Welcome to the August 7, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Google Has an Illegal Monopoly on Search, Judge Rules
• Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era
• How 2024 Became the Zoom Election
• Python Scores Its Highest Rating in Tiobe Index
• French Museum Network Hit by Ransomware Attack
• Malaysia Sets Up Chip-Design Hub to Boost Semiconductor Industry
• CMD-IT Awards 2024 Tapia Achievement to UofM’s Chad Jenkins
• Quantum Computing Aims for Diversity
• Washington Tax Break for Datacenters Snowballed into Corporate Giveaway
• Tencent Cloud's Traffic-Tamer Halves WAN Latency
• Outages Plague Trading Platforms During Stock-Market Selloff
• Illinois Voter Data Exposed by Unsecured Databases
• China to Launch First Satellites of Constellation to Rival Starlink

Google Has an Illegal Monopoly on Search, Judge Rules

A U.S. district judge on Monday ruled Google has violated federal antitrust law with its search business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on contracts to secure a dominant position as the world’s default search provider on smartphones and Web browsers, giving it the scale to block out potential rivals, the U.S. government had alleged.
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Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era

Mainframe computers are proving their resilience with new applications in the era of AI. Banks, insurance providers, airlines, and other industries that still rely on the mainframe for high-speed data processing are now looking to apply AI to their transaction data at the hardware source, rather than in the cloud. Said IBM's Ross Mauri, “Everyone’s kind of realizing that it’s better to bring your AI to where the data is, than the data to the AI.”
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How 2024 Became the Zoom Election

Rallies conducted via Zoom are raising millions of dollars for U.S. presidential nominee Kamala Harris. In the first big pro-Harris Zoom event, held right after President Biden declared he was dropping out of the race, a group called “Win With Black Women” hosted about 44,000 attendees on its weekly Zoom call and raised over $1.5 million for the campaign. That inspired other pro-Harris groups to organize similar events, some of which have strained Zoom’s technical limits.
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Python Scores Its Highest Rating in Tiobe Index

In Tiobe’s index of programming language popularity for August 2024, Python scored its highest-ever rating (18.04%) and became the first language to reach 18% since Java did so in November 2016. Python has an eight-point lead over second-place C++, which has a rating of 10.04%. Also in the August index, the Rust language, which reached its highest spot ever last month at 13th place, dropped to No. 14.
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French Museum Network Hit by Ransomware Attack

The central data systems of dozens of museums in the Réunion des Musées Nationaux network in France were targeted by a ransomware attack. While venues in the network are hosting competitions for the Summer Olympics, officials say no events have been disrupted thus far. The attack, detected Sunday, hit data systems used by around 40 museums across the country.
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Malaysia Sets Up Chip-Design Hub to Boost Semiconductor Industry

Malaysia has set up a chip-design hub in Selangor state to support its semiconductor industry and potentially attract foreign investment. The country is seeking to improve its chip design capabilities. Malaysia earlier this year pledged at least 25 billion ringgit (US$5.6 billion) to support its semiconductor industry, which aims to double exports to 1.2 trillion ringgit (U.S.$270 billion) by 2030, making it the sixth-largest chip exporter in the world.
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CMD-IT Awards 2024 Tapia Achievement to UofM’s Chad Jenkins

Chad Jenkins, a professor of robotics at the University of Michigan (UofM), has been named the 2024 recipient of the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing from the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT). Jenkins' work focuses on the enablement of robots to assist people. Said Jenkins, “I have been incredibly fortunate to stand on the shoulders of giants across the Tapia community.”
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Quantum Computing Aims for Diversity

U.S. jobs in the field of quantum computing are expected to grow by 5% by 2032, yet only one in 54 applicants for quantum roles are women, and 80% of quantum companies do not have a woman in a senior leadership role. Several initiatives have been launched to expand diversity in the field, including Girls in Quantum, Diversity in Quantum, and Qubit by Qubit. Said Kiera Peltz of California-based Qubit by Qubit, “Quantum computing will most certainly impact society, and I think that makes it even more critical to have diverse voices and experiences shaping these technologies.”
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Washington Tax Break for Datacenters Snowballed into Corporate Giveaway

The Washington state legislature in 2010 approved tax breaks for the creation of datacenters in the state on the promise those breaks would translate into new jobs. An investigation by The Seattle Times and ProPublica found that what was once promoted as a program for a budding industry in struggling rural areas became one of the biggest corporate tax giveaways in Washington, even as data on the number of jobs actually created has been kept private under the state’s taxpayer confidentiality laws.
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Tencent Cloud's Traffic-Tamer Halves WAN Latency

Chinese Web giant Tencent says the traffic engineering (TE) system in its cloud outperforms rivals by tailoring network configurations to the needs of individual flows generated by virtual machines (VMs) or containers. The MegaTE system relies on a database of known TE configurations, and a Redis instance to store them and allow constant rapid transactions as VMs seek good data about how to direct the traffic they create. Tencent’s Congcong Miao said MegaTE reduced WAN packet latency by 51%.
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Outages Plague Trading Platforms During Stock-Market Selloff

Major retail brokerages experienced online outages amid Monday's stock sell-off, frustrating panicky customers. Charles Schwab, Vanguard Group, and Fidelity Investments each said some customers experienced difficulties logging into their accounts on Monday morning. By around midday, the brokerages said the issues had been resolved.
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Illinois Voter Data Exposed by Unsecured Databases

More than a dozen databases containing sensitive voter information from multiple counties in Illinois were openly accessible on the Internet, revealing 4.6 million records that included driver's license numbers and other personally identifiable information. Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler uncovered a total of 13 exposed databases, none of them password-protected or requiring any type of authentication to access.
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China to Launch First Satellites of Constellation to Rival Starlink

Chinese state-owned enterprise Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) is set to launch the first batch of satellites for a megaconstellation designed to rival Space X's Starlink's Internet network, which includes about 5,500 satellites. The launch is part of SSST's "Thousand Sails Constellation" plan, which aims to deploy more than 15,000 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
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