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Welcome to the July 29, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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 Government, private-sector, and Olympic cybersecurity specialists have collaborated for months to prevent cyberattacks during the Summer Games. ANSSI, the French government's cybersecurity agency, worked with 500 companies, organizations, and facilities that it identified as critical to the Summer Games to perform cybersecurity audits of their systems.
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Bloomberg; Jamie Tarabay; Benoit Berthelot (July 25, 2024)
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Strong, flexible, gel-like tubes created by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Edinburgh using 3D-printing technology could help in treating heart disease. The artificial blood vessels can be made in thicknesses from one to 40 mm in diameter, and their flexibility means they could be integrated into the human body, according to the researchers.
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SciTechDaily (July 27, 2024)
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 An AI system deployed by the Japanese supermarket chain AEON scores employees' service attitude based on more than 450 elements, including facial expressions, voice volume, and tone of greetings. The Mr. Smile system from InstaVR features game elements to encourage staff to challenge their scores by improving their service attitude. AEON said the system is intended to "standardize staff members' smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum."
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South China Morning Post; Fran Lu (July 22, 2024)
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 With one question, an executive at Ferrari stopped an effort to use deepfake technology to scam the company. CEO Benedetto Vigna (pictured) was impersonated on a call by deepfake software that, using a convincing imitation of Vigna's southern Italian accent, said he needed to discuss something confidential that required an unspecified currency-hedge transaction to be carried out. The executive started to have suspicions and asked, for identification purposes, the title of the book Vigna had recently recommended to him. With that, the call ended.
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Bloomberg; Daniele Lepido (July 26, 2024)
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the start of a new plan to put a gun-detecting scanner at subway stations and warned that those who refused to be scanned would not be allowed to ride the trains. The maker of the scanner, Massachusetts startup Evolv Technology, says its devices are programmed with the “signatures” of certain items, allowing them to detect weapons, but the company has been sued by users questioning the constitutionality of its products.
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The New York Times; Emma G. Fitzsimmons (July 26, 2024)
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About 40 contestants are vying for a $2-million prize in a contest sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to come up with an autonomous program capable of scanning lines of open-source code, identifying security flaws, and repairing them. The AIxCC challenge aims to harness AI to counter a lack of skilled engineers to catch poorly maintained open-source software.
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The Washington Post; Joseph Menn (July 27, 2024)
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Former Google engineer Tim Libert has launched webXray, a search engine that lets users identify which websites are tracking them and where the data goes. Users can input a search term to identify all the websites connected to that term that are tracking the data and search queries connected to their IP address and giving that information to Google, advertisers, and third-party data brokers. Libert said his goal is "to give privacy enforcers equal technology as privacy violators."
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Wired; Brian Merchant (July 24, 2024)
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Malaysian regulators are calling on social media platforms to increase monitoring as part of an effort to crack down on scams, cyberbullying, child pornography, and other cybercrimes. The Malaysian government referred 51,638 cases involving harmful content to social media platforms for further action during the first quarter of 2024, up from 42,904 cases in all of 2023. Said Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil, "There are platforms that are more willing to cooperate with the government and there are those whose cooperation isn't satisfactory."
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Reuters; Rozanna Latiff; Danial Azhar (July 24, 2024)
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An AI model developed by Google researchers performs as well as current physics models in forecasting weather and climate patterns but uses less computing power. The NeuralGCM model uses a single tensor processing unit (TPU) to process 70,000 days of simulation in 24 hours; a competing X-SHiELD model needs a supercomputer equipped with thousands of TPUs to process 19 days of simulation.
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New Scientist; Matthew Sparkes (July 22, 2024)
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The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday that Rim Jong Hyok (pictured) was indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to breach U.S. hospital computer systems and extort them for ransom. Rim is an alleged member of a hacking group working for North Korea's military intelligence agency. U.S., South Korean, and British government security agencies on Thursday released information on North Korean hackers’ tactics and warned the hackers were targeting classified and other sensitive information in the nuclear, aerospace, and other sectors to advance their country's military and nuclear programs.
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CNN; Sean Lyngaas (July 25, 2024)
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A draft law proposed by Russia's State Duma Defense Committee would classify the use of electronic devices intended for "household purposes" while in the combat zone in Ukraine as a gross disciplinary offense. These are devices equipped with cameras, audio, and geolocation functions, like smartphones. A recent report by cybersecurity software firm Enea found mobile phones could be tracked easily on the battlefield in numerous ways.
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Reuters; Lidia Kelly (July 23, 2024)
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