|
Welcome to the July 10, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
|
|
|
The U.S. launched a $1.6-billion funding competition for chip packaging research and development (R&D) projects. Currently, the U.S. accounts for 3% of the world’s chip packaging capacity, with the vast majority done in Asia. The funding represents the largest opportunity thus far to come out of the $11-billion R&D fund created under the 2022 Chips and Science Act. The funding will pay for research on equipment and tools, power delivery and heat management, connector technology, electronic design automation, and chiplets.
[
» Read full article
]
Bloomberg; Mackenzie Hawkins (July 9, 2024)
|
Rust achieved its highest position ever in the monthly Tiobe Programming Index of computer language popularity, reaching the 13th spot in July. Previously, Rust has never gone higher than 17th place in the index. Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen attributed Rust’s ascent to a February U.S. report recommending Rust over C/C+ for security reasons.
[
» Read full article
]
InfoWorld; Paul Krill (July 8, 2024)
|
 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office have banned an anonymous messaging app from serving those under 18 due to “rampant cyberbullying and threats against children and teens” on the platform. The company behind the NGL app, which has been downloaded millions of times, will pay $5 million to settle what FTC Chair Lina Khan said was “reckless disregard for kids’ safety.”
[
» Read full article
]
CNN; Brian Fung (July 9, 2024)
|
A 3D printer developed by University of California Berkeley researchers achieved its first suborbital space flight on June 7 aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity. SpaceCAL floated for 140 seconds and autonomously printed a space shuttle figurine, among other things, under microgravity conditions using a Berkeley-developed technique known as Computed Axial Lithography (CAL). The process could be used to generate spacecraft parts on demand, as well as contact lenses and dental crowns for crew members.
[
» Read full article
]
Interesting Engineering; Mrigakshi Dixit (July 5, 2024)
|
Google researchers developed a self-replicating form of artificial life from random data. Their experiments involved the random mingling, combination, and execution of tens of thousands of separate pieces of computer code, with no explicit rules determining changes in the code samples and no rewards for specific behavior. The researchers observed the development of self-replicating programs that multiplied until they reached the population cap for the code samples. The researchers saw the emergence of new types of replicators that replaced the previous population.
[
» Read full article
*May Require Paid Registration
]
New Scientist; Matthew Sparkes (July 9, 2024)
|
China has granted authority to the companies Baidu, Saike Technology, Pony.ai, and Auto X to test driverless taxis without human safety operators on 205 kilometers (about 127 miles) of roads in Shanghai's Pudong district. Residents can ride the robotaxis for free during the test. Similar initiatives have been underway in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou since 2022, with fees imposed for some rides.
[
» Read full article
*May Require Paid Registration
]
The Wall Street Journal; Jiahui Huang (July 8, 2024)
|
StorageReview engineers set a new world record by calculating pi to more than 202 trillion digits using dual Intel Xeon 8592+ CPUs and 28 Solidigm P5336 61.44TB NVMe SSDs. Their previous record of 105 trillion digits was set earlier this year using a dual processor 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system with 1.5TB of DRAM and almost a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs. Solidigm's Greg Matson said, "This new Pi world record is an exciting accomplishment because this computational workload is as intense as many of the AI workloads we are seeing today."
[
» Read full article
]
TechRadar; Wayne Williams (July 6, 2024)
|
 Cybernews researchers discovered what they described as the largest-ever password compilation on a popular hacking forum. The rockyou2024.txt file, posted July 4 by a user known as "ObamaCare," contains 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext passwords. Although these passwords are from a combination of old and new data breaches, the researchers said the risk of credential stuffing attacks is higher given that the passwords were compiled into a single, searchable database.
[
» Read full article
]
PC Magazine; Emily Price (July 6, 2024)
|
American Rounds is offering markets in Oklahoma and Alabama vending machines that dispense bullets. The automated ammunition dispensers use AI, card scanning, and facial recognition technologies to verify buyers are of the legal age to purchase ammunition. American Rounds explained on its website that "each piece of software works together to verify the person using the machine matches the identification scanned."
[
» Read full article
]
Gizmodo; Lucas Ropek (July 5, 2024)
|
Computer scientists at Canada's University of Waterloo found that excessive highlighting of text may have a negative impact on reading comprehension. Their study involved 127 participants who read a short story, then completed a reading comprehension test 24 hours later. Participants who were limited to highlighting no more than 150 words in the document scored 11% higher than those allowed unlimited highlights and 19% higher than those who made no highlights on the reading comprehension test.
[
» Read full article
]
Waterloo News (Canada); Mayuri Punithan (July 5, 2024)
|
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute found that climate change could increase the risk of hurricane-induced power outages in the U.S. by 50% or more in the coming decades. The researchers created computer models of nearly 1 million hurricanes, under various climate-change scenarios from 2066 to 2100, and paired that data with a power outage model trained on data from 23 hurricanes that hit the U.S. in the last decade, to map the potential impact of future hurricanes on power supplies.
[
» Read full article
*May Require Paid Registration
]
The New York Times; Austyn Gaffney (July 5, 2024)
|
A system developed by Stanford University researchers can record live human demonstrations and provide audio and visual feedback to train robots on complex manipulation tasks. ManiWAV uses a piezoelectric microphone to capture high-quality contact audio and an algorithm to address audio domain gaps via data augmentation and an end-to-end sensorimotor learning network. The researchers used ManiWAV to train a robot to wipe a whiteboard, flip a bagel, pour from a cup, and strap wires using Velcro.
[
» Read full article
]
Interesting Engineering; Jijo Malayil (July 5, 2024)
|
Among the Basic Science Lifetime Award winners to be recognized at the second annual International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) in Beijing next week are two ACM A. M. Turing Award laureates. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao of China's Tsinghua University, who received the Turing Award for 2000, and Leslie Gabriel Valiant of Harvard University, the 2010 Turing Award recipient, each will be recognized in the category of theoretical computer and information sciences.
[
» Read full article
]
International Congress of Basic Science (China) (July 8, 2024)
|
|
