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

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• FCC Chair Proposes Cybersecurity Rules in Response to China's Telecom Hack
• Apple Sued for Failing to Curtail Child Sexual Abuse Material on iCloud
• Hinton, Other Turing Award Laureates, Among Recipients of VinFuture Grand Prize
• ChatGPT is Terrible at Checking Its Code
• New Method Compresses Terabytes of Genomic Data into Gigabytes
• UC Berkeley Project Is AI Industry's Obsession
• Drone with Legs Can Walk, Hop, Jump to Take Off
• Malaysia Faces Backlash over Plan to Broaden Internet Controls
• Excel World Champion Solves ‘Warcraft’ Spreadsheet to Win Crown
• Furious Contest to Unseat Nvidia as King of AI Chips
• Meta Says Gen AI Had Muted Impact on Global Elections
• U.S. Tries to Limit Doxing Through Credit Data

FCC Chair Proposes Cybersecurity Rules in Response to China's Telecom Hack

U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Jessica Rosenworcel proposed that communications service providers be required to submit an annual certification attesting that they have a plan in place to protect against cyberattacks. Said Rosenworcel, "We need to put in place a modern framework to help companies secure their networks and better prevent and respond to cyberattacks in the future."
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Apple Sued for Failing to Curtail Child Sexual Abuse Material on iCloud

Victims of child sexual abuse sued Apple Saturday over its failure to follow through with plans to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse materials. Apple unveiled a system to scan for images of suspected child sexual abuse and forward them to the proper authorities in 2021; it later dropped the system after being warned it could give governments backdoor access to iPhones.
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Hinton, Other Turing Award Laureates, Among Recipients of VinFuture Grand Prize

ACM A. M. Turing Award laureates Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun were among those awarded the $3-million 2024 VinFuture Grand Prize by Vietnam's VinFuture Foundation, along with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and ACM Fellow Fei-Fei Li, for their contributions to the development and adoption of deep learning. The foundation noted that Hinton and Bengio were awarded the prize for their research on neural networks and deep learning algorithms, while LeCun was recognized for helping develop convolutional neural networks for computer vision.
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ChatGPT is Terrible at Checking Its Code

ChatGPT is generally overconfident in its assessment of correctness, vulnerabilities, and successful repairs of code it has created, according to researchers at China's Zhejiang University. Their study found ChatGPT-3.5 had an average 57% success rate in generating correct code, 73% in producing code without security vulnerabilities, and 70% in repairing incorrect code. Using guiding questions enabled ChatGPT to identify more of its own mistakes, the researchers found, while asking it to generate test reports increased the number of flagged vulnerabilities.
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New Method Compresses Terabytes of Genomic Data into Gigabytes

The Genotype Representation Graph (GRG) created by Cornell University researchers compresses hundreds of terabytes of genomic data to gigabytes, so datasets can be stored locally instead of in the cloud. The main benefit is the ability to perform computations with the graphs without having to decompress data, said Cornell’s Ziqing Pan.
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UC Berkeley Project Is AI Industry's Obsession

Chatbot Arena allows users to obtain answers to a query from two anonymous AI models and rate which is better, then aggregates the ratings onto a leaderboard. Developed by University of California, Berkeley, graduate students Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, Chatbot Arena has grabbed the attention of the biggest players in the industry, which are vying for the top spot on the leaderboard. Chatbot Arena currently ranks more than 170 models, which have received a combined 2 million votes.
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Drone with Legs Can Walk, Hop, Jump to Take Off

A drone developed by researchers at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne can use its legs for jumping takeoffs for flight, as well as for walking and hopping. The RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) drone is about the size of a crow, with a wingspan of 100 cm and a body length of 50 cm. It can walk a meter in just under four seconds, hop over 12-cm gaps, and jump onto the top of a 26-cm obstacle.
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Malaysia Faces Backlash over Plan to Broaden Internet Controls

A bill introduced by the Malaysian government on Dec. 2 would strengthen penalties for Internet content violations and give law enforcement greater powers, including allowing any "authorized officer" to search and seize without a warrant. The law also would hold service providers liable, with representatives potentially facing arrest for violations, and require them to disclose user data to authorities during investigations.
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Excel World Champion Solves ‘Warcraft’ Spreadsheet to Win Crown

Canadian Michael Jarman won the 2024 Microsoft Excel World Championship. Twelve finalists participating in the event were asked to manage a team of players as they progressed through a simulated game. For each level, the players were required to keep track of various statistics. Jarman received a check for $5,000 after managing a team of 12 simulated Horde players through a simulated session of World of Warcraft.
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Furious Contest to Unseat Nvidia as King of AI Chips

Rivals are working to unseat Nvidia as the leader in AI chip development. The competition is driven by tech companies that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of AI development, a process called “inferencing” that happens after companies use chips to train AI models. Rivals have also begun emulating Nvidia’s tactic of building complete computers so customers can get maximum power and performance from the chips for AI applications.
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Meta Says Gen AI Had Muted Impact on Global Elections

Meta’s Nick Clegg said his company's apps saw a low amount of AI-generated misinformation related to global elections this year, and such content was removed or labeled quickly. Clegg said around 20 covert influence operations were removed from Meta's platforms in 2024, adding that Meta "probably overdid it a bit" when describing content moderation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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U.S. Tries to Limit Doxing Through Credit Data

A proposed rule change by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will impose limits on when data brokers can distribute sensitive information, including individuals’ names and addresses. The rule focuses on the distribution of credit header data, the personal information at the top of an individual's credit report, which does not include information on an individual's actual lines of credit, but is distributed broadly, making it easier for foreign adversaries to purchase and use the data for malicious purposes.
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