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
Searching For Answers in Very Old Dna
As he puts it in the subtitle of his memoir, "Neanderthal Man," Svante Paabo goes in search of lost genomes.
From ACM Opinion
Tetris at 30: An Interview with the Historic Puzzle Game's Creator
Thirty years ago today, a little game about dropping geometrically strange thingamajigs — originally clusters of punctuation marks—into neat, lookalike rows kicked...
From ACM Opinion
Every Little Byte Counts
In "On What We Can Not Do," a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates...
From ACM Opinion
Ordering Google to Forget
In a ruling that could undermine press freedoms and free speech, the highest court of the European Union said on Tuesday that Google must comply with requests from...
From ACM Opinion
The Peril of Knowledge Everywhere
Thanks to advances in technology, we may soon revisit a question raised four centuries ago: Are there things we should try not to know?
From ACM Opinion
The Move Toward Computing That Reads Your Mind
Like many people in this modern world, I struggle with the tension between the conveniences offered by the latest technology and the loss of privacy that comes...
From ACM Opinion
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance...
From ACM Opinion
If You Like Immersion, You'll Love This Reality
The news that Facebook paid $2 billion for a virtual reality start-up, Oculus VR, might strike you as a bit zany.
From ACM Opinion
Hey, Robot: Which Cat Is Cuter?
One recent morning, while contemplating writing this column, I scrolled through thousands and thousands of listings for mundane microgigs on Mechanical Turk, or...
From ACM Opinion
Abstract Ideas Don't Deserve Patents
The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant inventors a temporary monopoly over their creations to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
From ACM Opinion
A Conversation With Danah Boyd, Author of 'it's Complicated,' About Teenagers Online
Danah Boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and a fellow...
From ACM Opinion
Discovering Two Screens Aren't Better Than One
For years, techies have argued that getting an extra monitor or two for your desktop computer is an especially effective way to increase personal productivity.
From ACM Opinion
Flight 370 and the Terror of Being Off the Grid
How can a commercial airliner go missing?
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Internet Freedom
Over the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Waiting For the Black Box
Days after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 shortly after midnight on Saturday, investigators considering a range of possible causes—mechanical...
From ACM Opinion
How I Quit Google
I think it was the search for "pink glitter tiny toms" that finally prompted me to quit Google.
From ACM Opinion
How to Get a Job at Google
Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google—i.e., the guy in charge of hiring...
From ACM Opinion
Social Media, a Trove of Clues and Confessions
It seems as if every week there's a news story about someone committing a crime and confessing to it on Facebook, bragging about it on Twitter or sharing photos...
From ACM Opinion