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 Amazon's Recent Server Failures Slow the Rise of Cloud Computing?
Last Thursday morning around 5 a.m. eastern time, Amazon suffered a major data center outage. These sorts of outages happen now and then, but they seldom makewhy...
From ACM Opinion
No More Privacy Paranoia
Want Web companies to stop using our personal data? Be ready to suffer the consequences.
From ACM Opinion
Have Computers Made Architects Less Disciplined?
We generally assume that technological advances save time, boost efficiency, increase productivity, and so on. Once we get used to the latest conveniences, we...
From ACM Opinion
Three Cheers For the Judge Who Smacked Down Google Books
For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take...
From ACM News
Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!
What does Japan's earthquake mean for GPS? Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so powerful that it actually widened Japan. While parts of the country barely...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Mobile Gadgets
I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of...
From ACM Opinion
Psych-Out Sexism
The innocent, unconscious bias that discourages girls from math and science.
From ACM News
Wiring in a Wireless Age
Is Intel's Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?
From ACM Opinion
Tech Revolutionaries
The Arab Revolt shows that Google's and Twitter's corporate values are better than Facebook's.
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM News
An Html For Numbers
The Age of Data is just around the corner, right where it has been for years. As someone who spends a lot his time creating visualizations, I've been hoping for...
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion
The Purpose of Science Fiction
How it teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology.
From ACM News
The Triumph of Hacker Culture
Stuxnet and the iconic, pioneering hacker Captain Crunch.
From ACM Opinion
Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere...
From ACM Opinion
The Case Against the Consumer Electronics Show
A year ago, Steve Ballmer took the stage of the Consumer Electronics Show to tout a technology that he promised would change the world: the Windows operating...
From ACM Opinion
"this Paper Should Not Have Been Published"
Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.
From ACM News
Every Day We Write the Book
What would happen if Facebook made its data available for research?
From ACM Opinion