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Linus Torvalds: Linux Succeeded Thanks to Selfishness and Trust
From ACM Opinion

Linus Torvalds: Linux Succeeded Thanks to Selfishness and Trust

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy...

Desktop Computers Look More and More Like Smartphones
From ACM Opinion

Desktop Computers Look More and More Like Smartphones

If you're an experienced computer user, you probably remember explaining to newbies how a desktop computer worked: Your photos should go in this folder; your documents...

From ACM Opinion

Apple's Strategy of Built-In Obsolescence

Ross Miller made a good point about Apple's new flagship laptop, in his review for the Verge. Once you take into account that it has a solid-state drive, it's actually...

What Facebook Knows
From ACM News

What Facebook Knows

If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...

Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud 'meltdowns'
From ACM TechNews

Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud 'meltdowns'

As cloud computing becomes increasingly common, serious operational "meltdowns" could take place as end users and vendors mix, match, and bundle services for various...

World's Largest Organization For Computer Professionals Comes Out Against Cispa
From ACM Opinion

World's Largest Organization For Computer Professionals Comes Out Against Cispa

The U.S. Public Policy Council of the Association of Computing Machinery, representing ACM, came out against CISPA, the cybersecurity legislation recently passed...

Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan
From ACM Opinion

Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan

If you follow the news at all, you've probably seen Paul Krugman—Princeton professor, New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize-winning economist—championing the idea...

Analyzing the Cybersecurity Threat Posed By Hackers
From ACM TechNews

Analyzing the Cybersecurity Threat Posed By Hackers

In an interview, Northeastern University professor Themis Papa­george discusses the cybersecurity threat presented by rogue hacker groups such as Anonymous, and...

Google Fights Back in China
From ACM News

Google Fights Back in China

Two giants on the world stage are battling over the future of information.

Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon
From ACM News

Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon

That little iPhone in your pocket is perfectly positioned to become a clone of the credit cards in your wallet or purse.

Is Flame Virus Fallout a Chinese, Russian Plot to Control the Internet?
From ACM Opinion

Is Flame Virus Fallout a Chinese, Russian Plot to Control the Internet?

Has the U.S. government been caught with its virtual hands in the world's cookie jar? And might it lose control of the Internet as a consequence?

From ACM News

Back to Stuxnet: The Missing Link

Two weeks ago, when we announced the discovery of the Flame malware we said that we saw no strong similarity between its code and programming style with that of ...

How To Fix the Gender Gap in Technology
From ACM Opinion

How To Fix the Gender Gap in Technology

The United States has produced viable female presidential candidates, women athletes who command millions of dollars in endorsements, and the first female Nobel...

Zoran Popovi?: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease
From ACM Opinion

Zoran Popovi?: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease

Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that...

From ACM Opinion

Drones, Computer Viruses, and Blowback

Another day, another senior al-Qaeda leader killed by a drone strike. (I can't be the first to point out that being al-Qaeda's No. 2 is like being the drummer for...

Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One
From ACM Opinion

Berners-Lee: World Finally Realizes Web Belongs To No One

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the reason you're reading this story in a web browser, complete with hypertext like this and an internet address that looks like this: ...

From ACM Opinion

Cyberweapons: Bold Steps in a Digital Darkness?

In 1945, the United States organized a committee to investigate whether nuclear weapons should become a central military technology, or whether to abjure the weapons...

How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web
From ACM Opinion

How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web

Despite the massive amounts of computing power dedicated by search engine companies to crawling and indexing trillions of documents on the Internet, search engines...

Bionic Brains and Beyond
From ACM News

Bionic Brains and Beyond

The National Spelling Bee of 2023 started out like any other, but controversy enveloped the contest when Suzy Hamilton, an 8-year-old from Tulsa, emerged as the...

Are We Living in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451?
From ACM Opinion

Are We Living in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451?

Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, one of the world's leading writers of the genre for more than 60 years, died on Wednesday at the age of 91. Although he wrote...
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