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 Communications of the ACM
Computer Science Can Use More Science
Software developers should use empirical methods to analyze their designs to predict how working systems will behave.
From Communications of the ACM
The Risks of Stopping Too Soon
Good software design is never easy, but stopping too soon makes the job more difficult.
From Communications of the ACM
Practical Application of Theoretical Estimation
One of the most popular and successful approaches to estimating software projects is the Putnam model. Developed in the 1970s by...
From Communications of the ACM
Who Are We - Now?
Considerable progress has been made toward the formation of a computing profession since we started tracking it in this column a decade ago.
From Communications of the ACM
Identity Management and Privacy: A Rare Opportunity To Get It Right
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace represents a shift in the way the U.S. government is approaching identity management, privacy, and the...
From ACM Opinion
Open Science: A Future Shaped By Shared Experience
Mapping the human genome showed how the Internet can play a vital part in collective scientific research. Now more scientists are collaborating—and inviting amateurs...
From ACM Opinion
Why Library Privacy Matters
Without library privacy, individuals might not engage in free and open inquiry for fear that their interactions with the library will be used against them.
From ACM Opinion
Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Ethernet to networking over the past 25 years. When Network World started, the technology had been around a while,...
From ACM News
Why You Can't Really Anonymize Your Data
One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world data sets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record...
From ACM News
Andy Rubin: Why Android Is Only Quasi-Open
Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why.
From ACM News
The Man Who Invented the Microprocessor
Ted Hoff saved his own life, sort of. Deep inside this 73-year-old lies a microprocessor—a tiny computer that controls his pacemaker and, in turn, his heart.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Does Not Own Skype
So Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, its biggest deal ever. It’s too soon to make a pronouncement on whether the purchase is an idiot move, a brilliant...
From ACM Opinion
Five Gadgets that Will Be Dead in Five Years
If there's one thing that's predictable in the technology world, it's that things change. Products that were commonplace 10 years ago (PDAs, CRT televisions,...
From ACM Opinion
Sohaib Athar on Twitter Fame After Bin Laden Raid (q&a)
As U.S. special forces assaulted Osama bin Laden's walled compound in Pakistan, a Twitter user was already recording a rough outline of the events to come. Sohaib...
From ACM Opinion
Online 24/7: "life Logging" Pioneer Clarifies the Future of Cloud Computing
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, paperless for more than a decade, envisions data centers saturated with information and services readily available via the...
From ACM News
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Rails Against Facebook, Says It's a Spy Tool For .s. Government
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook "the most appalling spying machine ever invented" in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social...
From ACM News
Data Privacy, Put to the Test
To the catalog of corporate "bigs" that worry a lot of us little people, add this: Big Data.
From ACM Opinion
Conspiracies Say Bin Laden Lives
The decision to drop terror chieftain Osama bin Laden’s corpse into the Arabian Sea was the final meticulous step in a raid whose details were calculated to exert...
From ACM Opinion
The Persistence of Conspiracy Theories
No sooner had President Obama released his long-form birth certificate than Orly Taitz, the doyenne of the "birther" movement, found reason to doubt it.
From ACM Opinion