Welcome to the August 19, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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Gen Z employees in a workplace Data Science Jobs a Top Pick for Gen Z
Fortune
Meghan Malas
August 17, 2022


The U.S. job review website Glassdoor reports that Generation Z workers are highly satisfied by data science occupations, which rank fourth among the top 10 jobs overall. Glassdoor's Richard Johnson said previous research found data scientists have high wages, abundant job openings, and great job satisfaction, leaving "no doubt that these factors are appealing to younger workers starting their careers." The report also noted younger employees are more satisfied working for larger, established firms that can weather economic turmoil. Since data scientists do not necessarily need to be in an office, employers also are likely to offer employees more flexibility to work remotely. Johnson said data science also appeals to Gen Z because it demands creativity, as employees must "make sense of complex data patterns and interweave it into a simplified narrative for a variety of stakeholders."

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China Breaks Record for Quantum Memory Entanglement Distance
Tom's Hardware
Francisco Pires
August 17, 2022


Researchers in China have entangled two quantum memories across a record distance, bringing a quantum Internet a step closer to realization. The entangled memories could maintain coherence and transfer a photon between two separate laboratories, because the entangled quantum bits correlate so that their states cannot be described separately. The researchers entangled one quantum memory in the first lab and excited it with a laser, releasing the excess energy as a photon when the memory reverted to its ground state. A fiber-optic cable then transmitted the photon 12.5 kilometers (7.7 miles) from an original node to the destination node, allowing the researchers to entangle a new quantum memory. The researchers said they bypassed the photon's low energy using "the quantum frequency conversion technique to shift the photon's wavelength to 1,342 nm [nanometers] instead, which improves the overall transmission efficiency significantly."

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Curiosity rover on Mars, animation Curiosity Mars Rover Gets 50% Speed Boost from Software Update
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 17, 2022


The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Curiosity Mars rover will soon traverse the red planet 50% faster via a software update scheduled for 2023. The rover only travels about 45 meters (147 feet) an hour because it mainly navigates by visual odometry, stopping at typically meter-long waypoints and using photos to calculate how far it has traveled. The update will enable Curiosity to image its surroundings while stationary, then check its prior resting position as it moves, compensating for any detected errors. The rover could then travel almost continuously at an estimated speed of 83.2 meters (272 feet) an hour. A software bug nearly thwarted the update because engineers could not replicate it in computer simulations until an improved model that more closely mimicked the vehicle emerged in 2019.

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Made-Up Words Trick AI Text-to-Image Generators
Discover
August 16, 2022


Columbia University's Raphaël Millière found that made-up words can trick text-to-image generators, raising questions about their security. Millière created nonsense words using the "macaronic prompting" technique, which involves combining parts of real words from different languages. For instance, the made-up word "falaiscoglieklippantilado," a combination of the German, Italian, French, and Spanish words for "cliff," generated images of cliffs when input into the DALL-E 2 text-to-image generator. Millière said, "The preliminary experiments suggest that hybridized nonce strings can be methodically crafted to generate images of virtually any subject as needed, and even combined together to generate more complex scenes." However, Millière noted, "In principle, macaronic prompting could provide an easy and seemingly reliable way to bypass [content] filters in order to generate harmful, offensive, illegal, or otherwise sensitive content, including violent, hateful, racist, sexist, or pornographic images, and perhaps images infringing on intellectual property or depicting real individuals."

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Venus has an abundance of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid particles. Analysis Shows How Sulfur Clouds Can Form in Venus' Atmosphere
Penn Today
August 16, 2022


An international team of researchers applied computational chemistry methods to identify a novel process for the formation of sulfur particles in Venus' atmosphere. Scientists developed computational models that factored in optical wavelengths that would break apart sulfur compounds and the rates at which this would happen, for incorporation into Venusian atmospheric models. The work highlighted a faster pathway for generating disulfur, involving a reaction between sulfur monoxide and disulfur monoxide, with interactions with chlorine compounds as an intermediate process. Said James Lyons at Arizona's Planetary Science Institute, "Sulfur chemistry is dominant in Venus' atmosphere and very likely plays a key role in the formation of the enigmatic UV [ultraviolet] absorber. More generally, this work opens the doors to using molecular techniques to disentangle the complex chemistry of Venus."

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Engineers Fabricate Chip-Free, Wireless Electronic 'Skin'
MIT News
Jennifer Chu
August 18, 2022


An international team of engineers manufactured a chipless and battery-free wearable sensor that can wirelessly transmit signals related to pulse, sweat, and ultraviolet exposure. The sensor is a flexible, semiconducting film or electronic skin, which harnesses the material's two-way piezoelectric properties for sensing and wireless communication. The researchers coupled pure single-crystalline gallium nitride samples to a conducting layer of gold to boost any incoming or outgoing electrical signal. The sensor vibrates in response to a person's heartbeat and the salt in their perspiration, and the vibrations produce an electrical signal that can be read by a nearby receiver. "If there is any change in the pulse, or chemicals in sweat, or even ultraviolet exposure to skin, all of this activity can change the pattern of surface acoustic waves on the gallium nitride film," said former Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Yeongin Kim.

