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
Social Media in 2012 Elections Will Make 2008 Look Like the Digital Dark Ages
Forget all the jibber-jabber in this presidential campaign about policy and strategy. The highlight for me of this election cycle came when the Obama campaign released...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis
Digital innovators Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor...
From ACM Opinion
Web Privacy Standards: Easy to Break, Hard to Enforce
Over the past week, Google has been called out for bypassing default privacy settings in both Safari and Internet Explorer in order to serve up advertising cookies...
From ACM Opinion
Pinterest: Hot New Network or Another Quora?
After a decade of struggle, the social networking battlefield has quietened down. Facebook is the undisputed champion, while Twitter serves for instant news and...
From ACM Opinion
The .n. Threat to Internet Freedom
On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
The Connected Human: How the World Is About to Get Even Smaller
It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now.
From Communications of the ACM
The Artificiality of Natural User Interfaces
Toward user-defined gestural interfaces.
From Communications of the ACM
The Idea Idea
What if practices rather than ideas are the main source of innovation?
From ACM Opinion
Apple Needs More Than A Good Lawyer in China
Apple has no problem getting Chinese consumers to desire its products, as a near-riot outside its Beijing store showed in January. But the U.S. tech giant has been...
From ACM Opinion
Why Lightsquared Failed: It Was Science, Not Politics
The seeds of LightSquared's failure to win government clearance to build a 4G-LTE network can, ironically, be found in the "approval" the company received just...
From ACM Opinion
Tech Pioneer Channels Hard Lessons Into Silicon Valley Success
Modern computer games and their fast-paced graphics require an incredible amount of computing horsepower. So much, in fact, that the kinds of chips commonly used...
From ACM Opinion
Graphic Designers Are Ruining the Web
What happens when you click on a Weblink? Here's one answer: A request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server...
From ACM Opinion
Harvard Mapping My Dna Turns Scary as Threatening Gene Emerges
Four months after I walked into a lab at Harvard University and gave a vial of blood to have my genome sequenced, my search to understand my DNA led me to Mark...
From ACM Opinion
The Internet Is Broken; We Need to Start Over
Last year, the level and ferocity of cyberattacks on the Internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: let the Internet wither...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Mountain Lion Makes the Mac More Like the Ipad
Apple's iPhones and iPads get most of the attention, but Apple is now directing the spotlight on the Mac.
From ACM Opinion
Researchers Detail Flaw in Online Cryptography, but Don't Panic
First, the bad news: A small number of active RSA public encryption keys, a popular type of encryption protocol that secures billions of online transactions, offer...
From ACM Opinion
Rudy Rucker: 'all These Years, and I'm Still Looking For the Big Aha'
"When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're...
From ACM Opinion
What Dropbox Can Teach S About Cloud Computing
Dropbox is the most deceptively simple of services.
From ACM Opinion
Cyberwar Is the New Yellowcake, Fueling a Cybersecurity-Industrial Complex
In last month's State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass "legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber...
From ACM Opinion