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 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
Will Amazon's Recent Server Failures Slow the Rise of Cloud Computing?
Last Thursday morning around 5 a.m. eastern time, Amazon suffered a major data center outage. These sorts of outages happen now and then, but they seldom makewhy...
From ACM Opinion
Video Game Shapes Leadership Style of the New Head of Mit's Media Lab
Joi Ito has a knack for leading people, which he demonstrated, of all places, in World of Warcraft.
From ACM Opinion
Your Iphone Is Tracking You. So What.
Have you heard the news? Two researchers have discovered that the iPhone keeps a minute-by-minute, time-stamped log of everywhere you go. That’s right: Your phone...
From ACM News
Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones
In medicine, there's the patient and there's the chart. And the chart is paper.
From Communications of the ACM
An Interview with Steve Furber
Steve Furber, designer of the seminal BBC Microcomputer System and the widely used ARM microprocessor, reflects on his career.
From Communications of the ACM
Bell Labs and Centralized Innovation
In early 1935, a man named Clarence Hickman had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. Hickman was...
From Communications of the ACM
Reaching Learners Beyond Our Hallowed Halls
Rethinking the design of computer science courses and broadening the definition of computing education both on and off campus.
From Communications of the ACM
Online Advertising, Behavioral Targeting, and Privacy
Studying how privacy regulation might impact economic activity on the advertising-supported Internet.
From ACM Opinion
In the Digital Era Free Is Easy, So How Do You Persuade People to Pay?
To compete with piracy, content providers need clear value propositions that don't conflict with the product.
From ACM Opinion
Got an Iphone or 3g Ipad? Apple Is Recording Your Moves
A hidden file in iOS 4 is regularly recording the position of devices.
From ACM Opinion
Web Creator's Net Neutrality Fear
The inventor of the Web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may...
From ACM Opinion
The Web's Trust Issues
The most dubious phrase in English after "act natural" is "trust me." A party asking for trust without offering a reason why is probably untrustworthy. And yet...
From ACM News
Just How Creepy Is 'creepy'? A Test-Drive
You probably know that some Internet and cell phone applications like Foursquare or Twitter can broadcast your location to the world. And you might know that...
From ACM News
Why Cisco's Flip Flopped in the Camera Business
Cisco is shutting down a business unit that it bought for over half-a-billion dollars: the Flip camcorder division. That's a shame, considering how high the Flip...
From ACM Opinion