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2022 DEF CON attendee examines electrical voting machine at the Voting Village 'Hackers Against Conspiracies': Cyber Sleuths Take Aim at Election Disinformation
Politico
Maggie Miller
August 15, 2022


The annual DEF CON hacking conference's "Voting Machine Village," has been a feature since 2017, with attendees attempting to break into registration databases, ballot-casting machines, and other voting equipment to identify vulnerabilities. However, in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the resulting false claims of election fraud, the focus of this year's event was how to detect vulnerabilities without fueling election misinformation. Said Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Machine Village, "All the security improvements [have been] hampered by all the false claims, conspiracies—and fighting those." Hursti noted that clips from DEF CON were used in the media after the election to cast doubt on election security. This year's Voting Village featured officials from Maricopa County, AZ, among others, who discussed ongoing, though debunked, conspiracy theories. Hursti explained, "What we try to do is to make certain that the right message gets out."

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Apple Warns of Security Flaw for iPhones, iPads, Macs
Associated Press
August 18, 2022


Apple issued two security reports about a major flaw that hackers could potentially exploit to hijack iPhones, iPads, and Macs by gaining "full admin access." Rachel Tobac at computer security service SocialProof Security said this would allow intruders to masquerade as device owners and run any software in their name. Security experts have recommended that users update affected devices, while researcher Will Strafach said he had seen no technical analysis of the vulnerabilities that Apple has just patched. The company cited an anonymous researcher as the flaws' discoverer, without disclosing how or where they were found. Apple has previously conceded the existence of similarly serious flaws, and expressed awareness that such vulnerabilities had been exploited on perhaps a dozen occasions by Strafach's estimates.

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Woman’s hands holding a mobile phone Just 1 of 25 Apps That Track Reproductive Health Protect Users' Data: Report
The Hill
Shirin Ali
August 17, 2022


A study of 25 reproductive health apps and wearable devices by researchers at the Mozilla Foundation found that most have weak privacy protections. The researchers found that these apps generally collect personal information, including phone numbers, emails, home addresses, dates of menstrual cycles, sexual activity, doctors' appointments, and pregnancy symptoms. Of the apps analyzed, 18 were given a "Privacy Not Included" warning label due to vague privacy policies and potential security concerns. Additionally, the study found that most of the apps had vague guidelines regarding data-sharing with law enforcement. Mozilla's Ashley Boyd warned users that many reproductive health apps are "riddled with loopholes and they fail to properly secure intimate data." Only the Euki app was found not to collect any personal information about users, and any information input by users is stored locally on the user's device.

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Uncovering Nature's Patterns at the Atomic Scale in Living Color
Argonne National Laboratory
Joseph E. Harmon
August 15, 2022


Researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) have invented a technique for producing color-coded graphs of large datasets from X-ray diffraction. The tool uses computational data sorting to identify clusters related to physical properties, which should ramp up research on atomic-level structural changes caused by varying temperature. The X-ray Temperature Clustering method uses unsupervised machine learning processes developed at Cornell University. Analysis of two crystalline materials showed they become superconducting at temperatures near absolute zero, and manifest other unusual properties at higher temperatures caused by structural changes. "What might have taken us months in the past, now takes about a quarter hour, with much more fine-grained results," said ANL's Raymond Osborn.

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bug’s eyes Bioengineers Develop Bionic 3D Cameras with Bug Eyes, Bat Sonar
Interesting Engineering
Loukia Papadopoulos
August 13, 2022


University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) bioengineers say they have developed a bionic three-dimensional (3D) camera that can mimic bats' echolocation and flies' compound eyes. UCLA's Liang Gao said, "We developed a novel computational imaging framework, which for the first time enables the acquisition of a wide and deep panoramic view with simple optics and a small array of sensors." Research indicates the Compact Light-field Photography (CLIP) framework can be used to perceive hidden objects. The device combines CLIP with seven light detection and ranging (LiDAR) cameras to capture lower-resolution images of the scene, process what the individual cameras see, and reassemble the integrated scene in high-resolution 3D imaging.

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Janet Jackson performing at 2009 MTV Video Music Awards A Janet Jackson Song Could Crash Windows XP Laptops
PC Magazine
Michael Kan
August 17, 2022


Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen said a sound frequency in Janet Jackson's song "Rhythm Nation" could crash a model 5400rpm laptop hard drive used in certain Windows XP notebooks. A laptop maker alerted Microsoft's Windows team to the problem, which seemed to occur when the song's music video played on the laptops. However, the video also would crash Windows laptops produced by the manufacturer's competitors, and Chen blogged, "Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn't playing the video!" Microsoft determined the song had a frequency that matched the laptop hard drive's natural resonant frequency, which caused its moving disks to over-vibrate and induce a crash. Chen said the laptop manufacturer put a custom filter in the device's audio system that could eliminate the resonant frequency during audio playback.

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Resilient Robots
Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Leah Burrows
August 12, 2022


Computer scientists at Harvard University and Italy's University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMO) have developed a control mechanism for robotic teams that can automatically calculate which types of environments a team can navigate without breaking communication. UNIMO's Lorenzo Sabattini said communications can break down when presented with single points of failure. "Our work aims at removing this issue by determining when the system can maintain resiliency and achieve its goal, when resiliency and the goal are incompatible, and how the system can regain resiliency as quickly as possible after having to temporarily break it, thus paving the way towards reliable real-world application of multi-robot systems," he explained. The researchers showed that the control mechanism can compute the team's connectivity as it moves, and makes adjustments to keep it within the threshold.

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