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
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that...
From ACM Opinion
At Aereo Arguments, Can Old-School Analogies Explain New Technology?
Technology is hard. Valet parking and coat check rooms are not, at least for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
From ACM Opinion
How America's Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not.
From ACM News
Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?
A quantum computer is a device that could exploit the weirdness of the quantum world to solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them...
From ACM Opinion
Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street's Biggest High-Tech Swindle
Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower...
From ACM News
What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
On Thursday, astronomers announced that they'd reached a new milestone in the search for Earth's "twin," or a planet much like ours that orbits in what's known...
From ACM Opinion
The Fuzzy Math Behind the Search For Mh370
Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean.
From ACM Opinion
The Most Expensive Lottery Ticket in the World
No Exit, the new book from Gideon Lewis-Kraus, should be required reading for anybody who thinks it might be a good idea to found a startup in Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
If the Robots Kill s, It's Because It's Their Job
In the movie Transcendence, which opens in theaters on Friday, a sentient computer program embarks on a relentless quest for power, nearly destroying humanity in...
From ACM Opinion
Captchas Are Becoming Security Theater
CAPTCHAs are a time-worn way for humans to tell computers that we are human.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Web Needs Perfect Forward Secrecy More Than Ever
EFF has long advocated for websites to support HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to encrypt and authenticate data transmitted on the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination
Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its...
From ACM Opinion
Can We Really pload Johnny Depp's Brain?
When Wally Pfister's Transcendence is released on April 17, millions of moviegoers will be asking themselves, "Could we really upload Johnny Depp into a computer...
From ACM Opinion
Heartbleed: Developer Who Introduced the Error Regrets 'oversight'
The developer who introduced the "Heartbleed" vulnerability to the open-source code used by thousands of websites has told the Guardian it was an "oversight"—but...
From ACM Opinion
900 Years of Tree Diagrams, the Most Important Data Viz Tool in History
You'd be excused for thinking infographics are a modern invention.
From ACM Opinion