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 News
Judge Says Warrant Required For Cell Phone Location Data
In recent years, the courts have struggled to decide whether the government needs a warrant to access historical records about a cell phone user's location. Some...
From ACM Opinion
Let Our Bots Do Our Tweeting For S
My tweets generally reflect a set of parochial interests I continually revisit: the shuffle function in iTunes, the Phillies’ crummy batting lineup, reviews of...
From ACM Opinion
A Turbulent End to the Pc Era
The personal computer recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Then last week, Silicon Valley staged the PC's funeral.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Had to Have Motorola Mobility
For several years now, Google has been following a vow made by former CEO Eric Schmidt: mobile first. New CEO Larry Page is taking that dictum to a new level...
From ACM Opinion
Why Software Is Eating the World
Last week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM Opinion
Steve, Please Buy S a Carrier!
What should Apple do with its $76bn in cash? It could do worse than spend some of it on acquiring its own mobile carrier.
From ACM Opinion
What Constitutes an Act of Cyberwar?
Before we get to that, there's a clue in the spelling of the word: cyberwar instead of cyber war. The U.S. Defense Department has determined that cyber is a fifth...
From ACM News
The Death of Booting p
Remember "booting up"? It was the first thing you did every morning—you waited two minutes, three minutes, sometimes even longer while your computer ran through...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Rise to Top Means Less Than You Think
With Apple officially becoming the world's most valuable company—at least for a day—it's tempting to engage in lofty talk about what this says about the rise...
From ACM Opinion
Education Needs a Digital-Age pgrade
If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent. Chances are just that good that...
From ACM Opinion
Why I Already Miss Physical Media
For years, I had a happy weekend ritual. I'd head to my local Tower Records and lose myself in the aisles of CDs and DVDs. After emerging from the store—usually...
From ACM News
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life Through a Computer Avatar
Ray Kurzweil, a prominent inventor and "futurist" who has long predicted that mind and machine will one day merge, has been making arrangements to talk to his...
From ACM News
Google's Self-Driving Wreck: Really Human Error?
When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as...
From ACM Opinion
Why Isn't America Innovating Like It sed To?
America isn't innovating like it used to. And by "like it used to," I mean the period from after World War II to 1973, when an explosion of new technologies increased...
From ACM Opinion
Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be seful in Our Everyday Lives
It's all about human-robot interaction in this more interpersonal sense, like you saw in Star Wars. Until then, the way we reacted with robots was [by] remote...
From ACM News
Encrypt the Web with Https Everywhere
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in collaboration with the Tor Project, has launched an official 1.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere, a tool for the Firefox Web...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Instant Pages and the Joys of a Computer that Can Read Your Mind
Chrome is reading my mind. When I type a search query in Google's Web browser, it offers me the most likely results right in the address bar. It doesn't justWikipedia...
From ACM News