Welcome to the January 6, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Martin Karplus, Who Took Biochemistry to Cyberspace, Dies at 94
• New Orleans Attacker Used Meta Glasses to Record Bourbon Street
• Raspberry Pi RP2350 Hacked
• Carving Up C for Conversion to Rust
• George Mason Opens $254M Tech Hub
• At the Intersection of AI and Spirituality
• U.S. Sanctions Beijing Cyber Group over Hacks
• TikTok Knew Livestreams Exploit Children, Lawsuit Claims
• Robot Hands Know How Hard to Squeeze
• Scientists Hunt for Identities of Migrants Lost at Sea
• AI Robots Enter the Public World, with Mixed Results
• Cuneiform-like Tech Quadruples Data Storage

Martin Karplus, Who Took Biochemistry to Cyberspace, Dies at 94

Martin Karplus, who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for merging molecular physics and computer modeling, died Dec. 28 at 94. The virtual models he helped create allowed closer study of split-second biochemical reactions. The models “took the chemical experiment to cyberspace,” said Sven Lidin, chair of the Nobel selection committee.
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New Orleans Attacker Used Meta Glasses to Record Bourbon Street

The perpetrator of the New Year's Day attack in New Orleans visited the city at least twice in the months leading up to the assault, using Meta smart glasses to record video of the area. The glasses were recovered from the perpetrator's body at the scene of the attack, though police do not believe he enabled their live-streaming capacity during the truck massacre. The U.S. Army veteran served in information technology roles in the military, and later worked at Deloitte and Ernst & Young.
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Raspberry Pi RP2350 Hacked

Engineer Aedan Cullen revealed how he hacked the new Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller at the recent 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3), weeks before the winner of the $20,000 Raspberry Pi and Hextree RP2350 Hacking Challenge will be announced on Jan. 14. The sponsors of the challenge hid a secret on RP2350's One Time Programmable (OTP) memory on the chip, said to be a once-set but never-forget binary code. Cullen used a voltage injection glitch attack on pin 53 of the RP2350 chip, which turned on the "permanently disabled" RISC-V cores and their debug access port, enabling him to read the secret.
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Carving Up C for Conversion to Rust

Computer scientists at France's National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology and Microsoft developed a way to automate the conversion of a subset of C code into safe Rust code. By creating a subset of C that avoids common C patterns and features that can't be translated directly to safe Rust, the researchers produced what they say is safe Rust code, though some refactoring may be required.
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George Mason Opens $254M Tech Hub

Last month, George Mason University opened a $254-million facility designed to bring professors and students together with industry to work on cutting-edge technology. The launch is latest in a $1-billion statewide effort to make Northern Virginia a tech hub, in part by investing in higher education. The effort also includes the Innovation Campus at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which is expected to open next year.
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At the Intersection of AI and Spirituality

Religious leaders are seeking to determine where AI fits within their calling. This search has resulted in an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer AI tools, including assistants that can do theological research and chatbots that can help write sermons. While many agree using AI for research or marketing or translating sermons into different languages is acceptable, others argue using it for sermon writing, for example, is unethical.
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U.S. Sanctions Beijing Cyber Group over Hacks

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the China-based Integrity Technology Group (ITG) for its alleged involvement in hacking incidents targeting critical U.S. infrastructure. Friday's announcement of the sanctions alleged the cybersecurity company’s involvement in a series of attacks attributed to Flax Typhoon, a state-sponsored hacking campaign allegedly linked to the Chinese government.
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TikTok Knew Livestreams Exploit Children, Lawsuit Claims

Utah is accusing TikTok of knowing its video livestreams exploit children yet doing nothing because it "profited significantly." The accusations were made public on Friday as part of a lawsuit filed last June accusing TikTok of exploiting children. Friday's largely unredacted complaint said TikTok learned of the threats its Live streaming feature posed through a series of internal reviews.
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Robot Hands Know How Hard to Squeeze

A robotic hand developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers can sense the hardness of an object after touching it with a single digit, so it can determine the amount of force necessary to grip it. The researchers embedded piezoelectric sensors in the robot's fingertips which, after touching an object, transforms vibrations into electrical signals that are analyzed by an AI model to estimate the object's hardness within 15 milliseconds.
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Scientists Hunt for Identities of Migrants Lost at Sea

The Migrant Disaster Victim Identification (MDVI) Action is using technology in hopes of identifying tens of thousands of migrants who have died while trying to reach Europe. In addition to using DNA and posting photographs on social media, MDVI Action has deployed handheld scanners to record the features of deceased migrants, which can be used to create 3D images of the individuals.
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AI Robots Enter the Public World, with Mixed Results

With the emergence of generative AI (Gen AI), hopes are rising for greater adoption of robotics in public spaces. Robots rely on code that tells them how to execute functions or react to specific scenarios, limiting them to specific actions they were trained to perform. Gen AI could permit robots to better navigate obstacles, understand what certain objects are, and even take verbal commands, said ABB’s Marc Segura.
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Cuneiform-like Tech Quadruples Data Storage

A new system developed by a team led by Abigail Mann at Australia's Flinders University stores data via nanoscale indentations made in a high-tech polymer by a fine-tip probe mounted on an atomic force microscope. The method allows data to be stored via a three-state ternary code on inexpensive polymer film, quadrupling the system's data density compared to binary coding. The film also is rewritable.
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