ACM TechNews, Friday, November 15, 2024

Welcome to the November 15, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

Legislation introduced by South Korea's ruling party is aimed at addressing risks from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's threats of high tariffs on Chinese imports, which could push Chinese chip firms to drastically reduce export prices, undercutting Korean chip firms overseas. The legislation calls for subsidies for chip manufacturers and exemptions for some employees involved in research and development from the national working hours cap of 52 per week.
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China, the world’s largest market for industrial robots, last year installed over 276,000, more than half the global total, according to the International Federation of Robotics. This increased reliance on robotics requires a human workforce with engineering skills to fix broken parts and an understanding of the software that manages the machines. However, just 52% of the migrant workers China's manufacturing industry relies on had a middle school education last year, and 14% only had primary school education.
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Researchers at Google Research created the most complete map of the ionosphere (part of the Earth's upper atmosphere) to date using data from 40 million Android phones. The phone data was used to calculate how charged particles in the ionosphere impact the time it takes for radio signals to travel between the phones and GPS satellites in orbit. Such continuous ionosphere monitoring could improve the accuracy of GPS location-based services and short-term forecasting for solar storms and other space weather events.
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, and the University of Washington developed a technique for determining which older server components can be reused without impacting operations. The reused components in their GreenSKUs servers include 4th and 5th generation RAM modules and solid state drives from previously used servers that are no longer operational. The researchers said the technique achieved a net reduction of 8% of total embodied and operational carbon emissions.
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As the number of displaced people rises globally, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) is turning to AI tools to extend its reach. IRC is working to expand its network of AI chatbots available through Signpost, a portfolio of mobile apps and social media channels that answer questions in different languages for people in dangerous situations. The chatbots currently operate in El Salvador, Kenya, Greece, and Italy and respond in 11 languages.
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A mechanical qubit designed by physicists at ETH Zürich in Switzerland couples a sapphire crystal-based mechanical resonator with a superconducting qubit equipped with a tiny antenna, deposited on a similar sapphire crystal. The researchers were able to meld the two into a single system in which the energies of the hybridized states were no longer evenly spaced, allowing for the isolation of the two lowest energy states of the melded system as the 0 and 1 states of a qubit.
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Vietnam is ordering foreign social media platforms to verify the accounts of users and provide their identities to authorities on demand. Foreign social media platforms with an average of 100,000 or more visits a month must abide by the new rules, according to a new decree. Only verified users are to be allowed to share content, comments, and live-stream on social media.
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University of Pennsylvania researchers developed an algorithm that can jailbreak robots controlled by a large language model (LLM). The RoboPAIR algorithm uses an attacker LLM to provide prompts to a target LLM, adjusting the commands until they bypass the safety filters. It also employs a "judge" LLM to ensure the attacker LLM produces prompts that take into account the target LLM's physical limitations, such as certain obstacles in the environment.
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The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported a 37-point drop in the average scores of U.S. eighth-graders in computer and information literacy, and computational thinking, on the International Computer and Information Literacy Study from 2018 to 2023. The U.S. average score in 2023 was 482 for computer and information literacy, on par with the international average of 476, while the U.S. average score was 461 for computational thinking, lagging the international average of 483.
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California startup Atomic Canyon has forged a deal with utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to install its Neutron Enterprise software at Diablo Canyon, the state's only remaining nuclear power plant. The facility has around 9,000 procedures in place and 9 million documents stored in its system. The AI software is intended to help PG&E comply with requirements to maintain its federal license for up to 20 more years.
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A robotic system developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers can build objects of nearly any shape using reusable building blocks (voxels). The system transcribes the user's spoken request into text and uses AI to convert the text into a 3D model. The model is then transformed into a system of voxel coordinates by a computer-aided design program, which a robotic arm can assemble into furniture-scale objects.
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A report from U.K. software company Egress revealed a 28% increase in phishing emails in the second quarter of 2024 compared with the first quarter. The sophistication of these emails has increased as well, with a 52.2% jump in phishing attacks successfully bypassing secure email gateway detection. AI tools are being leveraged to increase the scale of the attacks.
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Password manager NordPass revealed "123456" as the most popular password for the second straight year. Its annual list of the world's most common passwords is based on a 2.5TB database of publicly available sources, some from the dark web and many able to be cracked within milliseconds. Rounding out the top 10 were 123456789, 12345678, password, qwerty123, qwerty1, 111111, 12345, secret, and 123123.
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