Welcome to the June 3, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Battle-Damage Detector Can Help Aid Groups
• AI Tools Readily Create Election Lies from Voices of Political Leaders
• Drones Offer New Perspective on Vulnerable Coral Reefs
• Hundreds of Thousands of U.S. Internet Routers Destroyed in Newly Discovered 2023 Hack
• FCC Ends Affordable Internet Program
• U.S. Slows AI Chip Exports to Middle East by Nvidia, AMD
• Robots Serve Customers at NAVER 1784's Starbucks
• Healthcare Sector Maps Cyber Risk Posed by 'Single Points of Failure'
• 1-Bit LLMs Could Solve AI's Energy Demands
• Spain's Data Watchdog Blocks EU Election Tools from Meta
• Russia Develops Its First Chipmaking Tool—Outdated by 30 Years

Battle-Damage Detector Can Help Aid Groups

An algorithm can detect differences between intact and damaged buildings in battle zones by analyzing radar signals from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites. Ollie Ballinger at the U.K.'s University College London used a statistical test to compare the radar return signals for each building in a United Nations dataset of more than 633,000 buildings in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq and to record battle damage based on changes. Compared with images labelled by humans, the method was up to 88% accurate in detecting damaged buildings.
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AI Tools Readily Create Election Lies from Voices of Political Leaders

Testing of six of the most popular AI voice-cloning tools by researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a D.C.-based digital civil rights group, found the tools could generate convincing voice clones of leading political figures. In 240 tests, the tools generated convincing voice clones in 193 cases, or 80% of the time, the group found. Some of the tools have rules or tech barriers in place to stop election disinformation from being generated, although the researchers found many of those obstacles were easy to avoid.
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Drones Offer New Perspective on Vulnerable Coral Reefs

University of Western Australia and Australian Institute of Marine Science researchers demonstrated that drones could be a useful tool in monitoring difficult-to-access intertidal coral reefs. The researchers used drone technology and innovative analytical techniques to map the Rowley Shoals intertidal coral reefs off the Kimberley coast. The comparison of machine learning and AI approaches for analyzing images of 3D reef structure captured by drones revealed the simplest methods estimated coral cover more accurately.
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Hundreds of Thousands of U.S. Internet Routers Destroyed in Newly Discovered 2023 Hack

Security researchers at Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs identified a cyberattack on an unnamed Midwest U.S. telecommunications company that disabled more than 600,000 Internet routers. The attack, which occurred in October but was not disclosed then, was perpetrated by an unidentified hacking group. It involved a malicious firmware update sent to the company's customers that disabled their Internet routers by deleting elements of the routers' operational code.
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FCC Ends Affordable Internet Program

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially ended the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which helped tens of millions of low-income households afford Internet service, due to a lack of funding. The 2.5-year-old program provided eligible low-income Americans with a monthly credit off their Internet bills. On Friday, President Biden repeated calls for Congress to pass legislation extending the ACP and announced a series of voluntary commitments by Internet providers offering their own proprietary low-income Internet plans.
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U.S. Slows AI Chip Exports to Middle East by Nvidia, AMD

The U.S. has slowed the issuance of licenses to Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and other chipmakers for large-scale AI accelerator shipments to the Middle East as a national security review of the region's AI development is performed. Part of the concern is that Chinese companies, largely cut off from cutting-edge U.S. technology themselves, could access those chips through datacenters in the Middle East.
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Robots Serve Customers at NAVER 1784's Starbucks

A Starbucks in the Naver 1784 tower in Seongnam, South Korea, is staffed by some 100 robots that serve customers. The Rookie autonomous service robots deliver packages, coffee, and lunch boxes throughout the 36-story building. The robots run on Naver's AI, Robot, and Cloud system, which enables precise indoor navigation, planning and processing for robot movement and tasks, and real-time management of online and offline environments.
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Healthcare Sector Maps Cyber Risk Posed by 'Single Points of Failure'

In response to a cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group's Change Healthcare unit, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working with experts to map the cybersecurity risks associated with a single point of failure. In the case of UnitedHealth, the risk was having a single technology supplier in charge of payment processing. Creating such a risk map would allow the government and healthcare companies to address cyber weaknesses and formulate plans for emergencies and outages.
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1-Bit LLMs Could Solve AI's Energy Demands

Researchers at Switzerland's ETH Zurich, China's Beihang University, and the University of Hong Kong used post-training quantization to create a 1-bit large language model (LLM), which could help reduce the energy demands of AI systems. The BiLLM method uses a single bit to approximate most network parameters, and two bits for those most influential to performance. This approach was used to binarize a version of Meta's LLaMa LLM with 13 billion parameters. BiLLM outperformed its closest binarization competitor while using a tenth of the memory capacity of the original model.
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Spain's Data Watchdog Blocks EU Election Tools from Meta

The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) ordered the provisional suspension of two planned Meta products set to be deployed in the upcoming EU election on its social media platforms Instagram and Facebook. "The data processing envisaged by Meta would be contrary to Spanish data protection regulation and would, at the very least, breach the data protection principles of lawfulness, data minimization, and limitation of the retention period," the AEPD said.
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Russia Develops Its First Chipmaking Tool—Outdated by 30 Years

Russian Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Vasily Shpak announced the development of the nation's first photolithography tool, which can produce chips with a 350nm process technology or thicker. Although Russia's first domestic lithographic scanner is an important milestone in its semiconductor manufacturing efforts, 350 nm is considered outdated by about 30 years.
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