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
Innovation Starvation
My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space.
From ACM Opinion
Superhero or Supervillain?
From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters.
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
Google's Chief Internet Evangelist on Creating the Interplanetary Internet
When some future Mars colonist is able to open his browser and watch a cat in a shark suit chasing a duck while riding a roomba, they will have Vint Cerf to thank...
From ACM News
China Sees Cyberwar as Reducing .s. Advantage in Future Conflict
It's one thing to read news concerning the latest report to Congress by the U.S. Department of Defense on China's latest military activities. But with regard to...
From ACM Opinion
Personal Information Is the Currency of the 21st Century
The currency of the 21st century digital economy is your personal information. It has no transaction costs and does not decrease in value when the supply increases...
From ACM Opinion
Why Fbi and CIA Didn't Connect the Dots
The FBI and the CIA are being criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the Boston Marathon bombings.
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin vs. Ben Bernanke
Could a virtual currency created by an anonymous Internet hacker someday replace the U.S. dollar?
From ACM Opinion
How Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen See the Future
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is ready for a future where his smart mattress monitors sleep patterns and alerts the curtains to allow daylight in, waking...
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
Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the .s. Government?
The real capabilities and behavior of the U.S. surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done...
From ACM News
How Facebook Designs the 'perfect Empty Vessel' For Your Mind
One day in March, I was sitting across from Facebook's design director, Kate Aronowitz, at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park when she told me, "It takes a lot of work...
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
Digital Tattoos, Mind-Reading Headphones: The Shape of Things to Come?
Forecasting future technology has never been easy. In the 1950s, scientists and technologists envisaged that by now the world would be free from disease, traversed...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Smartglasses and Other Wearable Computers Hit the Mainstream?
Google has stoked our collective imagination via relentless promotion of its Google Glass wearable computer in recent months.
From ACM Opinion
Why I Love the National Internet Sales Tax Plan
The Internet, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be free—"the last bastion of our economy untouched by the government," as they say on Fox News.
From ACM Opinion
Governments Won't Need to Issue Ids: Data Brokers Will Identify You For Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received—it's all in databases...
From ACM Opinion
20 Years On, the Open Web Faces Challenges
For people of a certain age in the technology industry, one of the ways of establishing a connection with someone is by asking some version of the following question...
From ACM Opinion
The Meaning of (making) Life
Christina Agapakis is a rising star among the new generation of biology researchers. Trained in the science of custom-building organisms known as synthetic biology...
From ACM Opinion