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 You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It
I once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance...
From ACM Opinion
Jawbone Is Now the Startup Apple Should Fear Most
Jawbone is ascending into the top echelon of tech startups, joining the likes of Uber, Dropbox, and Square.
From ACM Opinion
Why Startups Should Steal Ideas and Hire Weirdos
The most consistently creative and insightful people are explorers.
From ACM Opinion
I Spent Two Hours Talking With the Nsa's Bigwigs. Here's What Has Them Mad
My expectations were low when I asked the National Security Agency to cooperate with my story on the impact of Edward Snowden’s leaks on the tech industry.
From ACM Opinion
Doom's Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem
At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, an executive at id Software uploaded a file to an FTP site on the University of Washington's network.
From ACM Opinion
How Steve Jobs Made the Ipad Succeed When All Other Tablets Failed
Steve Jobs's solution to Google's Android-everywhere strategy was simple and audacious: he unveiled the iPad.
From ACM Opinion
Orson Scott Card Talks Ender's Game
In Ender's Game, the Nebula Award-winning 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card, a 6-year-old boy is taken from his family on Earth to an orbital military academy to be...
From ACM Opinion
Inside Paul Allen's Plan to Reverse-Engineer the Human Brain
In 2003, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen spent $100 million to build the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
From ACM Opinion
The Godfather of Apple Design Spots 4 Looming Tech Trends
Before there was Jony Ive, there was Hartmut Esslinger.
From ACM Opinion
Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
It is now 30 years since I launched the campaign for freedom in computing, that is, for software to be free or "libre" (we use that word to emphasize that we're...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Foreign Languages and Music. Teach Our Kids to Code
J. Paul Gibson began to teach programming classes for teens out of frustration.
From ACM Opinion
How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis—And Can We Resist It?
The latest Snowden document is the U.S. intelligence "black budget."
From ACM Opinion
Connecting the Dots on Prism, Phone Surveillance, and the Nsa's Massive Spy Center
Physically, the NSA has always been well protected by miles of high fences and electrified wire, thousands of cameras, and gun-toting guards.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who Sold a Month-Old App to Dropbox For $100m
When Mailbox sold itself to Dropbox for a reported $100 million or so this March, the month-old iPhone app wasn’t even available to the public.
From ACM Opinion
New Android Boss Finally Reveals Plans For World's Most Popular Mobile Os
For the past few years, Sundar Pichai has been part of a tag-team routine staged at Google's annual I/O developer conference.
From ACM Careers
Why iPhone Accessory Makers Love Bluetooth
Apple's closed ecosystem is losing the battle for how we connect our mobile devices to accessories as open solutions like Bluetooth dominate over Apple's proprietary...
From ACM Opinion
Let's Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype: A Hacker-Entrepreneur's Take
Bitcoin. Everybody's talking about it. What's true, and what's hype? Perhaps the only thing that's clear about Bitcoin is that it's not going away anytime soon.
From ACM Opinion
It's Not About New Icons: What Jony Ive Needs to Do For Apple's Ios
iOS 7 will be flat, as in flat design.
From ACM Opinion
How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the ltimate AI Brain
Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn't have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field...
From ACM Opinion