Buy
Where you live says a lot about you—and nobody knows that better than marketeers. Now, though, you can take a glimpse at what they know, using this searchable map...
From ACM Opinion
The Toughest Case: What If Osama Bin Laden Had an Iphone?
In rebuking Apple and Google for their new smartphone encryption polices on Thursday, FBI Director James B. Comey became the latest law enforcement official to...
From ACM Opinion
When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone
Everyone understands what it means to own a plunger.
From Communications of the ACM
Risks and Myths of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage
Considering existing and new types of risks inherent in cloud services.
From ACM Opinion
Visualizing 4-Dimensional Asteroids
One of the largest treasure troves of astronomical data comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an ongoing scan of the firmament that began 15 years ago...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Watch Will Make People and Computers More Intimate
A fundamental quest of the digital age has been to make our devices more personal.
From ACM Opinion
Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away
I teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for internet...
From ACM Careers
The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr.
From ACM Opinion