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
Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue
For more than two decades, Tim O'Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry.
From ACM Opinion
How the Chinese Cyberthreat Has evolved
With more than half of its 1.4 billion people online, the world's most populous country is home to a slew of cyberspies and hackers.
From ACM Opinion
Let's se the Government's Massive Databases to Make Better Policy
Members of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking appear before Congress this week to present their final report (pdf).
From ACM Opinion
Trump Is Making Canada Great Again
It's no secret that the United States has long dominated cutting-edge technologies, from personal computers and biotech to smartphones and social media.
From ACM Opinion
Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?
Who's smarter—you, or the computer or mobile device on which you're reading this article? The answer is increasingly complex, and depends on definitions in flux...
From ACM Opinion
Red-Pilled: My Bizarre Week sing the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet
Scroll with me here. Somebody named BeatlesBaby makes "a very badass chicken curry." Look, there's a nice sepia-tinted pencil drawing of Ned Stark from Game of...
From ACM News
The Coming Software Apocalypse
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service.
From ACM Opinion
What, Exactly, Were Russians Trying to Do With Those Facebook Ads?
Many questions remain about the ads purchased by Russian-linked accounts during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Careers
Europe Is Designing a New Particle Collider to Take On China
CERN, the European nuclear physics research organization, is contemplating the development of a particle accelerator three times larger than the Large Hadron Collider...
From ACM Opinion
Is Beaming Down In star Trek a Death Sentence?
In the 2009 movie Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Sulu plummeted down toward the planet Vulcan without a parachute. "Beam us up, beam us up!" Kirk shouted in desperation...
From ACM Opinion
I Helped Create Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How I'd Fix It
This month, two magnificently embarrassing public-relations disasters rocked the Facebook money machine like nothing else in its history.
From ACM News
These Robots Can Merge and Split Their Brains to Form New Modular Bots
We cover all kinds of modular robotics around here, and when we do, we're almost always talking about one overall robotic system made up of many different modules...
From ACM Opinion
Is There Any Hope For Facebook's Fact-Checking Efforts?
Facebook's fact-checking efforts are on the rocks.
From ACM Opinion
Cassini Vanishes Into Saturn, Its Mission Celebrated and Mourned
NASA&'s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn's magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across...
From ACM Opinion
Why It's a Real Mistake to Count on a Cellphone When You Go Hiking
Sarah Savage was alone in the woods and didn't know which way to turn.
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Faceid Could Be a Powerful Tool For Mass Spying
This Tuesday Apple unveiled a new line of phones to much fanfare, but one feature immediately fell under scrutiny:FaceID, a tool that would use facial recognition...
From ACM Opinion
You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even ...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Iphone X's Face Id Is a Terrible Way to Secure Your Data
The new iPhone X puts face recognition front and centre. Why? Because it is the quickest and easiest way to unlock your phone.
From ACM Opinion
What We Know About the Climate Change-Hurricane Connection
With Texas just beginning to recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey and the Southeastern U.S. preparing for Hurricane Irma's iminent arrival, people...
From ACM Opinion