Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Dollar Will Never Fall to Bitcoin
Last month, several people appeared before a U.S. Senate committee to defend bitcoin, among them Patrick Murck, general counsel of the Bitcoin Foundation...
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
Whither Net Neutrality?
As the new Federal Communications Commission chairman, Tom Wheeler, has kicked up some dust in the tech community by laying the groundwork for a grand vision for...
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 ACM Opinion
Nsa Debate Shifts in Favor of Surveillance Limits
In a sharp and unexpected shift, the national debate over U.S. government surveillance seems to be turning in favor of reining in the National Security Agency's...
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
An Nsa Coworker Remembers The Real Edward Snowden: 'a Genius Among Geniuses'
Perhaps Edward Snowden's hoodie should have raised suspicions.
From ACM Opinion
The Shape of Things to Come
On Alpine Road in Portola Valley, a few miles southwest of the campus of Stanford University, where the flat suburban landscape begins to give way to the vistas...
From ACM Opinion
Ars Editors Remember Their First Taste of Doom, 20 Years Later
On December 10, 1993, id Software uploaded the first publicly available version of Doom to a crowded BBS and FTP server, unleashing on the world the most influential...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Can't Let American Tech Take Over the World
Whenever an app, a website, or a physical product like a gaming console is exported, it ships with a side of cultural influence.
From ACM Opinion
2013: The Year 'the Stream' Crested
The Stream has been the organizing metaphor for the web for the past several years.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's a Shame that Computer Science Courses Aren't Mandatory
Millions of students will learn some lessons in computer coding this week as part of "Hour of Code," a national campaign offering free tutorials.
From ACM Opinion