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
The Biggest Security Threats We'll Face in 2015
As the clock strikes midnight on the new year, so begins the countdown to a new round of security threats and breaches that doubtless will unfold in 2015. But this...
From ACM News
This Year's 8 Smartest i Design Ideas
When your family gathered for the holidays this year, did you take note of the technology everyone was using?
From ACM Opinion
Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem
The robots will rise, we're told.
From ACM Opinion
Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives
On April 5, 2011, 41-year-old John Gass received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.
From ACM Opinion
The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally nleashed AI on the World
A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Will Build Google's Elusive Quantum Computer
John Martinis is one of the world's foremost experts on quantum computing, a growing field of science that aims to process information at super high speeds using...
From ACM Opinion
Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It
Jibo, the "world's first family robot," hit the media hype machine like a bomb.
From ACM Opinion
This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse
Charles Stross is an award-winning science fiction author whose books include The Bloodline Feud, about timeline-hopping narco-terrorists, Halting State, a near...
From ACM Opinion
The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will se the Same Tech Our Phones Do
The mobile revolution has spread beyond the mini supercomputers in our hands all the way to the data center.
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion
The Troubling Truth of Why It's Still So Hard to Share Files Directly
It's not always easy to spot the compromises in the technology we use, where we've allowed corporate interests to trump public ideals like privacy and press freedom...
From ACM Opinion
What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality
Even Sunday night HBO watchers are worried the Federal Communications Commission will soon put an end to net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion
The Nightmare on Connected Home Street
I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows.
From ACM Opinion
That Computer Actually Got an F on the Turing Test
Over the weekend, a group of programmers claimed they built a program that passed the famous Turing Test, in which a computer tries to trick judges into believing...
From ACM Opinion
Glenn Greenwald's Pulse-Pounding Tale of Breaking the Snowden Leaks
In June 2013, Edward Snowden was sitting in his room at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong, watching the world react to the first of his explosive leaks about the NSA's...
From ACM Opinion
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's Future, From Virtual Reality to Anonymity
No one ever accused Mark Zuckerberg of standing pat.
From ACM Opinion
Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street's Biggest High-Tech Swindle
Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower...
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet
The Heartbleed bug crushed our faith in the secure Web, but a world without the encryption software that Heartbleed exploited would be even worse.
From ACM Opinion