Welcome to the May 15, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Global Chips Battle Intensifies with $81 Billion Subsidy Surge
• NIST Finalizes Updated Guidelines for Protecting Sensitive Information
• Supercomputer Champ Repeats, Infiniband Tops Ethernet, Linux Dominates
• Female Health Apps Misuse Highly Sensitive Data, Study Finds
• Solar Storm Crashes GPS Systems Used by Some Farmers
• Manufacturing Optimized Designs for High Explosives
• Illness Took Away Her Voice. AI Created a Replica She Carries in Her Phone
• Zuse's Z3, the World's First Programmable Computer
• Seed-Dropping Drones Seek to Halt Kosovo's Deforestation
• GhostStripe Attack Haunts Self-Driving Cars
• Why Protesters Around the World Are Demanding a Pause on AI Development
• China Creates its Largest-Ever Quantum Computing Chip

Global Chips Battle Intensifies with $81 Billion Subsidy Surge

The U.S., EU, India, Saudi Arabia, and Japan, among the governments vying with China for global chip supremacy, are providing close to $81 billion in the first wave of subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers. In total, governments have promised $380 billion in funding to firms like Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to produce next-generation microprocessors.
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NIST Finalizes Updated Guidelines for Protecting Sensitive Information

In two new publications, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released finalized updated guidelines for protecting the sensitive data organizations that do business with the federal government handle, known as controlled unclassified information. “For the sake of our private sector customers, we want our guidance to be clear, unambiguous and tightly coupled with the catalog of controls and assessment procedures used by federal agencies,” said NIST’s Ron Ross.
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Supercomputer Champ Repeats, Infiniband Tops Ethernet, Linux Dominates

The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory again ranked first in the new Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The U.S. has the most systems on the list (171), including the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. As for supercomputer networking technologies, Infiniband is used by nearly half the systems on the Top 500 list (47.8%, 239 systems), while Ethernet is used by 39% (195 systems).
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Female Health Apps Misuse Highly Sensitive Data, Study Finds

A study of the privacy practices of 20 popular female health monitoring apps in U.K. and U.S. Google Play stores by researchers at the U.K.'s King's College London and University College London found that many have poor data handling practices that leave users vulnerable to privacy and safety risks. The researchers found that apps handling medical and fertility data persuade users to enter sensitive data, which could be accessed by law enforcement or security authorities.
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Solar Storm Crashes GPS Systems Used by Some Farmers

Some farmers in the U.S. and Canada were unable to use their tractors and other equipment due to the recent geomagnetic storm, the strongest to reach Earth since October 2003. Outages of GPS and other navigational technology related to the solar storm disrupted some farmers' operations at the peak of planting season. Such storms pose a threat to farming in the U.S., where the majority of crops are planted using modern guidance systems, according to Terry Griffin at Kansas State University.
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Manufacturing Optimized Designs for High Explosives

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers used AI and machine learning to develop computationally optimized designs for shaped explosive charges, which are used to manipulate metals, to control their hydrodynamic instabilities. The researchers conducted 14 high-explosive (HE) detonation experiments, with the results compared to a baseline design that did not include a buffer between the liner and the HE. Flash X-ray radiographs showed the silicone buffer reliably and consistently mitigated potential instabilities.
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Illness Took Away Her Voice. AI Created a Replica She Carries in Her Phone

Alexis "Lexi" Bogan (pictured), whose speech remains impaired after a tumor near the back of her brain was removed, has regained her voice through a pilot version of OpenAI's Voice Engine at Rhode Island Hospital. Trained on a 15-second clip of her teenage voice, the AI reads aloud whatever she types into the phone app. Said Dr. Fatima Mirza, “We’re able to help give Lexi back her true voice and she’s able to speak in terms that are the most true to herself.”
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Zuse's Z3, the World's First Programmable Computer

May 12 marked the 83^rd anniversary of the Z3, the world's first fully-functional, Turing complete programmable computer, which was unveiled by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1941. The original Turing complete Z3 was destroyed during a bombing in Berlin in 1943, but a replica reconstructed by Zuse in the 1960s (above) is on display in a Munich museum.
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Seed-Dropping Drones Seek to Halt Kosovo's Deforestation

Non-profit Sustainability Leadership Kosova has teamed up with Croatian company Project 02 to drop seeds from drones to fight deforestation in Kosovo. For each flight, a drone is filled with about 100 black balls made up of seeds surrounded by a mix of clay, sand, waste biomass with rich minerals, and other ingredients that protect the seeds from insects and rodents. The drone can plant one hectare (about 2.5 acres) in two hours.
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GhostStripe Attack Haunts Self-Driving Cars

Researchers in Singapore and the U.S. revealed an attack that exploits the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera sensors in self-driving vehicles, preventing them from recognizing road signs. The GhostStripe attack uses LEDs to shine light patterns on road signs, which prevents the vehicles' machine-learning software from reading them. Rapidly flashing different colors onto the sign abuses the sensors' rolling digital shutters, distorting every frame captured by the cameras.
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Why Protesters Around the World Are Demanding a Pause on AI Development

Protesters who are part of the "Pause AI" movement took part in protests in 13 countries Monday, calling for government regulation of AI companies and a freeze on the development of new AI models until companies agree to thorough safety tests. Experts don’t understand the inner workings of AI systems like ChatGPT, and they worry that lack of knowledge could lead us to dramatically miscalculate how more powerful systems would act.
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China Creates its Largest-Ever Quantum Computing Chip

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics have developed a 504-qubit quantum computing chip. The Xiaohong chip, the biggest built so far by Chinese researchers, will be integrated into a new quantum computer by researchers at the Chinese quantum computing firm QuantumCTek and China Telecom Quantum Group. Researchers across the globe will have access to the system through a new quantum computing cloud platform.
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