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
Jill and Scott Kelley on the Petraeus Scandal and Loss of Privacy
We woke up on the morning of Nov. 9 expecting the usual: for one of us, the tending to patients; for the other, the morning rush of packing lunches and getting...
From ACM Opinion
Hacktivism: Civil Disobedience or Cyber Crime?
When Reddit co-founder and internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide, he was facing up to 13 felony counts, 50 years in prison, and millions of dollars...
From ACM Opinion
The Fbi Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors
Just imagine if all the applications and services you saw or heard about at CES earlier this month had to be designed to be "wiretap ready" before they could be...
From ACM Opinion
For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade
If you’ve never been inside a "real" arcade, it could be hard to distinguish one from say, oh, a Dave & Buster's. Authenticity is a hard nut to crack, but there...
From ACM Opinion
What the Fbi Doesn't Want You To Know About Its 'secret' Surveillance Techniques
The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Kurzweil on Teaching Human Language to Computers
Famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil joined Google last month to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science," specifically machine learning and...
From ACM Opinion
What the Baseball Hall of Fame Decision Could Mean For the Singularity
If you buy into Ray Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity, then the future is a marvelous place where we’re all physically and mentally enhanced and living longer...
From ACM Opinion
Where Is Lt. Zuckerberg?
I often wonder how General Billy Mitchell must have felt as he relentlessly advocated for the use of strategic airpower while surrounded by leadership who did not...
From ACM Opinion
President Reif Writes to Mit Community Regarding Aaron Swartz
Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community...
From ACM Opinion
Meeting with Biden Is a Mistake for the Game Industry
A couple weeks ago, an industry friend of mine told me that the office for Vice President Joe Biden was reaching out to so-called "game industry leaders."
From ACM Opinion
Is It Time For the Internet to Get the Plumber In?
The strange thing about the Internet is that it went from being something exotic to something mundane almost without us noticing it.
From ACM Opinion
Aaron Swartz and Me, Over a Loosely Intertwined Decade
I don't remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer's blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz
The Internet is not so old. Its graybeards live still. Vint Cerf, author of the Internet Protocol, has been installed as Google's "chief Internet evangelist," a...
From ACM Opinion
The Small Business of 2063
Our world is changing faster than ever and, in recent years, a number of transformative technologies have moved from science fiction and the research and development...
From ACM Opinion
Ben Horowitz on the Impact of Software Everywhere
Ben Horowitz may have the skeleton key to the decimation—sorry, transformation—of our economic and political lives.
From ACM Opinion
Make Guns Smart
Voices across the political spectrum are debating how to prevent mass shootings such as the one in Newtown, Connecticut.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Let Math Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes
This column will make the case that many people, including holders of graduate degrees, professional researchers, and even editors of scientific journals, can be...
From ACM Opinion
Vint Cerf: Internet Competition Has 'evaporated' Since Dial-p
Vint Cerf, co-creator of the Internet, said he is troubled by the prospect of companies like AT&T avoiding government regulation after the transition from traditional...
From ACM News