Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
How a Private Data Market Could Ruin Facebook
To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions.
From ACM Opinion
The Flight From Conversation
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Death of DRM Would Be Good News for Readers, Writers, and Publishers
At the end of April, Tor Books, the world's largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital...
From ACM Opinion
How and Why You Should Do Data Journalism
One of the big areas of focus for technology companies over the past year has been "big data"—in other words, the idea that there can be a lot of value in finding...
From ACM Opinion
When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
It's an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility...
From ACM Opinion
The Call of the Future
In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data...
From ACM Opinion
Is It Time To Stop Trusting Google?
Was Google's snooping on home Wi-Fi users the work of a rogue software engineer? Was it a deliberate corporate strategy? Was it simply an honest-to-goodness mistake...
From ACM Opinion
Following the Breadcrumbs on the Data-Sharing Trail
Would you like to donate to the Obama campaign? Sign up for a college course? Or maybe subscribe to Architectural Digest?
From ACM Opinion
God and Man in Tennessee
Earlier this month state senators in Tennessee approved an update to our sex-education law that would ban teachers from discussing hand-holding, which it categorizes...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Microsoft Store
Three years ago, shortly after Microsoft announced that it would launch its own retail stores, I offered the company some unsolicited advice: Copy Apple "relentlessly...
From ACM Opinion
Cispa, 'national Security,' and the Nsa's Ability to Read Your Emails
This week the House of Representatives is debating the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, the dangerous "cybersecurity" bill that threatens...
From ACM News
Voyagers' Never-Ending Journey
Exploration is one thing, science another—but they've come together rather nicely in the Voyager mission to the outer planets, outbound for the past 35 years yet...
From ACM Opinion
The Robo-Help
I have two robots that clean the floors in my apartment: the Evolution Robotics Mint and the iRobot Roomba 530. The Mint sweeps and mops. The Roomba vacuums.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Be Evil, but Don't Miss the Train
Back in 2004, as Google prepared to go public, Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated the maxim that was supposed to define their company: "Don’t be evil."
From ACM Opinion
Nah, Iran Probably Didn't Hack Cia's Stealth Drone
Four months after capturing a crashed U.S. stealth drone near the Iran-Afghanistan border, Tehran claims it has hacked into the ‘bot’s classified mission-control...
From ACM Opinion
What Amazon's E-Book Strategy Means
First, I'd like to introduce three keywords that need defining before you can understand Amazon...
From ACM TechNews
A New Breed of Heterogeneous Computing
The foundation of high-performance computing is undergoing a revolution with the introduction of add-on accelerators. An emerging variant of the heterogeneous computing...
From ACM Opinion
How Much Do the Internet Giants Really Know?
To briefly state the obvious, the Internet giants are seriously big: Google is not only the world's largest search engine, it's one of the top three email providers...
From ACM Careers
With New Comforts, Growing Complacent
Google and Facebook, young and successful companies that they are, risk being left behind as technology shifts from PCs and Web browsers to mobile devices.
From ACM Opinion