Welcome to the May 21, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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Japan's Parliament passed a bill last week to allow the government to take proactive steps to prevent serious cyberattacks. Under the new law, the government will analyze communications between foreign countries via Japan, and between Japan and other countries during peacetime. If there is a sign of a cyberattack, police and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces will take steps to neutralize threats.
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The Japan Times (May 16, 2025)
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Digital services ministers in France, Spain, and Greece are working on a proposal calling for mandatory age restrictions for social media users. Under the proposal, any device able to access the Internet would be required to incorporate age verification technology. Additionally, the proposal would require "age-appropriate design" restrictions on pop-ups, personalized content, auto-play videos, and other features deemed "addictive and persuasive."
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Bloomberg; Daniel Basteiro (May 15, 2025)
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An executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump states that voting equipment should not use ballots that include barcodes or QR codes. Although election officials say such equipment is secure and routinely tested for accuracy, University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman testified in a Georgia case that attackers could tamper with the QR codes to change votes or install malware. The order, which is being challenged in court, exempts voting equipment used by voters with disabilities.
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Associated Press; Charlotte Kramon; Christina A. Cassidy (May 19, 2025)
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Regional tech hubs across the U.S. are losing talent as workers return to the coasts, with Austin being one of the hardest hit. A report from venture capital firm SignalFire found Big Tech employment fell 1.6% last year in Austin, and startup employment there fell 4.9%. Tech employment also declined last year in Dallas, Houston, Denver, and Toronto, while in New York and San Francisco, tech employment increased.
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The Wall Street Journal; Isabelle Bousquette (May 21, 2025)
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At this year's Computex in Taipei, Nvidia said two AI supercomputers, an "AI factory," and a local complex that will serve as its overseas headquarters will be built in Taiwan. The AI factory, developed in partnership with Foxconn (which will provide its AI infrastructure), will be used by semiconductor giant TSMC when finished and will include 10,000 Blackwell GPUs.
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The Register (U.K.); Dan Robinson (May 19, 2025)
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Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which two years ago blocked AI chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation is leading a national experiment to integrate generative AI technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new AI tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 students in high school.
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The New York Times; Natasha Singer (May 19, 2025)
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A prototype thermodynamic computer developed by researchers at New York startup Normal Computing harnesses noise to invert matrices. Researchers also used it to demonstrate Gaussian sampling, which underlies some AI applications. The system's prototype stochastic processing unit features eight capacitor-inductor resonators connected by tunable couplers and initialized with randomly generated noise. After a problem is programmed into the couplings and the system reaches equilibrium, a solution can be obtained by reading out the resonator units.
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IEEE Spectrum; Dina Genkina (May 19, 2025)
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The U.K. Met Office (formerly the Meteorological Office) is using a new supercomputer that allows the weather agency to issue detailed forecasts up to 14 days in advance, as well as more-accurate rainfall predictions. Operated by Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the supercomputer can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second. The supercomputing service is split across two datacenters in south England and is powered entirely by renewable energy.
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BBC; Graham Fraser; Imran Rahman-Jones (May 19, 2025)
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The number of people with a brain-computer interface (BCI) is set to double from less than 100 to date over the next year, if the four companies with new experimental-use approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration meet their goals in clinical trials. However, said University of Pennsylvania neurosurgeon Iahn Cajigas, “There is a vision that this is going to be a mass-consumer thing, which is a vision that you can sell. As a clinician, I find that kind of a dangerous way to talk."
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The Wall Street Journal; Christopher Mims (May 17, 2025)
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Cardiac "digital twins" developed by researchers at the U.K.'s King's College London, Imperial College London, and The Alan Turing Institute were used to investigate the impact of age, sex, and lifestyle factors on heart disease and cardiac electrical function. The researchers used real patient data and electrocardiogram readings from the U.K. Biobank and a cohort of patients with heart disease to develop more than 3,800 anatomically accurate digital hearts.
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King's College London (U.K.) (May 16, 2025)
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Researchers at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are developing a detector to identify extraterrestrial technologies as part of the Galileo Project. The researchers, studying unidentified anomalous phenomena, have deployed open-source computer vision programs with the goal of building a database of real and computer-generated images of all known airborne objects. They use AI to process the huge amounts of data being collected in real time from multiple sources.
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Bloomberg; Jordan Robertson; Drake Bennett (May 16, 2025)
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China bought a record amount of foreign chipmaking equipment last year as part of its efforts to expand domestic chip production. Of the $30.9 billion in foreign chipmaking equipment imported by China last year, Japan accounted for $9.63 billion, up 28.23% year over year, and the Netherlands accounted for $9.53 billion, up 31.6%, according to an analysis of Chinese customs data. Imports from the U.S. grew 11.5% last year to $3.18 billion.
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Nikkei Asia; Cheng Ting-Fang; Lauly Li; Kim Jaewon (May 14, 2025)
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Seven-Eleven Japan began a trial delivery service using robots on public roads in Tokyo suburb Hachioji on Monday. Two of the chain’s convenience stores have each been equipped with two robots that carry items ordered through the 7NOW delivery service app. The four-wheeled robots are designed to run on sidewalks, obey traffic signals, and avoid obstacles.
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The Japan Times (May 19, 2025)
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