Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
A High-Tech War on Leaks
Back in 2006, before the Obama administration made leak prosecutions routine, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether...
From ACM Opinion
Rudy Rucker: 'all These Years, and I'm Still Looking For the Big Aha'
"When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're...
From ACM Opinion
The Mathematical Equation that Caused the Banks to Crash
It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial...
From ACM Opinion
Cyberwar Is the New Yellowcake, Fueling a Cybersecurity-Industrial Complex
In last month's State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass "legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber...
From ACM Opinion
A Cyber Risk to the .s.
In a recent briefing to Congress about worldwide threats, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that the danger of cyberattacks will equal or surpass the danger...
From ACM Opinion
Tides Are Changing For Web Surfers
David Weinberger has a new book out entitled Too Big to Know in which he argues that one of the implications of a comprehensively networked society is that the...
From ACM Opinion
Are Supercomputers Worth Their Super Price Tags?
"Why do we have to aim for the world's No. 1 — what's wrong with being the world's No. 2?" That short question about Japan's vaunted K supercomputer program has...
From ACM Opinion
Google Knows Too Much About You
If you use Google, and I know you do, you may have noticed a little banner popping up at the top of the page announcing: "We're changing our privacy policy and...
From ACM Opinion
Why William Gibson Distrusts Aging Futurists' Nostalgia
Few things seem more pathetic than a science fiction writer who pines for the "good old days."
From ACM Opinion
The Science Fiction Effect
It's alive! Neurophysiology. Huddled around a warm fireplace one cold summer's night in 1816, a small group of friends decided to hold a competition to see who...
From ACM Opinion
Five Reasons The Robo-Car Haters Are Wrong
The self-driving cars we’ve been promised since the dawn of the auto age are here.
From ACM TechNews
A Discussion With David Farber: Bandwidth, Cyber Security, and the Obsolescence of the Internet
Internet technology veteran David Farber projects that within a decade, computers will be outfitted with optical connections rather than pins for networking, and...
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
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
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 Opinion