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
Will Facebook's Robot Censors Know Porn When They See It?
The old trope about pornography is that you’ll know it when you see it. Facebook is betting that not only will it know it, but that the social network will be able...
From ACM Opinion
Balancing Security and Liberty in the Age of Big Data
A very large Internet company once had the noble impulse to share some of its data with the research community.
From ACM Careers
Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite
On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That's more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO...
From ACM Opinion
Paul Mockapetris, Inventor of the Domain Name System, Wants to Filter the Web
Before the Internet, there was the ARPANet, a closed computer network that pretty much shut down on weekends and over holidays.
From ACM News
Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven
One of the oddest bits of news to emerge from the economic collapse of Cyprus is a corresponding rise in the value of Bitcoin, the Internet’s favorite, media-friendly...
From ACM Opinion
Why All Reporters (not Just J-School Students) Should Learn to Fly Drones
These days the future of journalism may look cloudy. But one thing about the future of the business is clear, according to ABC News. It will be full of drones.
From ACM Careers
Atari's Bankruptcy: Gen X Bids Pong Farewell
Reading the news that Atari’s U.S. subsidiary is filing for bankruptcy was a little like hearing that Bob Hope died—in that you were surprised to discover he had...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz
The Internet is not so old. Its graybeards live still. Vint Cerf, author of the Internet Protocol, has been installed as Google's "chief Internet evangelist," a...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's 'Next Billion': A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard University dorm room, hoping to see what his classmates were up to on campus. The following eight years...
From ACM Opinion
Apple Needs to Find Its Exit Strategy From China
"IPhone5 Launch Causes Riots" You'd expect to see headlines like this when consumers beat down doors and trample each other, yet these riots were in China, among...
From ACM Opinion
The Iphone 5's A6 Chip Could Be Apple's Sweetest Revenge Against Samsung
Four years ago, Apple set out on a dangerous path. It spent about $300 million on a struggling chip designer called PA Semi. The purchase signaled that Apple intended...
From ACM Opinion
Can Facebook 'monetize Eyeballs?'
In the days of the Internet bubble of the mid to late 1990s, companies received millions of dollars of venture capital to offer products that weren't especially...
From ACM Careers
Move Over, Eye Candy. Here Comes the Business Tech Boom
Sometimes an IPO is more than just another IPO, and that's the case with Palo Alto Networks, which has just filed to go public.
From ACM Opinion
Harvard Mapping My Dna Turns Scary as Threatening Gene Emerges
Four months after I walked into a lab at Harvard University and gave a vial of blood to have my genome sequenced, my search to understand my DNA led me to Mark...12