Welcome to the October 25, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Georgia Election Official Says State Fended Off Cyberattack
• U.S. Urges Agencies to ‘Harness’ AI for National Security
• DNA Modified to Store Data Faster
• China Extends "Great Firewall" into Space
• Russia Amplified Hurricane Disinformation
• Chile Team Builds Region's First 3D-Printed 'Seed Home'
• Samsung Galaxy S24 Smartphone Hacked During $1-Million Zero Day Spree
• Lost Silk Road Cities Discovered with Groundbreaking Tech
• AI Decodes Oinks and Grunts to Keep Pigs Happy
• Robots Test Evolution in New Experimental Field
• Can AI Be Blamed for a Teen's Suicide?
• Computer Finds Largest Known Prime
• Wearable Cameras Detect, Prevent Medication Errors in Operating Rooms

Georgia Election Official Says State Fended Off Cyberattack

The office of Georgia's Secretary of State said it warded off a cyberattack that sought to knock its absentee ballot website offline. The office's Gabe Sterling said it had "the hallmarks of a foreign power or a foreign entity [acting] at the behest of a foreign power." Sterling explained that the website was hit with bogus traffic from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from several countries.
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U.S. Urges Agencies to ‘Harness’ AI for National Security

The first-ever national security memorandum on AI, issued by President Biden on Thursday, directs the federal government to take action to improve the security and diversity of chip supply chains and to provide AI developers with cybersecurity and counterintelligence to keep their inventions secure. An administration official added that “the U.S. should harness the most advanced AI systems with appropriate safeguards to achieve national security objectives."
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DNA Modified to Store Data Faster

Researchers at China's Peking University developed a method of writing 350 bits onto a DNA sample at the same time. The researchers transformed long DNA strands into binary code using prefabricated DNA templates as a base and adding shorter DNA strands. After adding a methyl group via chemical reaction, the methylated beads served as the 1s of binary code and the unmethylated beads as the 0s.
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China Extends "Great Firewall" into Space

The Cyberspace Administration of China has issued draft rules that require its satellite Internet equipment and service providers to ensure all data is routed through China-based ground facilities so users' requests pass through "the Great Firewall." The rules are intended to prevent satellite Internet services from letting users connect via satellite to ground stations outside Chinese government control.
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Russia Amplified Hurricane Disinformation

Russia helped amplify and spread false and misleading online claims about recent hurricanes in the U.S. and the federal government’s response, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a U.K.-based organization that tracks disinformation and online extremism. The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, attempted to exploit concerns about the recovery effort by portraying political leaders as incompetent and corrupt.
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Chile Team Builds Region's First 3D-Printed 'Seed Home'

Researchers at Chile's University of Biobío have constructed what they say is Latin America's first 3D-printed prototype house, a 30-square-meter concrete building in the Torreones neighborhood of Concepción. The concrete layers of the "seed house" were poured in 29 hours in the university lab, and the seven-wall structure was assembled on-site in two days.
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Samsung Galaxy S24 Smartphone Hacked During $1-Million Zero Day Spree

During the Pwn2Own hacking competition held in Ireland this week, Ken Gannon of the NCC Group exploited five security vulnerabilities to compromise a Samsung Galaxy 24 smartphone by getting shell access and installing an arbitrary application. The feat won Gannon $50,000 of the more than $1,000,000 in bounty rewards up for grabs at the competition. Samsung was given 90 days to patch those vulnerabilities before the exploit proof of concept and details are disclosed publicly.
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Lost Silk Road Cities Discovered with Groundbreaking Tech

Drone-based LiDAR enabled researchers led by Michael Franchetti of Washington University in St. Louis and Farhod Maksudov of Uzbekistan's National Center of Archaeology to identify the remains of two medieval cities along the ancient Silk Road in the mountains of southeastern Uzbekistan. The high-resolution LiDAR images show homes, plazas, fortifications, and roads in detail, shedding new light on urban life in the remote mountains of Central Asia between the 6th and 11th centuries.
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AI Decodes Oinks and Grunts to Keep Pigs Happy

An AI algorithm developed by researchers from universities in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway, and the Czech Republic interprets the sounds pigs make. Using the algorithm could potentially alert farmers to negative emotions in pigs so the farmers can improve their well-being, according to Elodie Mandel-Briefer at Denmark's University of Copenhagen.
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Robots Test Evolution in New Experimental Field

"Paleo-robots" developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Cambridge could help reconstruct how ancient aquatic animals evolved to walk on land. The robots mimic ancient fish skeletons with mechanical joints, with researchers filling in gaps when fossil records are incomplete. Said Cambridge's Michael Ishida, "This data can help confirm or challenge existing theories about how these early animals evolved."
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Can AI Be Blamed for a Teen's Suicide?

The mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old from Orlando, FL, who took his own life in February, is suing Character.AI, a role-playing app the lets users create and chat with AI characters. Setzer reportedly spent hours every day conversing with the chatbot, even confiding his thoughts of suicide. The lawsuit calls the technology "dangerous and untested."
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Computer Finds Largest Known Prime

Former Nvidia employee Luke Durant has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^136,279,841-1, surpassing the previous record-holder by more than 16 million digits. The finding was aided by the use of a supercomputer made up of thousands of GPUs in 17 countries.
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Wearable Cameras Detect, Prevent Medication Errors in Operating Rooms

A wearable camera system developed by researchers at the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Uganda's Makerere University uses AI to prevent mixups of syringes and vials that could result in errors in medicating patients. The model was trained on videos captured by GoPro cameras of anesthesiology providers performing 418 drug draws in operating rooms. The system can identify vials and syringes based on size and shape, cap color, and label print size.
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