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
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM Opinion
To Pi and Beyond
Possibly not everyone knows that March 14th is Pi Day, in honor of the symbol used to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
The Holder of Secrets
From the garden terrace of a sixth-floor walkup on a quiet Berlin street, there was a clear view to the TV Tower, in Alexanderplatz.
From ACM Opinion
What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.
From ACM Opinion
How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati.
From ACM Opinion
"we're at Greater Risk": General Keith Alexander
Since Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillence, we know more about how the National Security Agency has been interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot...
From ACM Opinion
Putin's Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev's Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent.
From ACM Opinion
The Internet's Telltale Heartbleed
The cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has been writing about computer security for more than fifteen years, is not given to panic or hyperbole.
From ACM News
The Daunting Challenge of Secure Email
When users of Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service, logged on to the site this past August, they found a bewildering letter on the site's main page.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence
If the New York Times's latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost "magical."
From ACM Opinion
Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
Back in the twentieth century, people were roughly equal in their power to avoid advertising.
From ACM Opinion
The Prism
An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government...
From ACM Opinion
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box.
From ACM Opinion
Moral Machines
Google's driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory...12