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
Why I Already Miss Physical Media
For years, I had a happy weekend ritual. I'd head to my local Tower Records and lose myself in the aisles of CDs and DVDs. After emerging from the store—usually...
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
Could What Happened to Myspace Happen to Facebook?
MySpace fell from grace for several reasons. First, they sacrificed the service's integrity in pursuit of monetization. For those who remember, the user experience...
From ACM News
Should the Government Need a Search Warrant to Track Your Car with Gps?
The Supreme Court ended its term with a high-profile ruling that violent video games are protected by the First Amendment, but a bigger technology decision could...
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 Opinion
There's No Data Sheriff on the Wild Web
A company suffers a catastrophic attack on its servers. Gone are names, email addresses, home phone numbers, passwords, credit card numbers. Everything ends up...
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
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
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
World Web War I: Why Egypt's Digital prising Is Different
We've seen cyberwar declared before, but the one playing out in Egypt is my own candidate for World Web War I.
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 Opinion
Assange on Secrecy, China, and Wikileaks' Growth
"Secrecy is important for many things," said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with Time over Skype on Monday. Managing editor Richard Stengel...
From ACM Opinion