Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Surveillance-Based Manipulation: How Facebook or Google Could Tilt Elections
Someone who knows things about us has some measure of control over us, and someone who knows everything about us has a lot of control over us.
From ACM Opinion
Secrets Become History: Edward Snowden in Citizenfour Wins Documentary Oscar
Citizenfour is filmmaker Laura Poitras' account of the first meetings between herself, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden.
From ACM Opinion
Tetris Creators Talk Virtual Reality, Touch Screens, History, E-Sports
As the second and final day of the 2015 DICE Summit came to a close, Alexey Pajitnov took the stage in a rare public appearance to talk frankly about the history...
From ACM Opinion
Blackhat Brings Some Hacking Realism to Hollywood, but to What Effect?
During one scene in the upcoming hacker action movie Blackhat, a team is sent into the control room of a burned-out nuclear power plant to gather clues about the...
From ACM News
Snowden: .s. Has Put Too Much Emphasis on Cyber-Offense, Needs Defense
In an on-camera interview with James Bamford for an upcoming episode of PBS' NOVA, Edward Snowden warned that the U.S. Department of Defense and National Security...
From ACM Opinion
If the Supreme Court Tackles the Nsa in 2015, It'll Be One of These Five Cases
Roughly a year and a half since the first Snowden disclosures, there's already been a judicial order to shut down the National Security Agency's bulk metadata collection...
From ACM Opinion
North Korea and Cyberterrorists Won Big in Sony Hack, Researcher Says
It looks like the great cyber-war with North Korea has begun, at least by proxy.
From ACM Opinion
From Pc to Navy, Ars Pits Casual Flight Sim Skills Against a Real Cockpit Trainer
A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to take a short ride in a Folland Gnat trainer—a nimble little two-seat jet maintained by Rick Sharpe of Houston's ...
From ACM Opinion
Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console
Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.
From ACM Opinion
Finding an Image with an Image and Other Feats of Computer Vision
"We found that people were searching for squirrels just to favorite them, just to click 'like.' And the same with buses."
From ACM Opinion
Julian Assange on Snowden, Disliking Google, and His 'inevitable' Freedom
It would be too much to say that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange feels optimistic.
From ACM Opinion
John Walker, the Navy Spy Who Defined Crypto-Betrayal, Dead at 77
This week, the man responsible for what is probably the biggest cryptographic failure in military history died—just a few months before he was due to be released...
From ACM Opinion
Id Shows Off Double-Jumping, Skull-Crushing New Doom at Quakecon
The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas' QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game,...
From ACM Opinion
A Fast Look at Swift, Apple's New Programming Language
If anyone outside Apple saw Swift coming, they certainly weren't making any public predictions.
From ACM Opinion
How to Build a Gesture-Controlled Web Game with Leap Motion
Modern smartphones have helped shed a light on the power of user interfaces that are driven by gesture and touch. It’s increasingly clear that touch will play a...
From ACM Opinion
How Movies and Tv Give Life to the Mundane Text Message
In the last decade, movies and television have sprouted a new plot weakness: if tension hinged in any way on a situation that could have been solved by a simple...
From ACM Opinion
Science Inches Closer to Real Bioshock-Style Plasmids
Synthetic success. That's not to say that customized transposons are limited to the hypothetical.
From ACM Opinion
Ios 7, Thoroughly Reviewed
When we reviewed iOS 6 a year ago, we called it a "spit-and-polish" release and stand by that assessment today.
From ACM Opinion