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 Lessons of Aaron Swartz
On the day after Aaron Swartz's death in January, President Reif and I spoke about how MIT might respond to the breaking news of his suicide.
From ACM Opinion
Bruce Schneier: Nsa Spying Is Making S Less Safe
Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, provides perspective on the revelations from documents purloined from the U.S. National Security...
From ACM Opinion
Cryptographers Have an Ethics Problem
Last week, I visited the MIT computer science department looking for a very famous cryptographer.
From ACM Opinion
Intel's Justin Rattner on New Laser Chip Business
Intel came to dominate computing by consistently beating others at packing transistors ever more densely onto chips for desktop computers and servers.
From ACM Opinion
Proceed with Caution Toward the Self-Driving Car
Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would've made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor...
From ACM Opinion
Geeks Are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties
A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most...
From ACM Opinion
Security Guru Pledges to Strengthen Critical Computers
Stuxnet, a piece of malicious software discovered in 2010, targeted industrial software controlling Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges. But the code got loose—and...
From ACM Opinion
Christopher Soghoian
Christopher Soghoian sniffs out security holes and privacy shortcomings on the Web. Then he urges companies that are responsible—Google, AT&T, and Dropbox have...
From ACM News
What Facebook Knows
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...
From ACM Opinion
How a Private Data Market Could Ruin Facebook
To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions.
From ACM Opinion
Why Transparent Tracking Needs Its Own App
Amid widespread concern over an obscure piece of smart-phone diagnostic software that some experts say could be used to collect and transmit sensitive information...
From ACM News
Making the Case For Security
Major corporations have made serious mistakes with information security recently, resulting in spectacular failures to protect business and customer records....
From ACM Opinion
What Big Data Needs: A Code of Ethical Practices
In this era of Big Data, there is little that cannot be tracked in our online lives—or even in our offline lives. Consider one new Silicon Valley venture, called...
From ACM Opinion
Bing Is Copying Your Clicks, Not Google's Results
Google's results can be accessed because Bing is snooping on IE users.
From ACM News
The Brainy Learning Algorithms of Numenta
How the inventor of the PalmPilot studied the workings of the human brain to help companies turn a deluge of data into business intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
A Less Personal Computer
In Web parlance, "chrome" is the part of the browser that surrounds the page: the address bar, the "Back" button, and those all-important bookmarks. Chrome is also...
From ACM Opinion
Less Is More in Google's Os
"Chromium OS" is the open-source version of the new Chrome OS that Google is developing for netbooks, tablets, and other lightweight machines. It's built from...
From ACM TechNews