Welcome to the June 1, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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Inside the Frontier supercomputer, a network of tubes carries water to cool thousands of computer chips in the system. U.S. Retakes Top Spot in Supercomputer Race
The New York Times
Don Clark
May 30, 2022


The U.S. has retaken the lead in the global supercomputing race with the Frontier system at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. Frontier reportedly demonstrated 1 quintillion operations per second, yet rumor has it that two Chinese supercomputers have trumped its performance. Japan's Fugaku supercomputer took the top spot in June 2020, dethroning an IBM system at ORNL; Frontier uses two chips from Advanced Micro Devices to achieve twice the speed of Fugaku, according to Top500 tests. Chinese researchers awarded ACM's Gordon Bell Prize in November for simulating a quantum computing circuit on the exascale-capable Sunway system implied that China also had attained exascale speeds.

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Voting machines fill the floor for early voting at State Farm Arena on Monday, Oct. 12, 2020, in Atlanta. Voting Software Vulnerable in Some States
Associated Press
Kate Brumback
June 1, 2022


The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) warned state election officials that Dominion Voting Systems' electronic voting machines contain software flaws that could be exploited if left unpatched. Although there is no evidence the machines have been hacked to change election results, the advisory discloses nine vulnerabilities, and recommends safeguards to prevent or detect exploitation. Despite CISA executive director Brandon Wales' statement that "states' standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities, and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely," the advisory seems to suggest those efforts are inadequate. Advised mitigation strategies include application of continued and enhanced "defensive measures to reduce the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities" prior to every election. CISA also urged aggressive pre- and post-election testing on the machines, post-election audits, and having voters confirm the human-readable portion on printed ballots.

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Researchers in the University of California, Irvine Department of Computer Science set up a course to test the reactions of driverless cars to ordinary objects on the side of the road. Autonomous Vehicles Can Be Tricked into Dangerous Driving Behavior
UCI News
May 26, 2022


Researchers at the University of California’s Irvine (UCI) and Los Angeles locations discovered that objects on the side of the road can fool driverless vehicles into making sudden stops, and other hazardous driving behavior. The researchers were investigating security flaws in the planning module that manages the vehicle's decision-making processes. The team used the PlanFuzz tool to assess behavioral planning implementations of the Apollo and Autoware autonomous driving systems. The tool determined cardboard boxes and bicycles on the side of the road caused vehicles to permanently halt on empty thoroughfares and intersections; the cars also neglected to change lanes as planned when perceiving nonexistent threats. UCI's Qi Alfred Chen said autonomous cars cannot differentiate between objects left on the road accidentally or intentionally.

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AI Could Prevent Eavesdropping
Science
Matthew Hutson
May 31, 2022


Neural Voice Camouflage technology can help to prevent eavesdropping by producing custom background noise, which thwarts artificial intelligence (AI) that captures and transcribes recorded voices. The solution uses machine learning to alter audio so the AI, but not people, misinterpret sounds. Columbia University researchers trained a neural network on hours of recorded speech so it can constantly process two-second clips of audio, masking what it predicts will be spoken next. The researchers overlaid their system's output onto recorded speech as it fed into an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system; their technology boosted the ASR software's word error rate from 11.3% to 80.2%. Said Columbia University’s Mia Chiquier, “Artificial intelligence collects data about our voice, our faces, and our actions. We need a new generation of technology that respects our privacy.”

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created an integrated design pipeline that enables a user with no specialized knowledge to quickly craft a customized 3D-printable robotic hand. A Helping Hand for Robotic Manipulator Design
MIT News
Adam Zewe
May 25, 2022


Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and technology company TenCent America have established an interactive design pipeline for engineering a customized robotic hand, without requiring manual construction or specialized knowledge. Designers used the interface to assemble a robotic manipulator from modular manufacturable components. Upon the design's completion, the software generates three-dimensional printing and machine-knitting files for fabricating the device. A knitted glove integrated with tactile sensors fits over the robotic hand, allowing it to execute complex tasks. "One of the most exciting things about this pipeline is that it makes design accessible to a general audience," explained MIT's Lara Zlokapa. "Rather than spending months or years working on a design, and putting a lot of money into prototypes, you can have a working prototype in minutes."

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Ed Tech Wrongfully Tracked Schoolchildren During Pandemic: Human Rights Watch
ZDNet
Julian Bingley
May 26, 2022


A Human Rights Watch (HRW) study of 164 government-endorsed education technology products used by students during the COVID-19 pandemic found that 146 of those products endangered children's privacy by collecting and selling their contact, keystroke, and location data to ad tech companies. The study found that 199 third-party companies received such personal data, even though just 35 vendors had disclosed that data would be collected for behavioral advertising. Overall, HRW said the privacy of about 41 million students and teachers was endangered by these products. In Australia, the study found Minecraft Education Edition, Cisco's Webex, Education Perfect, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and Adobe Connect were among the programs able to track students.

