ACM TechNews, Monday, November 18, 2024

Welcome to the November 18, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

Thomas Kurtz, Co-Creator of BASIC, Dies at 96

ACM Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor who co-created the BASIC programming code, has died at 96. BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was invented by John Kemeny, chair of Dartmouth’s math department, and Kurtz, one of his faculty members, as part of their push to open up the world of computing to a wide community. “We looked at languages and we both decided that the languages Fortran, Algol, that type of language, were just too complicated,” Kurtz said in an oral-history interview with Dartmouth.
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U.S. Finalizes $6.6-Billion CHIPS Act Grant to TSMC

The U.S. finalized a CHIPS Act grant of $6.6 billion to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), with at least $1 billion to be disbursed by the end of the year. The funds will be distributed in phases as the company hits certain project milestones. TSCMC will produce 3 nanometer (nm), 2 nm, and A16 chips at three Arizona fabs.
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AI Is Already Taking Jobs

Generative AI is impacting job markets, according to researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research, and the U.K.’s Imperial College London Business School. The researchers studied more than a million job posts on a major global freelance work marketplace from July 2021 to July 2023 and found demand for automation-prone jobs had fallen 21% eight months after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
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Go Language Rises in Tiobe Popularity Index

Google's Go programming language achieved its highest ranking so far on the Tiobe index of programming language popularity for November, reaching No. 7. Tiobe's Paul Jansen said, "What makes Go unique in the top 10 is that Go programs are fast and easy to deploy while the language is easy to learn." Tiobe's top 10 for November shows Python as No. 1, followed by C++, Java, C, C#, JavaScript, Go, Fortran, Visual Basic, and SQL.
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Hardware Hacking? Study Raises Alarm on 98 Risks

Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology identified 98 vulnerabilities that allow chips to be hacked. Most involve access control, with 43 different scenarios identified that would allow unauthorized users to access sensitive data or control systems. The researchers noted modern computer chips contain millions of components and software that are physically embedded in silicon and thus difficult and expensive to patch.
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New Path to Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface

A digital holographic imaging system developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory identifies and validates brain signals as tissue deformation that occurs during neural activity. The system illuminates the tissue with a laser and records light scattered from neural tissue on a special camera. The data is processed to form a complex image of the tissue from which magnitude and phase information can be precisely recorded.
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'Sound Bubble' Headphones Tune Out Noise

Engineers at the University of Washington have developed headphones that use AI to create a "sound bubble" to filter out noise. A small computer, attached to noise-canceling headphones equipped with microphones along the headband, runs a neural network trained to analyze the distance of different sound sources, filtering out noise coming from farther away and amplifying sounds closer to the user.
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Autonomous Cars Do Doughnuts, Drift Sideways

A team at the Toyota Research Institute is using an AI model to teach driverless vehicles to drift sideways around corners at high speed, to help them recover from skids in an emergency. Using the model, the researchers enabled a Toyota GR Supra and Lexus LC 500 to drift around a course with multiple turns. The autonomous vehicles were able to enter a skid, drift sideways, and slide within 10 centimeters of targets.
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Giving Robots Superhuman Vision

A sensor developed by University of Pennsylvania researchers uses AI to transform radio waves, which can penetrate smoke and fog and see through certain materials, into detailed 3D views to help robots navigate challenging environments. PanoRadar rotates in a circle to scan the horizon, with a vertical array of antennas transmitting radio waves and listening for their reflections. It combines measurements from all angles and extracts 3D information from its environment using signal processing and machine-learning algorithms.
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Zero-Day Exploits Increasingly Sought Out by Attackers

Cyber agencies from the Five Eyes governments published a list of the 15 most exploited vulnerabilities of last year, the majority of which were zero-days, a trend that has continued this year. “More routine initial exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities represents the new normal which should concern end-user organizations and vendors alike as malicious actors seek to infiltrate networks,” said Ollie Whitehouse at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.
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NASA, Microsoft Launch 'Earth Copilot'

NASA has teamed with Microsoft on an AI chatbot tasked with answering questions about our planet. The ‘Earth Copilot’ chatbot integrates the massive amounts of data collected by NASA's monitoring technologies, including orbiting satellites, with the Azure OpenAI Service. NASA said it is looking to "democratize" access to its data through a more understandable format.
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T-Mobile Hacked in Chinese Breach of Telecom Networks

T-Mobile’s network was among the systems hacked by a Chinese cyber-espionage operation that gained entry into multiple U.S. and international telecommunications companies, say insiders. Hackers linked to a Chinese intelligence agency were able to breach T-Mobile as part of months-long campaign to spy on the cellphone communications of high-value intelligence targets.
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