Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency's reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United...
From ACM Opinion
The Nsa's Metadata Program Is Perfectly Constitutional
Last month two judges issued two different opinions about the NSA's controversial bulk metadata collection program.
From ACM Opinion
The Top Four Tech Legal Cases to Watch in 2014
While we're all wiping the champagne-induced sleep from our eyes, inevitably we have to sober up for 2014.
From ACM Opinion
Civilian Photography, Now Rising to New Level
Five years ago, the DJI Phantom 2 Vision would have seemed like a science fiction film prop or a piece of surveillance hardware flown only by the sexiest of superspies...
From ACM Opinion
Stop Pouting About Tech's Next Big Thing, It's Here
It's easy to get jaded when you cover the technology industry.
From ACM Opinion
I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass
An anecdote: I wanted to wear Google Glass during the birth of our second child.
From ACM News
Dogecoins and Litecoins and Peercoins Oh My: What You Need to Know About Bitcoin Alternatives
By now, most people have heard of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency whose value has soared over the past couple of years.
From ACM Opinion
7 Gadgets to Watch For in 2014
Turn an ordinary table into a touch screen, monitor your kids' whereabouts, and place the power of 3D printing in the palm of your hand—and there’s more.
From ACM Opinion
Correcting the Record on the Nsa Review
One of the dangers of a 304 -page report on a complex subject is that everyone gets to choose what he or she thinks is the bottom line.
From ACM Opinion
Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People
In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers...
From ACM Opinion
Do We Want an Erasable Internet?
This is going to sound silly, but I think Snapchat was the most important technology of 2013.
From ACM Opinion
The Predictive Power of Big Data
Right now, the average person's data footprint—the annual amount of data produced worldwide, per capita—is just a little short of one terabyte.
From Communications of the ACM
Publish Now, Judge Later
A proposal to address the problem of too many conference submissions and not enough time for reviewers to carefully evaluate each one.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Robot Army
A couple of weeks ago, shortly after the Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos unveiled, on "60 Minutes," that his company plans to deliver packages to customers with a swarm...
From ACM Opinion
Metadata Isn't Going Away. Here's How to Control It.
It's a good bet that, in the next few weeks, President Obama will impose some serious reforms—and ask Congress to enact a few more—on how the National Security...
From ACM Opinion
Tor Is Supposed to Hide You Online. In This Harvard Student's Case, It Did the Opposite.
At 9 a.m. Monday, fire alarms went off in Harvard's Emerson Hall.
From ACM Opinion
An Homage to Douglas Engelbart and a Critique of the State of Tech
Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, has been a thorn in the side of the computing establishment for more than a half century.
From ACM Opinion
The Judge and the Nsa
Federal Judge Richard Leon has become a sudden political celebrity after his remarkable opinion holding that antiterror surveillance is unconstitutional and, even...
From ACM Opinion