Welcome to the October 11, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

Please note: In observance of the U.S. Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day holiday, TechNews will not be published on Monday, Oct. 14. Publication will resume on Wednesday, Oct. 16.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Google DeepMind Boss Awarded Nobel for Proteins Breakthrough
• One of the Biggest AI Boomtowns Is Rising in Malaysia
• Some of the Web's Sketchiest Sites Share an Address in Iceland
• Hacker Defaces Internet Archive, Steals Data on 31 Million Users
• Taiwan's AI Goals Will Need More Tech Talent
• In Brooklyn, Robots Reshape the Grocery Delivery Business
• Holographic 3D Printing
• Europe's Largest Sampling-Based Photonic Quantum Computer Is Operational
• GoldenJackal Targets Embassies, Air-Gapped Systems
• Homemade Drone Software Finds People When Search and Rescue Teams Can't
• Police Seldom Disclose Use of Facial Recognition, Despite False Arrests
• Telegram App Hosts 'Underground Markets' for Crime Gangs, U.N. Says
• 80% of U.S. Internet Exchanges Are Now Datacenter, Carrier Neutral

Google DeepMind Boss Awarded Nobel for Proteins Breakthrough

British computer science professor Demis Hassabis, founder of the AI firm that became Google DeepMind, is among the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Hassabis and DeepMind Technologies’ John Jumper are being recognized their development of an AI tool, AlphaFold2, to predict the structures of nearly all known proteins. They share the Nobel Prize with University of Washington's David Baker, who was recognized for designing a new protein using amino acids.
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One of the Biggest AI Boomtowns Is Rising in Malaysia

The Malaysian state of Johor, known for its palm-oil plantations, is home to some of the largest AI construction projects in the world. Regional bank Maybank reported that Johor will see $3.8 billion in total datacenter investments this year. Johor is attractive to datacenter developers due to its abundant land, water, and power, as well as its proximity to Singapore, which has one of the world’s densest intersections of undersea Internet cables.
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Some of the Web's Sketchiest Sites Share an Address in Iceland

The proxy service Withheld for Privacy has shielded tens of thousands of suspicious websites (including online forums used by a U.S.-based white supremacist group, phishing sites, and sites tied to Russian influence campaigns) behind its Reykjavik, Iceland, address. Proxy services have proliferated in Iceland to take advantage of the country's strict privacy laws, which officials say are meant to protect ordinary users from authoritarian governments.
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Hacker Defaces Internet Archive, Steals Data on 31 Million Users

The Internet Archive's main site and its Wayback Machine went offline earlier in the week following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The breach was confirmed by Troy Hunt of HIBP, with whom the hacker shared a 6.4GB database of stolen information on 31 million Internet Archive user accounts, including email addresses, user names and hashed passwords.
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Taiwan's AI Goals Will Need More Tech Talent

Taiwan's government is hoping the island-nation can become a hub for innovation in advanced AI. However, Taiwan is in dire need of more skilled workers given its small, aging population and low birth rate. Taiwan's National Development Council plans to introduce "Global Elite" cards to attract top-tier foreign professionals to work for local companies offering yearly salaries of more than NT$6 million (about US$188,000).
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In Brooklyn, Robots Reshape the Grocery Delivery Business

Save A Lot's 4,000-sq.-ft. automated micro-fulfillment center in Brooklyn, NY, is intended to lower grocery prices and order completion times. It features robotic arms that grab items from plastic bins on shelves and transfer them to robots on the ground, which move them to workers who pack them before they are handed over to Uber drivers for delivery. The system, from Israeli firm Fabric, takes six to eight minutes to pack orders of 50 items.
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Holographic 3D Printing

A 3D-printing method developed by researchers at Canada's Concordia University leverages acoustic holograms to increase printing speed, consume less energy, and enable the production of more complex objects. The holographic direct sound printing process is based on a technique that uses sonochemical reactions in microscopic cavitations regions to harden resin into complicated patterns. The researchers sped up the polymerization process by embedding the technique in acoustic holograms containing cross-sectional images of the desired design.
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Europe's Largest Sampling-Based Photonic Quantum Computer Is Operational

Researchers at Germany's Paderborn University have completed the Paderborn Quantum Sampler (PaQS), Europe's biggest sampling-based photonic computer. To avoid the optical losses that typically plague photonic quantum computers, the researchers built the largest Gaussian boson sampling machine with PaQS to identify where photons escape the quantum network and identify ways to solve the problem. Their work incorporated the use of a programmable interferometer.
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GoldenJackal Targets Embassies, Air-Gapped Systems

Cybersecurity firm ESET said threat actor GoldenJackal has been connected to cyberattacks at a South Asian embassy in Belarus and an EU government organization, using two disparate bespoke toolsets to infiltrate air-gapped systems to steal confidential data. The intrusions involved the use of JackalWorm, a worm that can infect connected USB drives and deliver the JackalControl trojan. Malware tools written primarily in Go were deployed in the attack on the EU government organization.
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Homemade Drone Software Finds People When Search and Rescue Teams Can't

Piloting and image analysis software developed by Dan Roach and David Blinks, members of the U.K.'s Mountain Rescue (MR), located the body of a hiker in the Scottish Highlands in its first hour of use, more than six weeks after he went missing. The drone software automatically plots preprogrammed flight paths using the LiDAR data underpinning the U.K.'s Ordnance Survey maps.
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Police Seldom Disclose Use of Facial Recognition, Despite False Arrests

The Washington Post found that hundreds of U.S. residents have been arrested after facial recognition software linked them to a crime, with police departments in 15 states using the technology in more than 1,000 criminal investigations during the past four years. In many cases, the defendants were never notified facial recognition technology played a role in their arrest. At least seven Americans, six of them Black, have been wrongfully arrested after being misidentified by facial recognition software.
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Telegram App Hosts 'Underground Markets' for Crime Gangs, U.N. Says

A report by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that Southeast Asian criminal networks are using the Telegram messaging app to conduct illicit activities on a massive scale. This includes the open trading of credit card details, passwords, browser histories, and other hacked data, as well as the sale of deepfake software and other tools for cybercrime. The UNODC report also found Telegram is used by unlicensed cryptocurrency exchanges to provide money laundering services.
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80% of U.S. Internet Exchanges Are Now Datacenter, Carrier Neutral

A study by Dstream Group for the global Internet Exchange (IX) operator DE-CIX found that 80% of U.S. IXs are datacenter and carrier neutral, including 35 of the 50 biggest U.S. IXs. This comes as IX deployment across the U.S. jumped 600% in the last 10 years. The study indicated that neutral platforms have an average of four times more connected datacenters from different operators compared to other IX models.
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