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
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...
From ACM Opinion
Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets
Shortly after Robert Hannigan took over the British signals-intelligence agency GCHQ in 2014, he implored technology companies to do more to facilitate investigations...
From ACM Opinion
How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software pdate System
Apple's refusal to comply with a judge's demand that it help the FBI unlock a terrorist's iPhone has triggered a roiling debate about how much the U.S. government...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's 'code = Speech' Mistake
In its legal fight against the FBI over iPhone security, Apple has made just about every argument it can credibly make.
From ACM Opinion
Fighting Isis Online
The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country.
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions on Killer Robots
Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss fully autonomous weapons—machines that could...
From ACM Opinion
Toolkits For the Mind
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...
From ACM Opinion
Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.
From ACM Opinion
Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis
More than a year after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking details of the agency's electronic surveillance programs, questions remain...
From ACM Opinion
Joseph Ledoux
When it comes to the study of memory, we might be living in something of a golden age.
From ACM Opinion
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China's Espionage
Earlier this week the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five Chinese military officers for industrial espionage, accusing them of leading attacks on the computers...
From ACM News
Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Eugene Kaspersky
The Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab has analyzed major new kinds of malware, including Stuxnet, which four years ago was revealed to have damaged...
From ACM Opinion
Glass, Darkly
Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it's a very different machine.
From ACM Opinion
Dropbox Ceo Drew Houston
Dropbox, the popular cloud storage system that lets people drag files to an icon that puts that data in the cloud and sync new versions across multiple devicesHiding...
From ACM Opinion
Diagnosis For Healthcare.gov: nrealistic Technology Expectations
The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn't all bureaucratic.
From ACM Opinion