Welcome to the December 16, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Rhode Island Residents’ Data Breached in Large Cyberattack
• U.S., China Sign 5-year Amended Agreement on Science, Tech Cooperation
• Their Job Is to Push Computers Toward AI Doom
• Donald Bitzer, Pioneer of Cyberspace and Plasma Screens, Dies at 90
• Geoffrey Hinton Donates Some Nobel Winnings to Create Award
• U.S. Charges 14 North Koreans in Identity Theft, Extortion Case
• Nvidia Steps Up Hiring in China to Focus on Self-Driven Cars
• SwagBot Cattle Herder Prevents Soil Degradation
• Which AI Companies Are the Safest?
• Computer Scientists Earn IMC Test-of-Time Award for Bitcoin Research
• Police in China Take Rolling Robot Out on Patrol
• Waymo’s Robotaxis Pass First Responder Test

Rhode Island Residents’ Data Breached in Large Cyberattack

The personal data of potentially hundreds of thousands of people who applied for government assistance in Rhode Island was accessed by hackers, who have threatened to release the information unless they receive a ransom. State officials said at a news conference on Friday that hackers had gained access to RIBridges, the state’s online portal for obtaining social services.
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U.S., China Sign 5-year Amended Agreement on Science, Tech Cooperation

The U.S. and China on Friday signed a protocol to amend the bilateral, government-to-government Science and Technology Agreement and extend it for five years. First signed in 1979, the agreement is aimed at facilitating cooperation between the two nations. A State Department official said the new agreement, which took effect retroactively on August 27, narrows the scope of the previous deal and introduces "guardrails" to ensure “reciprocity, transparency, and openness."
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Their Job Is to Push Computers Toward AI Doom

AI startup Anthropic's Frontier Red Team is tasked with running safety tests (evals) on its AI models. The team worked with outside experts and internal stress testers to develop evals for its main risk categories: cyber, biological and chemical weapons, and autonomy. Anthropic's "Responsible Scaling Policy" states that it will delay the release of an AI model that comes close to specific capabilities in evals until fixes are implemented.
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Donald Bitzer, Pioneer of Cyberspace and Plasma Screens, Dies at 90

Donald Bitzer, developer of an educational platform called PLATO that offered a glimpse of the digital world to come, died Dec. 10 at age 90. Launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, PLATO was the first generalized, computer-based instructional system, and it grew into a home for early message boards, emails, chatrooms, instant messaging, and multiplayer video games. Bitzer spent more than two decades working on PLATO while also pioneering digital technologies that included the plasma display panel.
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Geoffrey Hinton Donates Some Nobel Winnings to Create Award

Nobel and ACM A.M Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton is donating some of his winnings to create a new award. The $10,000 award will be handed out at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference annually to recognize teams of two or more researchers under the age of 40 who write a paper proposing a novel theory of how the brain works. The award will be named the Sejnowski-Hinton Prize after computational neurobiologist Terry Sejnowski and Hinton.
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U.S. Charges 14 North Koreans in Identity Theft, Extortion Case

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) accused 14 North Korean nationals of conspiring to use false identities to get IT jobs with U.S. companies, alleging that the conspiracy generated at least $88 million between April 2017 and March 2023. Said the FBI's Ashley Johnson, “This is just the tip of the iceberg. The government of North Korea has trained and deployed thousands of IT workers to perpetrate this same scheme against U.S. companies every day."
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Nvidia Steps Up Hiring in China to Focus on Self-Driven Cars

Nvidia has hired hundreds in China this year to enhance its research capabilities and focus on new autonomous driving technologies, say sources. The company will end the year with about 4,000 people in China, up from just about 3,000 at the start of 2024, with about 200 people added in Beijing to beef up a team of researchers working on self-driving.
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SwagBot Cattle Herder Prevents Soil Degradation

A battery-powered, four-wheeled robot developed by researchers at Australia's University of Sydney could help cattle farmers avoid overgrazing, which leads to soil degradation. Equipped with sensors, AI, and machine learning systems, SwagBot can monitor the health, type, and density of pastures, as well as the health of livestock; it can autonomously herd cattle from one pasture to another based on the data it collects, while sending detailed, real-time information to farmers.
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Which AI Companies Are the Safest?

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio and other experts assembled by the Future of Life Institute graded large-scale AI models on their safety frameworks, governance, transparency, and other issues, as well as a range of potential harms, including carbon emissions and the risk an AI system will go rogue. The experts gave Meta an F grade, while X.AI, OpenAI, and China's Zhipu AI received grades of D-, D+, and D, respectively. Anthropic received the highest grade of C.
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Computer Scientists Earn IMC Test-of-Time Award for Bitcoin Research

A team of computer scientists at the University of California San Diego was recognized with a Test-of-Time Award at ACM's Internet Measurement Conference last week for a 2013 paper that detailed a technique for tracing Bitcoin. The paper concluded that Bitcoin payments are not anonymous; it has been credited with helping identify drug rings, cryptocurrency heists, and money launderers.
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Police in China Take Rolling Robot Out on Patrol

A spherical robot developed and patented by researchers at China's Zhejiang University will help local law enforcement identify and chase suspects without tipping over. The 275-pound robot can reach its top speed of 22 mph in just 2.5 seconds. It is equipped with flashing lights, speakers, net guns, and tear-gas sprayers. Said Zhejiang University's Wang You, "This robot can cope with dangers such as falling or being beaten, and can perform tactical actions such as enemy identification, tracking, and capture after modular modification."
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Waymo’s Robotaxis Pass First Responder Test

Waymo’s robotaxis can detect emergency vehicles, know how to respond to hand signals for traffic police, and can be disabled manually when something goes wrong, according to an independent review of the company’s first responder protocols by German tech inspection company Tüv Süd. The assessment found that Waymo’s First Responder Program “meets industry standards” for responding to emergency situations, which is in line with the best practices set out in the Society of Automotive Engineers.
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