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
Teaching to the Text Message
I've been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size...
From ACM Opinion
Have You Driven a Smartphone Lately?
I’m barreling along a rural Michigan highway at 75 miles per hour in a gray Ford Taurus X when I glance down to check a number on a screen.
From ACM Opinion
Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Linked
Our Father, who art in pixels, linked be Thy name, Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done, on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
From ACM Opinion
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...
From ACM News
Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled
This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication....
From ACM News
Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt
There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section...
From ACM Opinion
Web
The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Earth
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial...
From ACM Opinion
The First Church of Robotics
This constant stream of stories about artificial intelligence suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should...
From ACM Opinion
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading...
From ACM Opinion
The Google Algorithm
Google handles nearly two-thirds of Internet search queries worldwide. Analysts reckon that most Web sites rely on the search engine for half of their traffic....
From ACM Opinion
The Medium Is the Medium
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school...
From ACM Opinion
Are Cells the New Cigarettes?
The great cosmic joke would be to find out definitively that the advances we thought were blessings--from the hormones women pump into their bodies all their lives...
From ACM Opinion
In Defense of Computers and the Internet For Learning
If you’re reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you’re doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid. And whatever...
From ACM Opinion
My (brief) Life as a Robot
On Wednesday I attended a Silicon Valley press conference dressed as a robot. Actually I was physically in New York City and virtually in Menlo Park, Calif. For...
From ACM Opinion
The Death of the Open Web
The Web is a teeming commercial city. It's haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects...
From ACM Opinion
I Was Hacked in Beijing
The reality--and my fears--dawned only slowly. For weeks, friends and colleagues complained I had not answered their e-mail messages. I swore I had not received...
From ACM Opinion
Rethinking a Gospel of the Web
For about a decade now, ever since it became clear that the jungle of the World Wide Web would triumph over the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL and MSN, a general...
From ACM Opinion
Virtual Reality War
My battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Kurilla, gave the directive that my squad leaders, platoon sergeant, and myself had heard countless times: my platoon was...
From ACM Opinion