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
Yahoo Buys News App from British Teenager For a Reported $30 Million
When Yahoo was founded in 1995, Nick D'Aloisio wasn't even born yet. He says he taught himself to program computers using books and video tutorials.
From ACM Opinion
The Promise and Perils of a Datafied World
In a former life I was a research assistant. After painstaking weeks spent gathering data, I was tasked with putting the numbers into a statistics application that...
From ACM Opinion
How Relying on Algorithms and Bots Can Be Really, Really Dangerous
So you can’t wait for a self-driving car to take away the drudgery of driving? Me neither! But consider this scenario, recently posed by neuroscientist Gary Marcus...
From ACM Opinion
Why All Reporters (not Just J-School Students) Should Learn to Fly Drones
These days the future of journalism may look cloudy. But one thing about the future of the business is clear, according to ABC News. It will be full of drones.
From ACM Opinion
Ken Levine: Bioshock Infinite Is Very Much a Bioshock Game
Ken Levine is running. No really! I’m assuming on a treadmill.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Twitter Is Robots Tweeting at Each Other
Twitter is full of weird stuff none of us ever notice because it mostly just looks like spam or nonsense.
From ACM Opinion
Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 1974
The year is 1974, and Arthur C. Clarke is standing inside one of those cavernous computer centers that held the massive machines of the day.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's Time For Our Devices to nderstand What We Mean, Not Just What We Say
It wasn’t just cost and Moore’s law. The graphical user interface—now known as the GUI ("gooey")—is what really made computing widespread, personal and ubiquitous...
From ACM Opinion
The Touch-Screen Generation
On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Eric Schmidt Warns on China's Attempts to Control the Internet
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, has described China as "the most egregious" example of a nation attempting to control the Internet, as he issued...
From ACM Opinion
The Era of Deep Archiving Begins
As a Dartmouth student in the early 1970s, William McDonough went, somewhat casually, to hear a lecture by a visiting celebrity. Mr. McDonough had little idea beforehand...
From ACM Opinion
Jaron Lanier: The Digital Pioneer Who Became a Web Rebel
Jaron Lanier is that rarest of rare birds—an uber-geek who is highly critical of the world created by the technology he helped to create.
From ACM Opinion
Googling You
The settlement last week between a group of state attorneys general and Google over the company’s improper data collection from home wireless networks shows the...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a with Samsung's Mobile Chief
Samsung Electronics Co. is coming off its strongest year ever, reporting record earnings, and leapfrogging Apple Inc. to become the world's biggest smartphone maker...
From ACM Careers
10 Companies Chasing Innovations That Really Matter
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin faced some flak recently when he announced he was starting a new company in the already crowded field of digital payments.
From ACM Opinion
Qwerty Keyboards: Time For a Rethink?
Q-W-E-R-T-Y. Six letters that define so much of our waking lives.
From ACM Opinion
Why We'll Never Make an npickable Lock
It would be roughly accurate to say that there have been locks as long as there have been things humans wanted to guard.
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