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
The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Remarkable Career
Jim Yurchenco was responsible for squeezing the guts inside the impossibly slim Palm V.
From ACM Opinion
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
All these people are trying to kill email.
From ACM Opinion
Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis
More than a year after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking details of the agency's electronic surveillance programs, questions remain...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Classic Brain Illustrations That Make S Drool
I threw down a bit of a challenge last month at the Association of Medical Illustrators Conference in Minnesota.
From ACM Opinion
Okcupid's Co-Founder on Experiments, Data Science and the Myth of the 'unicorn'
Christian Rudder, co-founder and president of the IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s OkCupid, caused a stir recently when he responded to Facebook's news feed controversy with...
From ACM Opinion
What It's Like to Fly Passenger Planes from the Ground
Bob Fraser explains what it feels like to pilot a Jetstream airliner containing passengers on 800-kilometre trips from his desk at BAE Systems in Warton, U.K.
From ACM Opinion
Founder of America's Biggest Hacker Conference: 'we nderstand the Threat Now'
For one weekend every year, thousands of the world’s best—or worst, depending on your point of view—hackers meet in Las Vegas, Nevada, for Defcon.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn Into a Frankenstein's Monster
The singularity—or, to give it its proper title, the technological singularity. It's an idea that has taken on a life of its own; more of a life, I suspect, than...
From ACM Opinion
Why One of Cybersecurity's Thought Leaders ses a Pager Instead of a Smart Phone
In the computer and network security industry, few people are as well known as Dan Geer.
From ACM Opinion
I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me
There's this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody."
From ACM Opinion
How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You
In the depths of night on August 5th 1914 the British Cable Ship Alert took the first significant action of World War I, severing the five German submarine cables...
From ACM Opinion
Little Green Men Might Not Be So 'green'
Humans are affecting the Earth’s systems on a global scale. Industrial pollutants are accumulating in our atmosphere with the potential for long-term impact on...
From ACM Opinion
This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse
Charles Stross is an award-winning science fiction author whose books include The Bloodline Feud, about timeline-hopping narco-terrorists, Halting State, a near...
From ACM Opinion
Security Secrets, Dated but Real
Was the National Cryptologic Museum designed using a code of some kind?
From ACM Opinion
The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will se the Same Tech Our Phones Do
The mobile revolution has spread beyond the mini supercomputers in our hands all the way to the data center.
From ACM Opinion
A Tool That Answers 'what's That Typeface?'
The Internet is, from its very core to its most distant peripheries, a vast universe of text.
From ACM Opinion
Where Tech Is Taking s: A Conversation With Intel's Genevieve Bell
Genevieve Bell grew up among Aboriginal people in Australia, taught anthropology at Stanford and for the past 16 years has worked for Intel.
From ACM Opinion
Why Many Programmers Don't Bother Joining the ACM
Earlier this month Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol and current Google vice president, openly asked professional programmers for feedback regarding...
From ACM Opinion