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
'a Clockwork Orange' Strikes 40
The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece about the concept of a morality pill, a theoretical-but-apparently-not-implausible panacea for humankind's ethical...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Desktop Degree
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the titleElectronics...
From ACM Opinion
Rethinking the Soul As the 'net Becomes More Lifelike
Does the Internet have a soul?
From ACM Opinion
Privacy, Technology, and Law
Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away. On Facebook and LinkedIn. To servers that store our email, Google searches...
From ACM Opinion
David Karp, Founder of Tumblr, on Realizing His Dream
David Karp, the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr, was 17 when he decided to cut the apron strings and move to Tokyo. With a smattering of Japanese and a...
From ACM Opinion
How to Tackle Cybersecurity
There is a right way and a wrong way to address cybersecurity.
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Sopa
We welcomed the collapse this month of two flawed bills to prevent online piracy, bills that could have stifled speech and undermined Internet safety. But piracy...
From ACM Opinion
Can Apple Become the World's First Trillion-Dollar Company?
Almost certainly, Apple will soon hit $500bn in market capitalization—half a trillion dollars. So, based on its current growth, it's fair to wonder if it will become...
From ACM Opinion
Confessions of an Iphone Data Hog
I'm not on the run yet. But I've been warned. AT&T doesn't like what I'm doing.
From ACM Opinion
How Can the U.s. Seize a 'hong Kong Site' Like Megaupload?
The Megaupload takedown, and the arrest of its key employees, might seem to vindicate late 1990s worries about the Internet and jurisdiction. Does putting a site...
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Stop Talking About the Apple Cult
Thirty-seven million iPhones. Fifteen million iPads. Fifteen million iPods. Five million Macs. A million Apple TVs. No matter how you do the math, that's a boatload...
From ACM Opinion
Yes We Scan
Locked in our federal vaults is a tremendous storehouse of information that if digitized would form a core for our digital public libraries in America with huge...
From ACM Opinion
Time For Robots to Get Real
From robotic slug-killers to dancing humanoids, there's a lot of media buzz around robots.
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Science and Tech Jobs More Enticing to Undergrads
The number of U.S. undergraduate degrees being awarded in most STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) has risen steadily in recent years...
From ACM TechNews
Nasa's Sean Herron and William Eshagh on Code.nasa.gov
In an interview, the U.S. NASA's William Eshagh and Sean Herron discuss the open.nasa initiative, a response to President Obama's Open Government Directive, which...
From ACM Opinion
Coding For Success
Hoxton, we have a problem. Much has been written about how we need to improve the way we educate our children about technology. This is all great, but it's not...
From ACM Opinion
Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories
In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips.
From ACM News
Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch dacity
Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity—an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search...
From ACM Opinion