I agree wholeheartedly with the observations of Susan A. Brown and Viswanath Venkatesh ("Bringing Non-Adopters Along," Apr. 2003), particularly about the folly of a computer industry that produces larger and computationally more demanding programs full of largely useless features—that look good only in marketing brochures and that force users to upgrade their machines every three […]
The things Peter G. Neumann described as risks in his "Inside Risks" column ("Risks Relating to System Compositions," July 2006) I would generally characterize as stupidity. Unfortunately, too many software-oriented people, especially hackers and other free spirits, take an approach that is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette, inevitably causing most of their own problems. […]
As a practicing ICANN domain name dispute arbitrator, I found Michael Froomkin’s article "The Collision of Trademarks, Domain Names, and Due Process in Cyberspace" (Feb. 2001, p. 91) a bit too critical. First of all, it should be noted that about 50% of the respondents choose not to reply, which certainly helps explain the relatively […]
VL2 is a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics.
Like a discovery game that requires players to earn the right to take on new challenges, Immune Attack compels its players to learn the rules of the immune system before it reveals deeper biological insight.
Live analysis tools have made a significant difference in capturing evidence during forensic investigations. Such tools, however, are far from infallible.
Government-funded initiatives, in cooperation with private-sector partners in key technology areas, are fundamental to cybersecurity technical transformation.
The rise of the Indian start-up ecosystem can be characterized by three major changes over the last decade that offer interesting insights for the start-up ecosystem in India and across the world.
We’ve all contributed to the crisis in computer science described in Maria Klawe’s and Ben Shneiderman’s "Viewpoint" ("Crisis and Opportunity in Computer Science," Nov. 2005). Instead of pushing the CS frontier with new discovery, we’ve acquiesced, becoming a "mature" science while turning the applied-science productivity crank. For 50 years, we’ve built programs that put legions […]
We were happy to see the special section on voting systems (Oct. 2004). However, like most of the recent interest in such systems in both research centers and in the popular press, it largely ignored usability. This represents a serious blind spot, especially since user interface design (as in the butterfly ballot), rather than security, […]
As Peter G. Neumann discussed in his "Inside Risks" column "Optimistic Optimization" (June 2004) there is clearly a problem in the IT industry involving the failure of developers to consider the long-term implications of their decisions. But is the issue more that developers fail to identify them up front or to identify them at all? […]
I agree with Hal Berghel’s thesis ("Digital Politics 2000," Nov. 2000, p. 17) that the major presidential candidates’ Web sites did nothing to advance the state of democracy. The column raises a few questions, including: What steps are necessary to improve the state of democracy? Berghel mentions low voter turnout and the influence of monied […]
Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
