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
3-D Printed Gun Blueprints Are Back, and Only New Laws Can Stop Them
Attorneys general from 20 states celebrated on Monday when a district court judge in Seattle extended an injunction against the sharing of 3-D printed gun blueprints...
From ACM News
Here's What We Know about Google's Mysterious Search Engine
President Trump thinks Google's search engine is "rigged." By featuring more mainstream news outlets and relatively fewer conservative sites in the results he sees...
From ACM Opinion
Detecting 'DeepFake' Videos in the Blink of an Eye
A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called "deepfakes" after the pseudonymous...
From ACM Opinion
The Four Ways that Ex-Internet Idealists Explain Where It All Went Wrong
A long time ago, in the bad old days of the 2000s, debates about the Internet were dominated by two great tribes: the Optimists and the Pessimists.
From ACM Opinion
Trump Says He Will 'Address' Google's 'Suppressing' of Conservative News
On Tuesday morning, the 45th president of the United States woke up around 5:30am Eastern Time and decided to begin his Tuesday by berating the "Fake News Media...
From ACM Opinion
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom.
From ACM Opinion
How D-Wave's Quantum Machine Could Help Exotic Physics
Picture a computer. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you were probably thinking of your laptop, or maybe even your smartphone if you're being smart...
From ACM Opinion
Future Elections May Be Swayed by Intelligent, Weaponized Chatbots
The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose.
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism
A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product.
From Communications of the ACM
When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid
Observations on the use of machine learning and facial inferences to classify people using inexplicable data.
From ACM Opinion
I Just Hacked a State Election. I'm 17. And I'm Not Even a Very Good Hacker.
It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections.
From ACM Opinion
Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data?
In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in "electronic democracy," in which a single citizen, selected to represent...
From ACM Opinion
A Bold Mission to Touch the Sun
On Sunday, August 12, NASA launched a bold mission to fly directly into the sun's atmosphere, with a spacecraft named the Parker Solar Probe, after solar astrophysicist...
From ACM Opinion
Billion-Dollar Telescopes Could End p Beyond the Reach of S Astronomers
Every ten years, US astronomers set research priorities for the following decade.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Television Is … More Television
Call it Jeffrey Katzenberg's unicorn newborn. An operating company has come into being, ex nihilo, with the blandest of names—NewTV—and a valuation north of $1...
From ACM Opinion
Are Blockchains the Answer for Secure Elections? Probably Not
With the U.S. heading into a pivotal midterm election, little progress has been made on ensuring the integrity of voting systems—a concern that retook the spotlight...
From ACM Opinion
Honoring the '80s, Def Con's Badge Is also a Text Adventure
Nearly 30,000 people came to Las Vegas last week for the 26th edition of DEF CON, the iconic security conference. And no small amount of the mental energy of that...
From ACM Opinion
Hackers Are Out to Jeopardize Your Vote
Russian hackers targeted US electoral systems during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Opinion
To Win the AI Race, We Need More Humans
The United States is trying to develop a national strategy on artificial intelligence (AI) but is ignoring its single greatest advantage: many of the world's brightest...
From ACM Opinion