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
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
Open Science: A Future Shaped By Shared Experience
Mapping the human genome showed how the Internet can play a vital part in collective scientific research. Now more scientists are collaborating—and inviting amateurs...
From ACM Opinion
Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Ethernet to networking over the past 25 years. When Network World started, the technology had been around a while,...
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
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 News
Workplace Robots Need a Better View
Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says a new generation of industrial robots could be enabled by better machine vision.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Does Not Own Skype
So Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, its biggest deal ever. It’s too soon to make a pronouncement on whether the purchase is an idiot move, a brilliant...
From ACM News
Air France 447: How Scientists Found a Needle in a Haystack
Two weekends ago, investigators announced that they had recovered the flight data recorder from the wreckage of Air France 447—a jetliner that crashed in the deep...
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 Opinion
Five Gadgets that Will Be Dead in Five Years
If there's one thing that's predictable in the technology world, it's that things change. Products that were commonplace 10 years ago (PDAs, CRT televisions,...
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 Opinion
Can Tech Experts Save the .s. Postal Service?
Some of the folks responsible for developing and promoting the technologies that have undermined the U.S. Postal Service are banding together in an attempt to save...
From ACM Opinion
Sohaib Athar on Twitter Fame After Bin Laden Raid (q&a)
As U.S. special forces assaulted Osama bin Laden's walled compound in Pakistan, a Twitter user was already recording a rough outline of the events to come. Sohaib...
From ACM Opinion
Online 24/7: "life Logging" Pioneer Clarifies the Future of Cloud Computing
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, paperless for more than a decade, envisions data centers saturated with information and services readily available via the...
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
Conspiracies Say Bin Laden Lives
The decision to drop terror chieftain Osama bin Laden’s corpse into the Arabian Sea was the final meticulous step in a raid whose details were calculated to exert...
From ACM Opinion