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
Miracle Pill or Cheap Gimmick?
Aakash, the world's cheapest tablet computer, has the potential of being a game-changer that empowers India's poor. But its introduction raises important questions...
From ACM Opinion
The niversity of Wherever
For more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have...
From ACM Opinion
Protect Our Right to Anonymity
In November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could redefine the scope of privacy in an age of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance technologies...
From ACM News
Bike Crash Wiped Details; Gps Data Filled Them In
After racing and biking back roads on the San Francisco Peninsula for almost half a century without serious incident, on July 3 I crashed while riding downhill...
From ACM Opinion
Internet Memes 101: A Guide to Online Wackiness
In the olden days, it was simple to keep up with pop culture. There were only three channels on TV, and everybody saw the same shows at the same time.
From ACM Opinion
Art That Interacts If You Interface
The Museum of Modern Art’s "Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects" is one of the smartest design shows in years—by which I mean...
From ACM News
Decoding Your Email Personality
Imagine, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It's a safe bet he never would have guessed that...
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a Hot Product
When Cisco killed the beloved Flip camcorder a few months ago, a lot of people were shocked and upset—including me. It just seemed like such a ham-handed, thoughtless...
From ACM Opinion
The Tragic Decline of Blackberry
Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the venerable BlackBerry devices, will always be remembered as the company that liberated corporate email from the PC. In...
From ACM Opinion
Internet Piracy and How to Stop It
Online piracy is a huge business. A recent study found that Web sites offering pirated digital content or counterfeit goods, like illicit movie downloads or bootleg...
From ACM Opinion
Windows 8: What Should Be, If You Ask Me
What's next for Microsoft Windows? With Windows 7 now 19 months old, plenty of people are curious about its successor, a product that everybody's calling Windows...
From ACM Opinion
When the Internet Thinks It Knows You
Once upon a time, the story goes, we lived in a broadcast society. In that dusty pre-Internet age, the tools for sharing information weren’t widely available....
From ACM News
Data Privacy, Put to the Test
To the catalog of corporate "bigs" that worry a lot of us little people, add this: Big Data.
From ACM Opinion
The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories
No sooner had President Obama released his long-form birth certificate than Orly Taitz, the doyenne of the "birther" movement, found reason to doubt it.
From ACM Opinion
Your Iphone Is Tracking You. So What.
Have you heard the news? Two researchers have discovered that the iPhone keeps a minute-by-minute, time-stamped log of everywhere you go. That’s right: Your phone...
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