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A view inside the device that traps ions. Quantum Computer Could Catch Its Own Errors
New Scientist
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
May 25, 2022


A team of Austrian and German scientists has constructed a 16-quantum bit (qubit) computer that runs error-free calculations. The researchers developed a series of quantum gates to serve as components of more sophisticated computations, which prevent errors within even the most complex. They corralled 14 calcium ions with electric fields, forming two logical qubits composed of seven entangled ions each; two additional qubits flagged erroneous computations requiring correction. "With this universal set of gates, you can approximate every calculation that you can possibly want to do with a quantum computer," said Lukas Postler of Austria’s University of Innsbruck. The researchers found each logic gate in the system that works reduces the number of errors.

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Same Symptom—Different Cause?
Technical University of Munich (Germany)
May 27, 2022


Scientists at Germany's Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a machine learning algorithm to extract subtypes of illnesses from molecular data. The Molecular Signatures using Biclustering (MoSBi) tool merges the results of existing algorithms to acquire stronger, more precise clinical subtype predictions, removing the need for time-consuming adjustment. "We have developed a Web-based tool that permits online analysis of molecular clinical data by practitioners without prior knowledge of bioinformatics," explained TUM's Josch Konstantin Pauling. Researchers can submit data to a website for automated analysis, and use the results to interpret their research. The team worked with colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, Technical University of Dresden, and Kiel University Clinic to apply MoSBI to identify two potential biomarkers for progression to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

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Robot barista Singapore's Robot Workforce Plugs Labor Gaps
Reuters
Travis Teo
May 31, 2022


Businesses in Singapore increasingly are resorting to robots to help address labor shortages and perform a range of jobs. Singaporean construction firm Gammon uses Boston Dynamics' four-legged "Spot" robot to scan mud and gravel to check on progress at construction sites. Meanwhile, Singapore's National Library Board has deployed at a public library two shelf-reading robots that can scan labels on 100,000 books, or about 30% of its collection, daily. The International Federation of Robotics estimated last year that Singapore has 605 robots installed per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing sector, just behind the 932 per 10,000 workers installed by top placeholder South Korea. Moreover, more than 30 metro stations in Singapore are set to have barista robots from Crown Digital preparing coffee for commuters.

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The trajectories of asteroids (in green) discovered by scientists using an algorithm that studies astronomical images; Earth is in the foreground. Tool Helps Spot Killer Asteroids
The New York Times
Kenneth Chang
May 31, 2022


The nonprofit B612 Foundation and University of Washington researchers discovered 104 previously unknown asteroids by applying cutting-edge computations to 412,000 digital images archived at the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. The researchers developed the Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) algorithm, which can analyze astronomical imagery not only to identify points of light that might be asteroids, but also to determine which points of light in images captured on different nights are the same asteroid. THOR builds a test orbit corresponding to the observed point of light, assumes a specific distance and velocity, then calculates the asteroid's position on subsequent and previous nights. The work adds to planetary defense measures undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other organizations worldwide.

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Popular Python, PHP Libraries Hijacked to Steal AWS Keys
BleepingComputer
Ax Sharma
May 24, 2022


A Reddit user reported a software supply chain attack breached the Python Package Index (PyPI) module "ctx" this month to steal environment variables, exfiltrating data like Amazon Web Services keys and uploading them to a server on the Heroku cloud platform. Ethical hacker Somdev Sangwan also warned of an identical attack involving altered versions of a "phpass" fork published to the PHP/Composer package repository Packagist. The ctx module is downloaded more than 20,000 times a week, while the PHPass framework has been downloaded over 2.5 million times on the Packagist library. Ctx lets developers manipulate dictionary objects, and although PyPI has removed the tainted versions, copies retrieved from the Sonatype security research team's malware archives found malware in all versions. The PyPI and PHP packages contain the same logic and Heroku endpoints, suggesting a common hijacker.

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Tech Experts Urge Washington to Resist Crypto Industry's Influence
Financial Times
Scott Chipolina
May 31, 2022


A coalition of 26 leading computer scientists and academics has submitted a letter to U.S. lawmakers urging a crackdown on cryptocurrency investments and blockchain technology. The letter calls on major Senate figures "to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments." Signatory Bruce Schneier at Harvard University said blockchain, contrary to advocates' assurances, is insecure and not decentralized. Events like the recent implosion of the TerraUSD stablecoin have rekindled worries about crypto's financial stability, while letter signatory and former Microsoft engineer Miguel de Icaza argued, "The computational power [of blockchain] is equivalent to what you could do in a centralized way with a $100 computer."

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Multi-spin Flips and a Pathway to Efficient Ising Machines
Waseda University (Japan)
May 30, 2022


Researchers at Japan's Waseda University have developed a hybrid algorithm to improve Ising machines' efficiency with multi-spin flips. The solution offers a route to faster combinatorial optimization by masking a multi-spin flip as a single-spin flip. Accompanying the algorithm is a merge process, "in which the original Hamiltonian of a difficult combinatorial problem is deformed into a new Hamiltonian, a problem that the hardware of a traditional Ising machine can easily solve," explained Waseda's Tatsuhiko Shirai. Waseda's Nozomu Togawa said when applied to common examples of challenging combinatorial optimization problems, the algorithm "reduces residual energy and reaches more optimal results in shorter time."

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