Communications of the ACM
Why Google's AI Can Write Beautiful Songs but Still Can't Tell a Joke
Creating noodling piano tunes and endless configurations of cat drawings with AI may not sound like an obvious project for Google…
From ACM Opinion
Is There Any Hope for Facebook's Fact-Checking Efforts?
Facebook's fact-checking efforts are on the rocks.
From ACM Opinion
Software Has a Serious Supply-Chain Security Problem
The warnings consumers hear from information security pros tend to focus on trust: Don't click web links or attachments from an untrusted sender.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's a Real Mistake to Count on a Cellphone When You Go Hiking
Sarah Savage was alone in the woods and didn't know which way to turn.
From ACM Opinion
Apple's FaceID Could Be a Powerful Tool for Mass Spying
This Tuesday Apple unveiled a new line of phones to much fanfare, but one feature immediately fell under scrutiny:FaceID, a tool that would use facial recognition...
From ACM Opinion
You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even ...
From ACM Opinion
Why the iPhone X's Face ID Is a Terrible Way to Secure Your Data
The new iPhone X puts face recognition front and centre. Why? Because it is the quickest and easiest way to unlock your phone.
From ACM Opinion
The Only Safe Email Is Text-Only Email
It's troubling to think that at any moment you might open an email that looks like it comes from your employer, a relative or your bank, only to fall for a ...
From ACM Opinion
These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised
From the moment we humans first imagined having mechanical servants at our beck and call, we've assumed they would be constructed in our own image.
From ACM Opinion
How Facebook Changed the Spy Game
Any doubt that Russia has been running a strategically targeted disinformation campaign in the United States was erased on Wednesday, when Facebook revealed that...
From ACM Opinion
The Fake-News Fallacy
On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the radio.
From ACM Opinion
The Darkening Web: Misinformation Is the Strongest Cyberweapon
In late June, I was leaving for a flight from Kiev's Boryspil Airport as news broke that Ukraine was the victim of another massive cyberattack.
From ACM Opinion
How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics' Brain Race
In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium.
From ACM Opinion
A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization
Law enforcement officials, technology companies and lawmakers have long tried to limit what they call the "radicalization" of young people over the internet.
From ACM Opinion
The Enduring Legacy of Zork
In 1977, four recent MIT graduates who'd met at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science used the lab's PDP-10 mainframe to develop a computer game that captivated...
From ACM Opinion
Tracing the Sources of Today's Russian Cyberthreat
Beyond carrying all of our phone, text and internet communications, cyberspace is an active battleground, with cybercriminals, government agents and even military...
From ACM Opinion
Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the...
From ACM Opinion
Magical Technologies Just over the Horizon
We the people have always been helplessly drawn to the concept of magic: the notion that you can will something to happen by wiggling your nose, speaking special...
From ACM Opinion
Why Video Games Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse
Video games are, in a way, the perfect medium through which to depict the post-apocalypse. If we assume that after the collapse of civilisation everyone will revert...
From ACM Opinion