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
Bradley Manning 'aiding the Enemy' Charge Is a Threat to Journalism
Thursday, Colonel Denise Lind, the judge in the Bradley Manning court martial, refused to dismiss the "aiding the enemy" charge.
From ACM Opinion
Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-drivingUdacity...
From ACM Opinion
How to Be an Email Survivalist
In the early 2000s it was the height of geek fashion to run your own email server—then along came Gmail with two gigabytes of free storage and excellent spam filtering...
From ACM Opinion
Who Scores Games By Hand Anymore?
The first thing Bruce Levy did upon recent entry into Yankee Stadium while accompanied by his in-laws and teenage son was to purchase a program in the area of the...
From ACM Opinion
Responding to Government Legal Demands For Customer Data
Today we have asked the Attorney General of the United States to personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to share publicly more complete...
From ACM Opinion
The Pros and Cons of a Surveillance Society
Here are three topics much in the news these days: Prism, the surveillance program of the national security agency; the death of Trayvon Martin; and Google Glass...
From ACM Careers
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
Q. How is Big Data being used more in the leadership and management field?
From ACM Opinion
The Hut Where the Internet Began
Let's start at the end point: what you're doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication...
From ACM Opinion
The Crypto-Currency Ecosystem
Just like the IP protocol, bitcoin is the culmination of several important advancements, all combining to form a paradigm-changing innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Internet Inventor: No Technological Cure For Privacy Ills
Is there technological solution for protecting people from online surveillance?
From ACM Opinion
What Your Metadata Says About You
As recently as a few weeks ago, "metadata" was an obscure term known mainly to techies and academics.
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden's Nightmare Comes True
Snowden's worst fear, by his own account, was that "nothing will change."
From ACM Opinion
A Eulogy For Altavista, the Google of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this.
From ACM Opinion
Social Media Free Speech Rights Complicated For Workers
An anonymous "Suzy Citizen" leaves fliers criticizing management in a public area of the St. Cloud Public Library, and the Great River Regional Library board of...
From ACM Opinion
What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read Kafka’s "The Trial" and ...
From ACM Opinion
The Taming of the Spook
On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority...
From ACM Opinion
A Eulogy For Altavista, the Google of Its Time
Goodbye AltaVista. You deserved better than this. Better than the one-sentence send-off Yahoo gave you today, when announcing your July 8 closure date.
From ACM Opinion
Will Facebook's Robot Censors Know Porn When They See It?
The old trope about pornography is that you’ll know it when you see it. Facebook is betting that not only will it know it, but that the social network will be able...
From ACM Opinion
Software Recognition Technology Is Amazing, but Not Amazing Enough
The gadget blogs may work themselves into a frenzy over megapixels and processor speed. But if you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider a feature...
From ACM Opinion