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
The Rise and Fall of Blackberry: An Oral History
In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded...
From ACM Opinion
Charlie Rose Talks to Nathan Myhrvold
You worked for years at Microsoft, where things now look uncertain.
From ACM Opinion
The False Promise of Classroom Technology
The cover story of Life magazine on Oct. 16 was "U.S. Schools: They Face a Crisis."
From ACM Opinion
Why the Googlification of Obamacare Really Matters
The Internet is piling yet more vitriol on the shoddy Obamacare rollout in response to a report, by Bloomberg's Alex Wayne, that the administration has recruited...
From ACM Opinion
Why Apple Wants Its Software to Be Free
Who knew Apple would become such a big shareware company?
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Surveillance Makes For Strange Bedfellows
The controversy over U.S. government surveillance has produced a king-size collection of strange bedfellows. Beneath the covers one finds both amusing ironies and...
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter on the Hail Mary Genome and Synthetic Meat
Where are we in the hype cycle of synthetic biology?
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 Opinion
Charlie Rose Talks to Tumblr's David Karp
What made you decide that this was the right time to sell—and that Yahoo! was the right buyer?
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
How Boston Police Won the Twitter Wars During the Marathon Bomber Hunt
The first official announcement that law enforcement agencies had concluded their manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't come at a...
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 Opinion
Apple and the Mysterious Case of the Missing Moonshot
When John Morrell left his post at Yale University last year and decamped to Apple, some members of the robotics community were perplexed.
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
Google's Self-Driving Robot Cars Are Ruining My Commute
My hometown, Mountain View, Calif., has become the unofficial capital of the robotic car revolution.
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 Opinion