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
How Can the U.s. Seize a 'hong Kong Site' Like Megaupload?
The Megaupload takedown, and the arrest of its key employees, might seem to vindicate late 1990s worries about the Internet and jurisdiction. Does putting a site...
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Stop Talking About the Apple Cult
Thirty-seven million iPhones. Fifteen million iPads. Fifteen million iPods. Five million Macs. A million Apple TVs. No matter how you do the math, that's a boatload...
From ACM Opinion
Yes We Scan
Locked in our federal vaults is a tremendous storehouse of information that if digitized would form a core for our digital public libraries in America with huge...
From ACM Opinion
Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories
In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips.
From ACM Opinion
Android Design Chief Details Google's Mobile Future
By most measures, the Android platform is an enormous success. It dominates the smartphone space in terms of market share, with over a quarter of a billion currently...
From ACM Opinion
Why 2012, Despite Privacy Fears, Isn't Like Orwell's 1984
Last week was a remarkable one for the Web: A week that proved George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" incredibly prescient yet woefully incorrect.
From Communications of the ACM
What Have We Learned About Software Engineering?
Upon closer examination, everything old appears to be new again in the realm of software engineering.
From Communications of the ACM
Emotion and Security
Examining the role of human emotional response in making complex security-related decisions.
From Communications of the ACM
Wanton Acts of Debuggery
Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.
From Communications of the ACM
Yet Another Technology Cusp: Confusion, Vendor Wars, and Opportunities
Considering the unexpected risks associated with seemingly minor technological changes.
From Communications of the ACM
Peer Instruction: A Teaching Method to Foster Deep Understanding
How the computing education community can learn from physics education.
From Communications of the ACM
Incentive Auctions
Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.
From ACM Opinion
The Great and Powerful Reddit
Of all the sites that went dark on Wednesday to protest Congress's misguided anti-piracy legislation, Reddit was the one I missed most.
From ACM Opinion
Why The 'check Engine' Light Must Be Banned
It's pretty easy to dismiss the "check engine" light as just stupid, because, well, it is.
From ACM Opinion
Even Woz Thinks the Android Bests the Iphone
Apple CEO Steve Jobs hated the Android smartphone operating system so much that he vowed he would spend his last dying breath and every penny Apple had in the bank...
From ACM Opinion
Why We've Censored Wired.com
We've blacked out the headlines on our Website homepage today as part of a global internet protest against two radical anti-piracy bills pending in Congress—legislation...
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Start 3d Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body,...
From ACM Opinion
The Rise of the New Groupthink
Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement...
From ACM News
Google's Data Center Engineer Shares Secrets of 'warehouse' Computing
Luiz André Barroso doesn't see Google's data centers as data centers. He sees them as computers the size of warehouses.
From ACM Opinion