Welcome to the August 9, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• World's Five Leading Chipmakers Promise U.S. Investment
• Experts Pen Support for California's AI Safety Bill
• Fugaku Supercomputer Released in the Cloud
• AI Is Coming for India's Outsourcing Industry
• Widespread YouTube Outages Reported Across Russia
• World's Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Nears Completion
• Smartphone Flaw Reveals Floor Plans
• Faulty Instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs Blow Away All Security
• GPU Cluster Research Earns SC24 Test of Time Award
• The Race to Become First Document-Free Airport
• Researchers Uncover AWS Vulnerabilities, 'Shadow Resource' Vector
• Drones Warn New Yorkers of Storm Danger

World's Five Leading Chipmakers Promise U.S. Investment

On Aug. 6, the Biden administration announced that it would give South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix up to $450 million in grants toward the construction of a new chip plant in Indiana. This means the U.S. government has received commitments from all five of the world's leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers to build chip plants in the U.S., following agreements with Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung, and Micron.
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Experts Pen Support for California's AI Safety Bill

In a letter addressed to legislative leaders in California, ACM A. M. Turing Award laureates Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, along with renowned professors Lawrence Lessig and Stuart Russell, voiced support for a bill that would require AI firms training large-scale models to perform rigorous safety tests to identify potentially dangerous capabilities and institute comprehensive safety measures to mitigate risks. The letter said the bill amounts to the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology."
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Fugaku Supercomputer Released in the Cloud

A virtual version of the Fugaku supercomputer that can be run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform will make it easier for any user to develop a private Fugaku environment. The Virtual Fugaku rolled out by Japan's RIKEN Center for Computational Science was coded to operate on Amazon's Graviton processors, which are based on the Arm architecture and use Scalable Vector Extension instructions for faster number crunching.
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AI Is Coming for India's Outsourcing Industry

India's $250-billion outsourcing industry is being forced to adapt as companies replace call centers and other low-level operations with generative AI. According to TCS' Harrick Vin, "The roles of the future will require greater levels of critical thinking, design, strategic goal setting, and creative problem-solving skills." Meanwhile, industry executives contend AI tools are giving a boost to some businesses, particularly the programming workforce.
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Widespread YouTube Outages Reported Across Russia

Users across Russia reported widespread YouTube outages Thursday, weeks after Russian authorities criticized the video streaming platform for what they called anti-government actions. Speculation YouTube could be blocked in Russia has grown since the country’s invasion of Ukraine, when Russian authorities accused the Google-owned platform of spreading “terrorist” anti-war content. Last week, Russian users began noticing a slowdown in YouTube’s download speeds after authorities demanded Google restore around 200 pro-government channels.
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World's Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Nears Completion

A robotic printer from ICON is finishing the last few of 100 3D-printed houses in a community in Georgetown, TX, which once completed will be the world's largest 3D-printed neighborhood. The single-story three- to four-bedroom homes take about three weeks to finish printing, with the foundation and metal roofs installed traditionally. They range in price from around $450,000 to close to $600,000.
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Smartphone Flaw Reveals Floor Plans

A security flaw found in smartphones can be used to create a map of the room users are in and determine what they are doing. The vulnerability, discovered by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, uses data in the GPS signal. The researchers created an AI-based system called AndroCon that interpreted the metrics provided by this data from five types of Android smartphones.
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Faulty Instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs Blow Away All Security

A serious vulnerability in Alibaba subsidiary T-Head Semiconductor's RISC-V processors, identified by researchers at Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, could allow attackers to assume complete control of a device. The GhostWrite vulnerability affecting the four T-Head C910 CPU cores in the TH1520 SoC could enable attackers to read and write physical memory and execute arbitrary code with kernel and machine-mode privileges.
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GPU Cluster Research Earns SC24 Test of Time Award

Research led by Arie Kaufman of Stony Brook University that laid the foundation for the GPU-powered supercomputing landscape of today is the recipient of this year’s SC Test of Time Award. The researchers' approach was inspired by the improved FLOPs per dollar that GPUs provided compared to traditional CPU hardware. To leverage this, the team created a cluster of 30 GPU nodes to simulate airborne contaminant dispersion in New York City’s Times Square, which achieved speeds 4.6 times faster than CPU cluster implementations of the time.
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The Race to Become First Document-Free Airport

Abu Dhabi's Zayed International Airport could become the world's first document-free airport by 2025. As part of its Smart Travel Project, the airport is installing biometric sensors at every identification checkpoint. Biometric information is collected by the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs & Port Security from anyone entering the United Arab Emirates at immigration, and the airport's system accesses this database to verify passengers at each checkpoint.
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Researchers Uncover AWS Vulnerabilities, 'Shadow Resource' Vector

During a Black Hat USA 2024 session, Aqua Security researchers detailed six critical vulnerabilities in AWS services, which have since been patched, and a new "shadow resource" attack vector. An AWS S3 bucket (shadow resource) is created automatically when customers create a CloudFormation service with the AWS Management Console for the first time in a new region. The researchers identified weaknesses in the bucket-naming process that could allow attackers to guess the name of a potential bucket prior to its creation.
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Drones Warn New Yorkers of Storm Danger

New York City's emergency management agency on Tuesday deployed five teams, each with multiple drones, to warn residents in flood-prone neighborhoods about impending heavy rains. The drones were equipped with loudspeakers to alert residents in basement apartments to evacuate if flooding occurs, in multiple languages. The drones were used alongside social media, text alerts, and an emergency messaging system that reaches thousands of city organizations serving seniors and people with disabilities, among others.
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