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 Communications of the ACM
Who Are We - Now?
Considerable progress has been made toward the formation of a computing profession since we started tracking it in this column a decade ago.
From Communications of the ACM
Identity Management and Privacy: A Rare Opportunity To Get It Right
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace represents a shift in the way the U.S. government is approaching identity management, privacy, and the...
From ACM Opinion
Why Library Privacy Matters
Without library privacy, individuals might not engage in free and open inquiry for fear that their interactions with the library will be used against them.
From ACM News
Eric Schmidt: Anti-Piracy Laws Would Be Disaster For Free Speech
Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a "disastrous precedent"...
From ACM News
Why You Can't Really Anonymize Your Data
One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world data sets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record...
From ACM News
Andy Rubin: Why Android Is Only Quasi-Open
Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why.
From ACM News
Ralph Langner on Stuxnet, Copycat Threats
A year ago, Ralph Langner was plugging away in relative obscurity, doing security consulting work for the industrial control system industry in his Hamburg headquarters...
From ACM Opinion
Let in the Super-Immigrants!
The best way to improve the U.S. economy fast is to poach entrepreneurs from the rest of the world. So why do we make it so difficult for them to immigrate?
From ACM Opinion
There's No Data Sheriff on the Wild Web
A company suffers a catastrophic attack on its servers. Gone are names, email addresses, home phone numbers, passwords, credit card numbers. Everything ends up...
From ACM News
Customers Had More Faith in Sony Than It Deserved
In the wake of the recent hacking attacks, which compromised more than 100 million account records on its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services...
From ACM News
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Rails Against Facebook, Says It's a Spy Tool For .s. Government
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook "the most appalling spying machine ever invented" in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social...
From ACM News
Data Privacy, Put to the Test
To the catalog of corporate "bigs" that worry a lot of us little people, add this: Big Data.
From ACM Opinion
Sony Hack Highlights Importance of Breach Analysis
Sony's apparent difficulty in figuring out the extent of the damage from the recent intrusion into its PlayStation Network, while frustrating for those affected...
From ACM Opinion
Jobs and Apple Execs on Tracking Down the Facts About Iphones and Location
Although Apple was silent for several days after researchers raised issues about location information being stored on the iPhone, that wasn’t because it was ignoring...
From ACM Opinion
Your Iphone Is Tracking You. So What.
Have you heard the news? Two researchers have discovered that the iPhone keeps a minute-by-minute, time-stamped log of everywhere you go. That’s right: Your phone...
From ACM News
Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones
In medicine, there's the patient and there's the chart. And the chart is paper.
From Communications of the ACM
The Importance of Reviewing the Code
Highlighting the significance of the often overlooked underlying software used to produce research results.
From Communications of the ACM
Bell Labs and Centralized Innovation
In early 1935, a man named Clarence Hickman had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. Hickman was...
From Communications of the ACM