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Welcome to the May 22, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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C. Gordon Bell, called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, died on Friday at the age of 89. Bell was the master architect in the effort to create smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into a network. He built the first time-sharing computer and was among a group of engineers whose designs formed the bridge between the room-size models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer. He also sponsored the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work in parallel computing.
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The New York Times; Glenn Rifkin (May 21, 2024)
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A group of 25 AI experts have published a paper stating that the world is not prepared for AI breakthroughs and that governments must do more to regulate the technology. The experts, who include ACM A. M. Turing Award laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, call for government safety regimes that trigger regulatory action when certain ability levels are reached by AI systems.
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The Guardian (U.K.); Dan Milmo (May 20, 2024)
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Computer science graduates are finding it harder to secure jobs in their discipline as tech giants shift their attention away from entry-level coders in search of AI expertise or are reducing headcount. Indeed reported a 30% decrease in job postings for software-development roles from pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education reported more than 600,000 students majoring in computer and information science last year, up 40% over five years.
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The Wall Street Journal; Katherine Bindley; Corrie Driebusch; Lindsay Ellis (May 20, 2024)
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The Netherlands' ASML Holding NV and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) can disable the world’s most sophisticated chipmaking machines in the event China invades Taiwan, sources say. The remote shut-off applies to ASML’s line of extreme ultraviolet machines (EUVs), for which TSMC is its single biggest client. EUVs harness high-frequency light waves to print the smallest microchip transistors in existence.
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Bloomberg; Diederik Baazil; Cagan Koc; Jordan Robertson (May 21, 2024)
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Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco placed implants into the motor region of the brain of a paralyzed man who understood Spanish and English to measure the neural activity associated with speech. The researchers trained the software portion of the system to recognize when the participant wanted to say specific words, which involved him imagining speaking them and the software knowing the word he intended to speak. The participant was eventually able to use the system to participate in conversations.
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Ars Technica; John Timmer (May 20, 2024)
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an enforcement alert Monday to warn the nation's water utilities about increasingly frequent and severe cyberattacks, stating that it will pursue civil or criminal penalties based on its inspections. The alert revealed around 70% of utilities inspected last year had violated standards intended to protect against hacks. EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe said China, Russia, and Iran are "actively seeking the capability to disable U.S. critical infrastructure."
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Associated Press; Michael Phillis; Matthew Daly (May 20, 2024)
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Adding programmability to the Bitcoin blockchain could fuel the next big rally in cryptocurrency. Last year's launch of Bitcoin Ordinals, which allows for the creation of nonfungible tokens by embedding data onto satoshis (the smallest denomination of bitcoin), has turned developers' attention to a software upgrade to the entire network to more easily implement programmability. The Layer 1 Foundation is working on a programmable module for the BRC-20 metaprotocol.
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Bloomberg; Olga Kharif (May 19, 2024)
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A handful of apps passively collect data from a user's phone to track their mental state. These apps run in the background while gathering data on typing, the user's movements, screen time, call and text frequency, and GPS location. Apps like BiAffect and Ellipsis Health can identify subtle changes in a user's normal routine, as well as helping doctors monitor patients between visits.
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IEEE Spectrum; Gwendolyn Rak (May 19, 2024)
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Two students at the University of California, Santa Cruz identified a security flaw in the mobile app used by CSC ServiceWorks' Internet-connected laundry machines that could allow users to do their laundry without paying. The students were able to send remote commands to the machines to run a cycle without having money on their CSC laundry accounts, and were able to make it appear as though a laundry account through the CSC Go mobile app had a balance of several million dollars.
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Tech Crunch; Zack Whittaker (May 17, 2024)
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 Microsoft has unveiled personal computers that can run AI systems. Copilot+ PC will be included in Microsoft Surface laptops and high-end laptops from other manufacturers that run on the Windows operating system. For the last two decades, the demand for the fastest laptops has diminished because software moved into cloud computing centers. Microsoft will run the AI systems directly on a personal computer to eliminate the lag time and costs related to running large AI models in datacenters.
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The New York Times; Karen Weise; Brian X. Chen (May 20, 2024)
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A team led by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Glasgow bolstered the location-finding potential of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), an emerging wireless communication technology. The researchers paired a 1.3-square-meter RIS with 4,096 elements with two universal serial radio peripherals as a receiver and a transmitter. They configured the RIS to reflect signals from the transmitter to the receiver by steering the beam in nine different positions and sending test signals from each, then tested machine learning algorithms to determine which identified the signals most accurately.
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The Engineer (May 17, 2024)
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The Pew Research Center reported that 38% of Webpages in existence in 2013 are no longer available, along with 8% of Webpages that existed last year. The analysis also found that 23% of news Webpages and 21% of government Webpages contain at least one broken link, and 54% of Wikipedia pages include at least one "References" link that is broken.
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Pew Research Center; Athena Chapekis; Samuel Bestvater; Emma Remy (May 17, 2024); et al.
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Federal agencies are turning to the private sector to ease backlogs at the U.S. National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Chainguard's Kaylin Trychon said the backlogs have led to delays in updates of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) information. Trychon noted common platform enumeration matching was halted around Feb. 15, "meaning the CVE entries do not contain any metadata around 'what software is actually affected'." Earlier this year, the NVD indicated it was considering plans for an industry consortium to help improve the database.
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CSO Online; Jr., John Mello (May 15, 2024)
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