Welcome to the December 13, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Europe Jumps into AI Supercomputing Race
• Big Oil Eyes Powering Big Tech's Datacenter Demand
• IBM Gives Chicago’s Quantum Campus a Boost
• Malaysia Launches National AI Office
• UnitedHealth Exec Shooting Heightens Debate over Ghost Guns
• HiPEAC Announces 2024 Technology Transfer Award Winners
• Accessibility Worsens for Blind, Low-Vision Readers of Academic PDFs
• Russia Takes Unusual Route to Hack Devices in Ukraine
• Smart TVs Collect Viewing Data, Even When Used as External Screens
• Ferroelectric Devices Could Make Data Unhackable
• How Years of Reddit Posts Have Made the Company an AI Darling
• New Technique for Stealing AI Models
• Flaw in Computer Memory Leads to Global Security Fixes

Europe Jumps into AI Supercomputing Race

The European Union will invest €1.5 billion in seven sites across the bloc to build and maintain supercomputers that European startups can use to train their AI models. The European Commission will contribute €750 million, with EU member companies providing the remainder. The goal of the initiative is eliminate reliance on big tech firms in the U.S.
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Big Oil Eyes Powering Big Tech's Datacenter Demand

Major U.S. oil companies are working on deals to use natural gas and carbon capture to power the technology industry's AI datacenters. Exxon said on Wednesday it was working to provide datacenters with low-carbon electricity through natural gas-fired power plants by the end of the decade. Chevron New Energies president Jeff Gustavson said his company has been in talks for more than a year about supplying natural gas-fired power, coupled with carbon capture technologies, to datacenters.
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IBM Gives Chicago’s Quantum Campus a Boost

IBM said it will partner with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to build a national algorithm center for quantum computing in Chicago. The state of Illinois will provide a $25-million grant to help purchase equipment for the project. The announcement comes five months after PsiQuantum Corp. said it would invest more than $1 billion to become the anchor tenant at a quantum campus in the state.
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Malaysia Launches National AI Office

Malaysia has opened a national AI office tasked with strategic planning, research and development, and regulatory oversight. Part of a plan to establish Malaysia as a regional hub for AI development, the office will focus on developing a code of ethics, an AI regulatory framework, and a five-year AI technology plan during its first year. The Malaysian government has announced strategic partnerships with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies that have datacenter, cloud, and AI projects planned in Malaysia.
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UnitedHealth Exec Shooting Heightens Debate over Ghost Guns

The debate over ghost guns is ramping up in the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The 9 mm handgun found in the suspect's possession appears to have a 3D-printed frame and a barrel and sliding mechanism from a kit. Over a dozen states have passed laws restricting self-made guns and untraceable gun parts, with some imposing outright bans on the 3D printing of such weapons.
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HiPEAC Announces 2024 Technology Transfer Award Winners

HiPEAC has named the recipients of its 2024 Technology Transfer Award. The European Commission-funded hub for researchers, industry, and policy related to computing systems launched the award in 2012 to recognize and encourage the transfer of leading-edge technologies from academia to industry. Eight candidates were selected this year, with winners to be recognized in a ceremony at the HiPEAC conference in January. Said HiPEAC's Koen De Bosschere, "The influence of AI and machine learning is unmistakable in these winning projects."
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Accessibility Worsens for Blind, Low-Vision Readers of Academic PDFs

Low-vision and blind readers are unable to access a majority of PDF versions of scholarly papers, University of Washington researchers found. Their study assessed the compliance of about 20,000 studies published from 2014 to 2023 with six accessibility criteria, such as the use of alternative text for figures and headers for tables, and the addition of tags that make PDFs accessible to users of assistive reading devices. The researchers found nearly 75% of the studies met none of the criteria, while just 3% met all six criteria.
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Russia Takes Unusual Route to Hack Devices in Ukraine

A Russian hacking group used servers and malware from different threat groups in attacks targeting front-line Ukrainian military forces, Microsoft said Wednesday. In one case, the group, referred to as Secret Blizzard by Microsoft, leveraged the infrastructure of a cybercrime group tracked as Storm-1919. In the other, Secret Blizzard appropriated resources of Storm-1837, a Russia-based threat actor with a history of targeting Ukrainian drone operators.
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Smart TVs Collect Viewing Data, Even When Used as External Screens

Smart televisions from Samsung and LG collect viewing data even when the devices are connected to a laptop or used as an external screen, according to researchers at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the U.K.'s University College London, and the University of California, Davis. Using Automatic Content Recognition technology, the televisions take screenshots or audio, which used to develop viewer profiles. Users can block the sharing of this data by changing the devices' default settings.
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Ferroelectric Devices Could Make Data Unhackable

A device created by researchers at China's Peking University uses arrays of ferroelectric field effect transistors (FeFETs) to enable homomorphic encryption. Fluctuations in current through the FeFETs allow the transistor array to create an encryption key, with a higher degree of fluctuation than traditional MOSFET transistors, enabling the generation of less-predictable random numbers.
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How Years of Reddit Posts Have Made the Company an AI Darling

AI companies are a key part of Reddit's growth strategy, with data-licensing deals with OpenAI and Google contributing to the social media platform's first quarterly profit as a publicly traded company. Reddit began charging companies last year for access to its data for training AI models. Reddit's data is in high demand because its content is organized by topic, sorted for quality via a voting system, and is more candid given that most of the platform's users write under pseudonyms.
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New Technique for Stealing AI Models

North Carolina State University researchers demonstrated a method of stealing an AI model without hacking into a device where the model is running. The researchers determined the hyperparameters of an AI model running on a Google Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) with an electromagnetic (EM) probe that provided real-time data on changes in the EM field during AI processing. By comparing that EM signature to a database of other AI model signatures made on another Google Edge TPU, the team identified the target model’s architecture and layer details.
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Flaw in Computer Memory Leads to Global Security Fixes

A security flaw in AMD computer processors identified by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Birmingham, Belgium's KU Leuven, and Germany's University of Luebeck allowed the bypassing of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology, which safeguards data stored in shared cloud environments. The researchers used rogue memory modules, known as BadRAM, to trick the CPU into addressing non-existent memory regions, allowing CPU memory protections to be bypassed.
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