Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From Communications of the ACM
In Praise of 'Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill'
Sixty years ago, Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill produced the first textbook on programming: The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital...
From Communications of the ACM
Remix Nation
Assessing the threat the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act pose for fair use.
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM Opinion
Steve, Please Buy S a Carrier!
What should Apple do with its $76bn in cash? It could do worse than spend some of it on acquiring its own mobile carrier.
From ACM Opinion
Why Cctv Has Failed to Deter Criminals
I've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's Internet in times of civil unrest by blocking...
From ACM Opinion
What Constitutes an Act of Cyberwar?
Before we get to that, there's a clue in the spelling of the word: cyberwar instead of cyber war. The U.S. Defense Department has determined that cyber is a fifth...
From ACM Opinion
11 Hard Truths About Html5
HTML5 heralds some nifty new features and the potential for sparking a Web programming paradigm shift, and as some members of the technical press have touted,...
From ACM News
The Death of Booting p
Remember "booting up"? It was the first thing you did every morning—you waited two minutes, three minutes, sometimes even longer while your computer ran through...
From ACM TechNews
Nsf's Seidel: 'software Is the Modern Language of Science'
Software is the core technology behind a dramatic acceleration in all areas of science, and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the science community...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Rise to Top Means Less Than You Think
With Apple officially becoming the world's most valuable company—at least for a day—it's tempting to engage in lofty talk about what this says about the rise...
From ACM Opinion
Education Needs a Digital-Age pgrade
If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent. Chances are just that good that...
From ACM Opinion
Why I Already Miss Physical Media
For years, I had a happy weekend ritual. I'd head to my local Tower Records and lose myself in the aisles of CDs and DVDs. After emerging from the store—usually...
From ACM News
Google's Self-Driving Wreck: Really Human Error?
When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as...
From ACM Opinion
Why Isn't America Innovating Like It sed To?
America isn't innovating like it used to. And by "like it used to," I mean the period from after World War II to 1973, when an explosion of new technologies increased...
From ACM Opinion
When Knowledge Isn
“Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project...
From ACM News
Encrypt the Web with Https Everywhere
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in collaboration with the Tor Project, has launched an official 1.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere, a tool for the Firefox Web...
From ACM TechNews
Web Search Is Ready For a Shakeup, Says w Computer Scientist
University of Washington (UW) professor Oren Etzioni recently called on the international academic community and engineers to be more ambitious in designing how...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Instant Pages and the Joys of a Computer that Can Read Your Mind
Chrome is reading my mind. When I type a search query in Google's Web browser, it offers me the most likely results right in the address bar. It doesn't justWikipedia...
From ACM News
Shady Rat Hacking Is Not About China
Jeffrey Carr, author of O'Reilly Media's Inside Cyber Warfare, argues that McAfee's supposed revelations about large-scale Chinese hacking attacks are a smokescreen...
From ACM Opinion