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
Why a Cyberwar Won't Happen
Exactly two decades ago, the RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, proclaimed that "cyberwar is coming!"
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Surveillance Makes For Strange Bedfellows
The controversy over U.S. government surveillance has produced a king-size collection of strange bedfellows. Beneath the covers one finds both amusing ironies and...
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Surveillance: A Guide to Staying Secure
Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the Internet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems...
From ACM Opinion
Why the .s. Should se Cyber Weapons Against Syria
If the Obama administration does conduct military strikes against Syria, as seems likely, it should use military cyber weapons at the earliest possible moment to...
From ACM Opinion
How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis—And Can We Resist It?
The latest Snowden document is the U.S. intelligence "black budget."
From ACM Opinion
Tech Pioneer Vint Cerf on the Age of Context and Why You Can't Be a Citizen of the Internet
Few people have as much claim as Vint Cerf to the title "Father of the Internet," but as the technologies he helped develop in the 1970s and 1980s become increasingly...
From ACM Opinion
The Nsa's Crypto "breakthrough"
One difficulty of reporting on spy outfits like America's National Security Agency is the veil of secrecy they operate behind.
From ACM News
In Markets' Tuned-p Machinery, Stubborn Ghosts Remain
A generation ago, when the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987, the Nasdaq stock market appeared to have done much better than the New York Stock Exchange.
From ACM Opinion
What You Need to Know on New Details of Nsa Spying
Today's report in The Wall Street Journal reveals that the National Security Agency's spying tools extend deep into the domestic U.S. telecommunications infrastructure...
From ACM Opinion
The Problem with Algorithms: Magnifying Misbehaviour
By the time you read these words, much of what has appeared on the screen of whatever device you are using has been dictated by a series of conditional instructions...
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
This year the U.S. Congress is considering changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary law that governs cyber crime and fraud on the Internet...
From ACM Opinion
What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking US Online?
Say you, like me, went to bed a little early last night.
From ACM News
The New York Times Was Losing $5 Per Second Thanks to Its Web Site Outage
The New York Times is still reeling from a massive Web outage that took down its homepage, its corporate Web site, and everything in between.
From ACM Opinion
WikiLeaks' Teenage Benedict Arnold
When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder's attitude and quickly signed up to the cause.
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter on the Hail Mary Genome and Synthetic Meat
Where are we in the hype cycle of synthetic biology?
From ACM Opinion
In Pursuit of Quantum Biology With Birgitta Whaley
As an undergraduate at Oxford University in the mid-1970s, K. Birgitta Whaley struggled to choose between chemistry and physics.
From ACM Opinion
Former Nsa Chief on Latest Leaked Dragnet Spy Program: It's Real, and It's Spectacular
Does the NSA really operate a vast database that allows its analysts to sift through millions of records showing nearly everything a user does on the Internet,...
From ACM Opinion
Hacktivist Richard Stallman Takes On Proprietary Software, Saas, and Open Source
Richard Stallman, revered by some as a genius (after all, he won a McArthur "genius" grant in 1990) and by others as a crackpot, was in New York Monday where he...
From ACM Opinion