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Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not
From ACM Opinion

Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not

As a Japanese, I grew up watching anime like "Neon Genesis Evangelion," which depicts a future in which machines and humans merge into cyborg ecstasy.

How NASA Was Born 60 Years Ago from Panic Over a 'Second Moon'
From ACM Opinion

How NASA Was Born 60 Years Ago from Panic Over a 'Second Moon'

The origins of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can be traced all the way back to the Wright brothers, but the real story happened over less than...

Supreme Court Struggles to Define 'Searches' as Technology Changes
From ACM Opinion

Supreme Court Struggles to Define 'Searches' as Technology Changes

What the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means when it protects citizens against an unreasonable search by government agents isn't entirely clear.

How Plausible Are All Those Mission: Impossible Gadgets, Anyway?
From ACM Opinion

How Plausible Are All Those Mission: Impossible Gadgets, Anyway?

It's been 22 years since Tom Cruise infiltrated a CIA vault suspended from a wire in the first Mission: Impossible flick.

How ­.S. Intelligence Agencies Can Find Out What Trump Told Putin
From ACM Opinion

How ­.S. Intelligence Agencies Can Find Out What Trump Told Putin

President Donald Trump's insistence on holding a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin hobbled U.S. intelligence agencies that would usually...

Want Facebook to Censor Speech? Be Careful What You Wish For
From ACM Opinion

Want Facebook to Censor Speech? Be Careful What You Wish For

The only figure as capable as Donald Trump of spinning up an instant and frantic media cycle these days is Mark Zuckerberg, whose ubiquitous company can't manage...

AI Can Be Sexist and Racist; It's Time to Make It Fair
From ACM Opinion

AI Can Be Sexist and Racist; It's Time to Make It Fair

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become "he said" or "he wrote."

Why Did the European Commission Fine Google Five Billion Dollars?
From ACM Opinion

Why Did the European Commission Fine Google Five Billion Dollars?

Acording to some estimates, about eighty-five per cent of the world's smartphones run on Google's Android operating system.

How to Tell If You're Talking to a Bot
From ACM Opinion

How to Tell If You're Talking to a Bot

Twitter recently took drastic action as part of an effort to slow the spread of misinformation through its platform, shutting down more than two million automated...

Microprocessor Designers Realize Security Must Be a Primary Concern
From ACM Opinion

Microprocessor Designers Realize Security Must Be a Primary Concern

Computers' amazing abilities to entertain people, help them work, and even respond to voice commands are, at their heart, the results of decades of technological...

How to Combat China's Rise in Tech: Federal Spending, Not Tariffs
From ACM Opinion

How to Combat China's Rise in Tech: Federal Spending, Not Tariffs

At the heart of the trade war between the United States and China lies a profound and unsettling question: Who should control the key technologies that will rule...

Looking Through the Eyes of China's Surveillance State
From ACM Opinion

Looking Through the Eyes of China's Surveillance State

They perch on poles and glare from streetlamps. Some hang barely visible in the ceiling of the subway, and others seem to stretch out on braced necks and peer into...

 Trump-Putin Summit Mystery: What About Snowden?
From ACM Opinion

Trump-Putin Summit Mystery: What About Snowden?

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Vladimir Putin on Monday, lawmakers from both parties want him to demand that the Russian president hand over 12 hackers...

Alexa: Don't Let My 2-Year-Old Talk to You That Way
From ACM Opinion

Alexa: Don't Let My 2-Year-Old Talk to You That Way

Parents, your child may have a new secret friend: your smart speaker.

We Have Reached Peak Screen. Now Revolution Is in the Air.
From ACM Opinion

We Have Reached Peak Screen. Now Revolution Is in the Air.

Smartphones were once the best thing to happen to the tech industry—and for a while, it seemed, to all of us, too.

A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns
From ACM Opinion

A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns

Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world's first fully 3-D-printed...

The ­S May Have Just Pulled Even with China in the Race to Build Supercomputing's Next Big Thing
From ACM Opinion

The ­S May Have Just Pulled Even with China in the Race to Build Supercomputing's Next Big Thing

There was much celebrating in America last month when the US Department of Energy unveiled Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer. Now the race is on to achieve...

What Was on a ­SB Fan Given at the Trump-Kim Summit? Security Experts Say Nothing, but Don't Plug It In.
From ACM Opinion

What Was on a ­SB Fan Given at the Trump-Kim Summit? Security Experts Say Nothing, but Don't Plug It In.

When journalists arrived in Singapore for the historic summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last month, security experts were alarmed...

How We Proved Einstein Right on a Galactic Scale, and What It Means for Dark Energy and Dark Matter
From ACM Opinion

How We Proved Einstein Right on a Galactic Scale, and What It Means for Dark Energy and Dark Matter

Gravity may be the weakest of the fundamental forces in nature, but it is ultimately what enabled life on Earth to evolve.

Article 13: Europe's Hotly Debated Revamp of Copyright Law, Explained
From ACM Opinion

Article 13: Europe's Hotly Debated Revamp of Copyright Law, Explained

First they came for the privacy violations, then they came for the memes.
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