ACM TechNews, Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Welcome to the August 14, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released three encryption algorithms designed to withstand cyberattacks from a quantum computer. FIPS 203 is derived from post-quantum cryptographic algorithm Kyber. FIPS 204 is based on Dilithium and is designed to protect digital signatures. FIPS 205 is based on the security of SHA-2 or SHA-3 and offers robust security with very small public keys, generating signatures of about seven kilobytes. Said NIST's Laurie E. Locascio. “Quantum computing technology could become a force for solving many of society’s most intractable problems, and the new standards represent NIST’s commitment to ensuring it will not simultaneously disrupt our security."
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Classes are being offered across the U.S. to help seniors better understand the benefits and risks of AI. The classes often detail the ways AI can make certain tasks easier while also warning them about deepfakes, misinformation, and AI-perpetrated scams. Said University at Buffalo's Siwei Lyu, "We need this kind of education for seniors, but the approach we take has to be very balanced and well-designed."
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At the DEF CON conference on Aug. 9, hackers attempted to infiltrate the new online Secure Internet Voting (SIV) platform to identify vulnerabilities. The SIV platform is being tested in small pilot programs across the U.S. and was used during a 2023 Republican primary race. Any hackers who identify flaws in the SIV platform will share $10,000 in prize money from SIV.
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In June, U.S. chipmaker ON Semiconductor Corp. announced that it would develop a $2 billion manufacturing hub in the Czech town of Roznov pod Radhostem, marking the biggest foreign investment in the Czech Republic in 30 years. The plans involve expanding a site already used to make chips for electric vehicles and the renewable energy industry. The Roznov facility currently manufactures 10 million chips per day. The new investment will boost the Czech economy as the plant's focus shifts to higher capacity silicon-carbide semiconductors.
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TikTok's algorithm promotes content that is favorable to the Chinese government in an effort to shift the views of users, according to a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), in association with Rutgers University. The study found the algorithm promotes pro-Chinese Communist Party content and suppresses videos critical of the government. Much of the pro-CCP content is linked to state government-supported accounts, the study also found, including state-backed influencers or official media.
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U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Robert P. Casey, Jr., are seeking information from Kroger on its uses of electronic shelf labels. In a letter to Kroger Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen, the senators accused the company of using the technology to "calibrate price increases to extract maximum profits" and "gather and exploit sensitive consumer data." The technology could allow grocery stores to boost prices when demand increases for a specific product, they said. They also expressed concerns about the use of cameras and facial recognition technology to determine shoppers' age, gender, and other information to generate personalized offers and advertisements.
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The advent of generative AI has made the cooling of datacenters a hot topic. Datacenters are expected to consume 8% of total U.S. power demand by 2030, compared with about 3% now. For its coming GB200 server racks, Nvidia will use liquid circulating in tubes rather than air to cool the hardware. The company is also working on additional cooling technologies, including dunking entire drawer-sized computers in a nonconductive liquid that absorbs and dissipates heat.
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Researchers are leveraging AI to decipher more than 3,000-year-old clay tablets containing fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient writings. Over 500,000 clay tablets, and many more tablet fragments, are housed in museums and universities worldwide, many having yet to be read or published due to a lack of cuneiform experts. Researchers led by Enrique Jiménez of Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich have identified new segments of the poem and hundreds of missing words and lines from other works using a machine learning model.
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Engineering students at Switzerland's ETH Zurich have developed a robotic fish with a silicone tail that allows it to mingle with the ecosystem in Lake Zurich. Named Eve, the robotic fish is powered by hidden pumps and features a camera to film underwater. Eve navigates around obstacles using sonar in conjunction with an algorithm. Additionally, it is equipped with a filter to collect DNA from the environment, which can be used to identify the species living in a body of water.
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Organizers of the Paris Olympic Games took steps to make them more accessible for people with visual impairments. The Vision Pad, for example, used a moving magnetic ball so that users could track the movement of the ball in play during basketball, soccer, rugby, and four Paralympics sports. The Low-Vision Helmet let users zoom in on a race, game, or athlete and switch between live-action and televised coverage. Meanwhile, the Olympics app offered an audio description broadcast.
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Hacker Samy Kamkar (pictured) demonstrated a light-based keystroke eavesdropping technique at the Defcon security conference. The technique involves pointing an invisible laser through a window at a laptop and recording the computer's vibrations to reconstruct the characters being typed. Kamkar said his open-source surveillance system features the first laser microphone "modulated in the radio frequency domain," with the ability to pick up anything spoken or typed in the targeted room. Using the 400-kilohertz frequency, the laser microphone can convert sound into light, then into radio, and then back into sound.
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An overactuated aerial robot developed by researchers at Tecnalia's Basque Research and Technology Alliance in Spain can control its position and orientation autonomously. Its central body is connected to four quadrotors via passive universal joints, enabling it to move independently in six directions and perform intricate movements. The robot also can take off and land on inclined surfaces and features advanced thrust-vectoring capabilities. Among other things, its specialized control algorithm transforms the main body's desired positions and orientations into angular speed commands for its 16 propellers.
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Security researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn found vulnerabilities in Ecovacs' vacuum and lawnmower robots that could allow hackers to access the devices' cameras and microphones. The researchers found that anyone with a phone who is within 450 feet of an Ecovacs robot can hack the device via Bluetooth, then remotely access the microphones and cameras to spy on users. They also found that data stored on the robots, as well as the authentication token, stays on Ecovacs' cloud servers even after a user deletes their account, and the PIN number used to protect the lawnmower robots is stored in plain text inside the device.
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