Welcome to the October 30, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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Under new rules, foreign semiconductor manufacturers will find it more difficult to obtain rare earth metals and other minerals mined and refined in China. As of Oct. 1, exporters must provide Chinese authorities with step-by-step details regarding the use of rare earth metals in Western supply chains. Last month, China's Ministry of Commerce moved to restrict antimony exports; export controls were imposed last year on the chip-making elements gallium and germanium.
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The New York Times; Keith Bradsher (October 28, 2024)
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Indian nonprofit People+ai launched the Open Cloud Compute (OCC) project to develop an open source marketplace where cloud providers of all sizes can offer their services and customers can move between offerings based on their needs. People+ai's Tanvi Lall said OCC is geared toward individuals and businesses that cannot afford offerings from big tech companies, as well as firms in the healthcare or finance industries that must keep data local for security reasons.
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IEEE Spectrum; Edd Gent (October 28, 2024)
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The U.S. Department of the Treasury has issued final rules imposing limits on U.S. investment and technical assistance in Chinese development of technologies with military applications. Effective Jan. 2, the rules restrict U.S. financing of some Chinese ventures involved in the development of semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum computing, and AI, and require U.S. investors to report their involvement in others.
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The Washington Post; David J. Lynch (October 28, 2024)
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HYPR, a New York-based cybersecurity firm providing identity protection and passwordless technology, said it hired a fake remote IT worker posing as an Eastern European software engineer. HYPR reported several red flags during the onboarding process, such as refusing to appear on video and failing a facial recognition test, but said the employee left before completing the onboarding process and receiving login credentials. This follows a North Korean IT worker scam reported earlier this year by the cybersecurity training platform KnowBe4.
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Axios; Sam Sabin (October 25, 2024)
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Management consulting firm McKinsey forecasts a jump in total IT load demand for European datacenters from 10 gigawatts (GW) today to 35 GW by 2030. The McKinsey report also anticipates power consumption among European datacenters will nearly triple from about 63 terawatt hours (TWh) today to 150 TWh by 2030. Datacenter infrastructure investments of no less than $250 billion to $300 billion will be necessary to meet growth in demand, according to McKinsey.
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Reuters; Nina Chestney (October 24, 2024)
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Switzerland's ETH Zurich public research university this past weekend hosted the 2024 Cybathlon, where 67 teams from 24 countries participated in a competition involving people with disabilities and experimental assistive technologies. The goal of the competition was to optimize assistive technologies for everyday use. The technologies presented by the competitors included a robotic guide dog, an intelligent cane for the blind, and a chest harness that employs kinaesthetic feedback to guide its wearer.
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Business News This Week; Neel Achary (October 27, 2024)
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The Open Source Pledge is using billboards in San Francisco to call out companies that have not paid for the open source code they use. The group wants companies using open source code to pledge $2,000 per developer to support open source projects. Of the 25 companies that have done so thus far, most are smaller startups in series B and C funding rounds. Open Source Pledge co-founder Chad Whitacre is hopeful that larger companies will eventually join the effort.
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The Register (U.K.); Iain Thomson (October 25, 2024)
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A recent patch removed around a dozen names from Linux kernel's MAINTAINERS file, accompanied by a comment from Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Harrison that the entries were removed "due to various compliance requirements." The removed entries had Russian names or .ru email addresses, and sanctions against Russia and Russian companies were the compliance issues in question. The incident sparked debate about the place for international politics within the open source code arena.
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Ars Technica; Kevin Purdy (October 24, 2024)
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At Singapore’s Changi Airport, passengers can move through immigration in just 10 seconds thanks to facial recognition and iris biometrics scans. Singapore's Immigration & Checkpoints Authority said the average time for passengers to be processed had declined from 25 seconds since the technology was fully implemented at the end of September. The technology allows permanent residents and long-term pass holders to depart and arrive without showing their passports.
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Bloomberg; Danny Lee (October 24, 2024)
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A reconfigurable 3D integrated photonic processor developed by researchers at China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University is designed to solve the subset sum problem, which requires calculating whether a certain subset of numbers can sum to a given target. The researchers built a photonic chip featuring 1,440 standardized optical components using femtosecond laser direct writing. The behavior of light can be encoded onto the processor, which uses photons to simultaneously consider all possible paths, speeding computation while maintaining accuracy.
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SPIE (October 23, 2024)
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Researchers from the U.K.'s Queen Mary University of London and Extend Robotics are building an AI-powered robot capable of determining whether grapes are ripe and removing bunches from vines. The robot features visual sensors that measure the wavelengths of light passing through the grapes to assess their sugar levels, and pressure-sensitive fingers to avoid damaging the fruit.
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The Economist (October 23, 2024)
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Software developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and Adobe Research was designed to help fashion designers reduce wasted material. The WasteBanned software allows users to enter fabric dimensions and digitally cut, sew, move, measure, and label panels. It also transforms two-dimensional designs into 3D clothing modeled by a digital mannequin. The design can then be printed to match the garment's precise dimensions to assist with cutting the material.
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MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Alex Shipps (October 23, 2024)
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A mobile 3D-printing device developed by University of Washington researchers can 3D-print objects in a desired space. Attached to a modified robot vacuum, MobiPrint autonomously navigates a room and maps it using LiDAR. The map is transformed into an interactive canvas, where users can choose from a library of objects or upload their own designs and identify the desired location to print them on the map. MobiPrint then travels to that spot and utilizes ordinary 3D-printing bioplastic to produce the object directly on the floor.
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GeekWire; Kurt Schlosser (October 21, 2024)
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