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
Social Physics
Since 2001, the Human Dynamics Laboratory at the MIT Media Lab has used digital technologies—from home-brewed portable sensors to cellphone call records—to try...
From ACM Opinion
Remembering Mit, When There Were Just 50 Women in a Class of 1,000
When Radia Perlman attended MIT in the late '60s and '70s, she was one of just a few dozen women (about 50) out of a class of 1,000.
From ACM Opinion
Encryption Would Have Stopped Snowden From sing Secrets
Edward Snowden could have been thwarted from leaking classified U.S. documents if the National Security Agency encrypted the information to make it unreadable,...
From ACM Opinion
The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple
Shortly after Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple in August 2011, he told a confidant that he got up every morning reminding himself just to do the right...
From ACM Opinion
What Do Data Brokers Know About Me?
I once ran into a friend and her husband at the playground in our neighborhood in Manhattan.
From ACM Opinion
Hackers Allegedly Stole $400 Million in Bitcoins. Here's How to Catch Them.
On Friday, what had been the world's leading Bitcoin exchange declared bankrutpcy, claiming that hackers had exploited a technical issue called "transaction malleability...
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin Mania Worse Than Tulip Craze
The global bitcoin community was rocked this week by a pair of tragic mishaps.
From ACM Opinion
How Movies and Tv Give Life to the Mundane Text Message
In the last decade, movies and television have sprouted a new plot weakness: if tension hinged in any way on a situation that could have been solved by a simple...
From ACM Opinion
The Weirdest Thing About the Apple Security Bug Is How Simple It Was
So for the past 18 months, there has been a horrific security hole in many of Apple's products that has allowed "man in the middle" attacks on supposedly secure...
From ACM Opinion
Good Riddance to Mt. Gox
It is over. Mt. Gox, bitcoin’s oldest—and once its most popular—exchange, was taken offline Monday night, leaving behind angry customers and acrimonious debate...
From Communications of the ACM
How to Build a Bad Research Center
Sharing lessons learned from experiences creating successful multidisciplinary research centers.
From ACM Opinion
Everything You Need to Know About the Latest Bitcoin Crisis
The once-popular Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has gone dark.
From ACM Opinion
Asimov's Predictions from 1964: A Brief Report Card
Predictions about technology's future are almost always doomed.
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
How to Get a Job at Google
Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google—i.e., the guy in charge of hiring...
From ACM Opinion
Comcast's Deal with Netflix Makes Network Neutrality Obsolete
For the past two decades, the Internet has operated as an unregulated, competitive free market.
From ACM Opinion
The Joy of Teaching Computer Science in the Age of Facebook
Over the last two decades, it can be argued, no area of study has seen larger growth in span and general application than computer science.
From ACM Opinion