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
'brave' Director Talks About the Pixar Process
Mark Andrews has worked in animation and live-action as a storyboard artist, story supervisor, writer, and even as a voice actor, including The Incredibles, John...
From ACM Opinion
Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
The ugly truth is that computers don't know anything. They have no common sense.
From ACM News
How Depressives Surf the Web
In what way do you spend your time online? Do you check your email compulsively? Watch lots of videos? Switch frequently among multiple Internet applications—from...
From ACM News
Google's New Brain Could Have a Big Impact
A store of information dubbed the "Knowledge Graph" now adds useful context and detail to the list of links that Google serves up.
From ACM Opinion
Linus Torvalds: Linux Succeeded Thanks to Selfishness and Trust
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy...
From ACM Opinion
Desktop Computers Look More and More Like Smartphones
If you're an experienced computer user, you probably remember explaining to newbies how a desktop computer worked: Your photos should go in this folder; your documents...
From ACM News
What Facebook Knows
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...
From ACM Opinion
World's Largest Organization For Computer Professionals Comes Out Against Cispa
The U.S. Public Policy Council of the Association of Computing Machinery, representing ACM, came out against CISPA, the cybersecurity legislation recently passed...
From ACM TechNews
Analyzing the Cybersecurity Threat Posed By Hackers
In an interview, Northeastern University professor Themis Papageorge discusses the cybersecurity threat presented by rogue hacker groups such as Anonymous, and...
From ACM News
Google Fights Back in China
Two giants on the world stage are battling over the future of information.
From ACM News
Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon
That little iPhone in your pocket is perfectly positioned to become a clone of the credit cards in your wallet or purse.
From ACM Opinion
Is Flame Virus Fallout a Chinese, Russian Plot to Control the Internet?
Has the U.S. government been caught with its virtual hands in the world's cookie jar? And might it lose control of the Internet as a consequence?
From ACM News
Back to Stuxnet: The Missing Link
Two weeks ago, when we announced the discovery of the Flame malware we said that we saw no strong similarity between its code and programming style with that of ...
From ACM Opinion
Zoran Popovi?: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease
Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that...
From ACM Opinion
Drones, Computer Viruses, and Blowback
Another day, another senior al-Qaeda leader killed by a drone strike. (I can't be the first to point out that being al-Qaeda's No. 2 is like being the drummer for...
From ACM Opinion
Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the reason you're reading this story in a web browser, complete with hypertext like this and an internet address that looks like this: ...
From ACM Opinion
Cyberweapons: Bold Steps in a Digital Darkness?
In 1945, the United States organized a committee to investigate whether nuclear weapons should become a central military technology, or whether to abjure the weapons...
From ACM Opinion
How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web
Despite the massive amounts of computing power dedicated by search engine companies to crawling and indexing trillions of documents on the Internet, search engines...
From ACM Opinion
Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?
In the last week or so, cyberwarfare has made front-page news: the United States may have been behind the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran; Iran may have suffered another...
From ACM Opinion