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
New Laws For New Threats Like Drones and Bioterrorism
You walk into your shower and see a spider.
From ACM Opinion
The 12 Tech Nuisances That Annoy s Most
You know those days when your phone battery doesn't even make it to dinner?
From ACM Opinion
The Technion’s Peretz Lavie on Technology and Education
What Stanford University is to Silicon Valley, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is to Israel’s booming tech sector.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin and the Digital-Currency Revolution
About a half-billion dollars worth of it vanished from an online exchange in Tokyo.
From ACM Opinion
Sony Made It Easy, but Any of S Could Get Hacked
Earlier this month, a mysterious group that calls itself Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems and began revealing many...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat—Yet
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested?
From ACM Opinion
Google's Schmidt Fires Back Over Encryption
To hear Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt tell it, the U.S. government has only itself to blame for new efforts by Google and Apple Inc. to keep police...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.
From ACM Opinion
Okcupid's Co-Founder on Experiments, Data Science and the Myth of the 'unicorn'
Christian Rudder, co-founder and president of the IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s OkCupid, caused a stir recently when he responded to Facebook's news feed controversy with...
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
From ACM Opinion
Former Nsa Chief Mike Mcconnell Says Culture, Not Tech, Is Key to Cyber Defense
John M. (Mike) McConnell says that technology alone isn't enough to secure corporate networks from pervasive and increasingly damaging cyberattacks.
From ACM Opinion
Why I'm Not in a Hurry For a 'smart Home'
Here's what it's like to wake up in America's smartest home.
From ACM Opinion
How to se Tech Like a Teenager
Enough with complaining that young people these days are addicted to their phones. The question you should be asking is: What do they know that you don't?
From ACM Opinion
Man Behind the First Computer Password: It's Become a Nightmare
In the early 1960s, Fernando Corbató helped deploy the first known computer password.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin's Crisis Is Turning Point For Currency
Many bitcoin users are probably too young to remember the Notorious B.I.G.'s 1997 rap hit "Mo Money Mo Problems."
From ACM Opinion
How Cybersecurity Laws Are Outdated
Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency and of National Intelligence, talks about the details of the NSA's surveillance program and tells...
From ACM Opinion
Do We Want an Erasable Internet?
This is going to sound silly, but I think Snapchat was the most important technology of 2013.
From ACM Opinion
The Judge and the Nsa
Federal Judge Richard Leon has become a sudden political celebrity after his remarkable opinion holding that antiterror surveillance is unconstitutional and, even...
From ACM Opinion
Are Smartphones Turning s Into Bad Samaritans?
In late September, on a crowded commuter train in San Francisco, a man shot and killed 20-year-old student Justin Valdez.
From ACM Opinion