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
Peter G. Neumann: Top Cop on the Hair-Raising Cybersecurity Beat
The threat is always there—in your car, at the office, on the table next to where you sleep at night: a near-biblical plague of worms, phisher kings, identity thieves...
From ACM Opinion
From 'wargames' to Aaron Swartz: How .s. Anti-Hacking Law Went Astray
Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide while facing the possibility of a felony criminal conviction, was prosecuted under a law that was never...
From ACM Opinion
Can Your Boss Read Your Email?
Harvard faculty members responded with shock after the Boston Globe revealed that theuniversity’s administration had searched 16 faculty deans’ email accounts to...
From ACM Opinion
Kim Dotcom Is the Anti-Zuckerberg: Share Nothing, Encrypt Everything, Be Happy
Appearing like a retro-futuristic apparition, digitally transmitted through pneumatic tubes from a future that was but will never be, the disembodied head of Kim...
From ACM Opinion
Sxsw: Google's Amit Singhal Talks Natural-Language Search, Mobile
How do you build a search engine that's more attuned to natural language, capable of divining what you mean, and giving back what you want?
From ACM News
Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You
Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying...
From ACM Opinion
Lars Rasmussen: The Brains Behind Facebook's Future
For a man that made his career out of helping millions of people find their way around, Lars Rasmussen is frank about his own navigational shortcomings.
From ACM Opinion
Google Glass: Is It a Threat to Our Privacy?
If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass—the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to...
From ACM Opinion
6 Things I Want to Do with Nfc
Tapping your phone on a console to pay for fries and a Coke is cool. Yet until the stars align, it's not how you'll be using NFC, the Near Field Communications...
From ACM Opinion
Shedding More Light on National Security Letters
Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos.
From ACM Opinion
Are We Really Facing Cyberwar?
A few weeks ago I was standing by a railway track in the small town of Gaithersburg in Maryland as a CSX freight train blasted through the level crossing; its horn...
From ACM Opinion
Eye-Tracking Smartphones Have Arrived. What About the Privacy Implications?
Last March, I wrote in Slate about eye-tracking, which could allow computers and smartphones of the future to collect information not only about what we read, but...
From ACM Opinion
Computer Interfaces: Tech's Next Great Frontier
Consider the tongue. It's sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It's...
From ACM Opinion
Google Services Should Not Require Real Names: Vint Cerf
In the face of increasing government-led crackdowns on social media, Google Inc. should not force Internet users to reveal their real names for some services, including...
From ACM Opinion
What to Do After You've Been Hacked
Evernote became the latest member of the "we’ve been hacked" club. And the thing is, what was once a pretty exclusive club now lets just about everyone in these...
From ACM Opinion
Why Teens Are Tiring of Facebook
To understand where teens like to spend their virtual time nowadways, just watch them on their smartphones.
From ACM Opinion
Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow on 'homeland,' Printed Guns, and Heart Hacking
I had the pleasure of spending some time with Cory Doctorow on Feb. 25 at the Jefferson Hotel here in the nation's capital.
From ACM Opinion
How the Cloud and Big Data Might Help Win the Hacker Wars
Hewlett-Packard's senior VP and head of its Software Enterprise Security Products, Art Gilliland, is speaking today at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco...
From ACM Opinion
On Today's Battlefield, Is Information More Important Than Firepower?
Halo, Borderlands, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Metal Gear Solid—these kinds of games taught a generation to see enemies as red dots on a mini-map...
From ACM Opinion