Welcome to the August 12, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Trump Campaign Confirms It Was Hacked
• Tech Aims to Identify Future Olympians
• Cisco to Lay Off Thousands in Latest Round of Tech Cuts
• California Partners with Nvidia to Bring AI Resources to Colleges
• Chipmaking Giant Learns What Works in Taiwan Doesn't in Arizona
• Startups Launch Life-Saving Tech for the Opioid Crisis
• Entangled Photons Maintained Under New York Streets
• GPS Spoofers 'Hack Time' on Commercial Airlines
• Bengio Joins U.K. Project to Prevent AI Catastrophes
• DeepMind Develops a ‘Solidly Amateur’ Table Tennis Robot
• Struggling AI Startups Look for Bailout from Big Tech
• Computer Crash Reports Are Untapped Hacker Gold Mine

Trump Campaign Confirms It Was Hacked

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that some of its internal emails had been hacked. The admission came after Politico started receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation, including a research dossier the campaign had done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the U.S.,” citing a Microsoft report on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.”
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Tech Aims to Identify Future Olympians

AI-based talent spotting technology set up near the Olympic Stadium in Paris aimed to find the next generation of athletic stars. Data gathered from five tests, including running, jumping, and grip strength, was analyzed to assess a person's power, explosiveness, endurance, reaction time, strength, and agility. The results are compared with data from professional and Olympic athletes. “We’re using computer vision and historical data, so the average person can compare themselves to elite athletes and see what sport they are most physically aligned to,” says Sarah Vickers, head of Intel’s Olympic and Paralympic Program.
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Cisco to Lay Off Thousands in Latest Round of Tech Cuts

Networking equipment maker Cisco will cut thousands of jobs in a second round of layoffs this year, say insiders. The number of people affected could be similar to or slightly higher than the 4,000 employees Cisco laid off in February, the sources said. The layoffs are the latest in the tech industry, which has been cutting costs this year to offset big investments in AI. Over 126,000 people have been laid off across 393 tech companies since the start of the year, according to data from tracking website Layoffs.fyi.
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California Partners with Nvidia to Bring AI Resources to Colleges

California and tech giant Nvidia are partnering to help train the state’s students, college faculty, developers, and data scientists in AI. The initiative aims to add new curriculum and certifications, hardware and software, and AI labs and workshops, and is particularly focused on community colleges. Said Governor Gavin Newsom, “California’s world-leading companies are pioneering AI breakthroughs, and it’s essential that we create more opportunities for Californians to get the skills to utilize this technology and advance their careers."
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Chipmaking Giant Learns What Works in Taiwan Doesn't in Arizona

Four years after announcing plans to build a chip plant in Arizona, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) still has not started selling semiconductors manufactured there, with chip production now expected to commence in the first half of 2025. Much of the lag can be attributed to cultural clashes between Taiwanese managers and U.S. workers, prompting the company to provide managers with communication training. TSMC also lacks a network of skilled workers and suppliers in Arizona, and while it brought thousands of workers from Taiwan to Phoenix, executives say that strategy is not sustainable. Meanwhile, local high schools and universities are boosting efforts to train future TSMC workers.
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Startups Launch Life-Saving Tech for the Opioid Crisis

Tech startups are developing technologies to address the opioid crisis. For example, OpiAID researchers are working on a predictive algorithm that uses patients' biometric data to help clinicians customize treatment protocols for opioid use disorder. Meanwhile, Masimo's Halo device, which features a pulse oximeter and sensors, and Celero Systems' Rescue-Rx, an ingestible sensor, monitor vital signs to detect opioid-induced respiratory depression. Rescue-Rx could also be used to deliver overdose medication autonomously.
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Entangled Photons Maintained Under New York Streets

A quantum network using existing commercial fiber-optic cable surpassed previous performance metrics in enabling the distribution of polarization-based quantum entanglement while delivering high rates of preservation and fidelity. A team led by Mehdi Namazi, co-founder of New York-based start-up Qunnect, sent 20,000 entangled photons per second down a 34-kilomter-long section of a New York City fiber-optic network continuously for 15 days. The test achieved an uptime of 99.84% and a compensation fidelity of 99% for entangled photons transmitted at a rate of about 20,000 per second. With half a million photons per second, the fidelity was nearly 90%.
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GPS Spoofers 'Hack Time' on Commercial Airlines

A recent surge in GPS “spoofing” includes incidents in which time had been "hacked," according to Ken Munro, founder of cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners. During a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention on Saturday, Munro said, “We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it's actually a source of time.” He described a recent case in which an aircraft operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly sent forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally-encrypted communication systems.
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Bengio Joins U.K. Project to Prevent AI Catastrophes

ACM A. M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio has signed on to Safeguarded AI, a U.K. government-funded project with the goal of developing an AI system that can assess the safety of other AI systems deployed in critical sectors. This "gatekeeper" AI would assign risk scores and offer other quantitative guarantees regarding the real-world impacts of AI systems. Bengio, who will serve as the project's scientific director, said the use of AI to safeguard AI is "the only way, because at some point these AIs are just too complicated."
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DeepMind Develops a ‘Solidly Amateur’ Table Tennis Robot

Google’s DeepMind Robotics researchers developed a “solidly amateur human-level” robotic table tennis player. During testing, the robot beat all of the beginner-level players it faced. With intermediate players, the robot won 55% of matches. The system’s biggest shortcoming was how it reacted to fast balls, which DeepMind blames on system latency, mandatory resets between shots, and a lack of useful data.
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Struggling AI Startups Look for Bailout from Big Tech

Many of the AI startups that raised billions of dollars last year are now seeking bailouts from big tech companies. Google has agreed to hire many of Character.AI's researchers and executives and helped buy out early investors by licensing the startup's technology for about $2 billion. Amazon recently paid around $330 million to hire most of Adept AI's staff and license its technology, following a move by Microsoft to hire almost all Inflection's staff to create a new consumer AI division and license the startup's technology for about $650 million. These deals are seen as more favorable than outright acquisitions that likely would face regulatory scrutiny.
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Computer Crash Reports Are Untapped Hacker Gold Mine

During a presentation at the Black Hat security conference, Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle explained that crash reports revealed the cause of the worldwide computer outages related to a flawed software update from CrowdStrike before it was officially disclosed. Wardle said crash reports provide valuable information about coding issues and potentially exploitable software vulnerabilities, with cyber criminals and state-backed hackers combing through them for information they can use to their advantage. Wardle presented multiple vulnerabilities he discovered in crash reports on his own devices, including bugs in the analysis tool YARA and in the current version of Apple's macOS operating system.
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