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There's Nowhere to Hide on the Internet
From ACM Opinion

There's Nowhere to Hide on the Internet

Sometime before dawn on March 29th, not too many hours after Congress approved legislation that allows Internet-service providers to sell your browsing historyInternet...

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees
From ACM Opinion

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees

Last month, Mark Clattenburg, who is generally regarded as one of the finest referees in professional soccer, left England's Premier League for a better-paying...

Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance
From ACM Opinion

Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance

Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I'd become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands.

The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence

Earlier this month, on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver skewered media companies' desperate search for clicks.

Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers
From ACM Opinion

Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers

Ads can seem like the bane of the Internet.

All Alone in No Man's Sky
From ACM Opinion

All Alone in No Man's Sky

If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary...

Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?
From ACM Opinion

Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?

It's been a lousy couple of years for researchers who study the effects of computerized brain training.

Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
From ACM Opinion

Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality

It started as an April Fool's joke.

For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge
From ACM Opinion

For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge

Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick...

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
From ACM Opinion

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...

The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
From ACM Opinion

The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality

If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...

What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?
From ACM Opinion

What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?

The radio signal that is the lifeblood of the Global Positioning System originates from a constellation of twenty-four satellites, orbiting more than twelve thousand...

Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?
From ACM Opinion

Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?

Two years ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, I witnessed David Edwards receive what he claimed was the world's first transatlantic ...

Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
From ACM Opinion

Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.

It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a lockedSan...

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality
From ACM Opinion

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality

"I'm a skeptic of 3-D, but when I saw the paintings I knew I had to use it," Werner Herzog told Judith Thurman in 2010, after the New York première of his documentary...

Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!
From ACM Opinion

Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!

On April 1, 2009, Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a plug-in that promised to read and generate contextually relevant replies to the messages piling up in users'...

How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
From ACM Opinion

How the Internet Has Changed Bullying

This summer, American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, released a special issue on the topic of bullying and victimization...

Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future
From ACM Opinion

Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future

In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever...

A Beginner's Guide to Invisibility
From ACM Opinion

A Beginner's Guide to Invisibility

It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.

In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
From ACM Opinion

In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City

I'm not the first man to believe that he might fix London.
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