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
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
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
The Future of Internet Freedom
Over the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet.
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
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
Satya Nadella, Chief of Microsoft, on His New Role
Q. What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer?
From ACM Opinion
The Digital Ties That Bind: Love, Loss and Oversharing in the Internet Age
The most serious relationship of my life so far ended last summer without a trace—physically at least.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin and the Fictions of Money
How should we think about a currency like Bitcoin?
From ACM Opinion
Why Bitcoin Matters
A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers...
From ACM Opinion
Ann Cavoukian
Ann Cavoukian is the information and privacy commissioner in Ontario, Canada, and a longtime advocate of default online confidentiality.
From ACM Opinion
When Doctors 'google' Their Patients
I remember when I first looked up a patient on Google.
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency's reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United...
From ACM Opinion