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
Flame One Year Later
It's been a year since the first reports of the Flame malware surfaced, and looking back at the 12 months since then, it seems more and more each day that the discovery...
From ACM Opinion
Government Plan to Build 'back Doors' For Online Surveillance Could Create Dangerous Vulnerabilities
Recently, the FBI has been attacking the "going dark" problem—that is, its inability to read all electronic communications—from both legal and technological angles...
From ACM News
Building Supercomputers with Raspberries
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even...
From ACM Opinion
Jony Ive's New Look For Ios 7: Black, White, and Flat All Over
With the grand unveiling of Apple’s next operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch approaching, sources have provided detailed descriptions of what...
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who Sold a Month-Old App to Dropbox For $100m
When Mailbox sold itself to Dropbox for a reported $100 million or so this March, the month-old iPhone app wasn’t even available to the public.
From ACM Opinion
Thoughts on Pew's Latest Report: Notable Findings on Race and Privacy
Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about "Teens, Social Media, and Privacy." As a researcher who's...
From Communications of the ACM
Swamped By Automation
Whenever someone asks you to trust them, don't.
From Communications of the ACM
Thumb Numbers
Rules of thumb stated as numerical rules are enticing, but many are folk theorems that may not apply in your critical situation.
From Communications of the ACM
Learning from the Past to Face the Risks of Today
The Space Shuttle software program can provide guidance to today's projects.
From ACM Opinion
Telecom's Big Players Hold Back the Future
If you were going to look for ground zero in the fight against a rapidly consolidating telecom and cable industry, you might end up on the fifth floor of the Benjamin...
From ACM Opinion
Steve Jobs' Dream Device Has Arrived
Just before he died, Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson about his dream for revolutionizing television.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Propaganda: Sean Gourley on Big Data and the 'war of Ideas'
In 2009, Sean Gourley, an Oxford-trained physicist, gave a TED talk called "The Mathematics of War."
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's T.j. Campana
The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has been spearheading botnet takedowns and other anti-cybercrime operations for many years, and it has had remarkable success.
From ACM Opinion
Will Giving the Internet Eyes and Ears Mean the End of Privacy?
The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool.
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to Google Island
I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird.
From ACM Opinion
Is Computing Speed Set to Make a Quantum Leap?
"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost," wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, "not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really...
From ACM Opinion
Paul Otellini's Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It?
Forty-five years after Intel was founded by Silicon Valley legends Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, it is the world's leading semiconductor company.
From ACM Opinion