ACM TechNews


Banner
Welcome to the January 22, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank form joint venture to build artificial intelligence infrastructure OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank on Tuesday announced a partnership to build datacenters and other infrastructure to power AI, in partnership with MGX, a tech investment arm of the United Arab Emirates government. The Stargate initiative aims to invest $100 billion "immediately" and $500 billion over the next four years. U.S. President Donald Trump said the plan is a "resounding declaration of confidence in America's potential."
[ » Read full article ]
BBC News; João da Silva; Natalie Sherman (January 22, 2025)
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday pausing implementation of a law banning TikTok in the U.S. and providing a liability shield to the app’s business partners. The order pauses implementation of the law for 75 days, giving the administration time "to pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans,” according to the text of the order.
[ » Read full article ]
NPR; Bobby Allyn (January 20, 2025)
U.S. President Trump rescinded an executive order by former U.S. President Biden regulating AI, immediately halting implementation of safety and transparency requirements for AI developers. Biden’s order required leading AI companies to share safety test results and other critical information for powerful AI systems with the federal government. It also prompted the creation of the U.S. AI Safety Institute, housed under the U.S. Commerce Department, to create voluntary guidelines and best practices for the technology’s use.
[ » Read full article *May Require Paid Registration ]
Bloomberg; Jackie Davalos; Oma Seddiq (January 21, 2025)

A view from the obstacle course game A paralyzed 69-year-old man flew a virtual drone using a brain–computer interface (BCI). University of Michigan in Ann Arbor researchers trained the BCI to differentiate neural signals produced when the man thought about moving his right thumb, first and second fingers, or third and fourth fingers. The researchers linked the decoded finger movements to the speed and direction of an onscreen virtual drone, allowing the man to manipulate the drone through rings on a virtual basketball court.
[ » Read full article ]
Nature; Miryam Naddaf (January 20, 2025)
China’s Commerce Ministry said it will investigate U.S. government subsidies to its semiconductor sector over alleged harm caused to Chinese mature node chipmakers. As a result of the subsidies, "U.S. enterprises have … gained an unfair competitive advantage and exported relevant mature node chip products to China at low prices, which has undermined the legitimate rights and interests of China's domestic industry," the Ministry said in announcing the probe.
[ » Read full article ]
Reuters; Eduardo Baptista (January 16, 2025)

A robotic exoskeleton A robotic hand exoskeleton developed by Shinichi Furuya at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Japan and colleagues can help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers for them. The exoskeleton can raise and lower each finger individually, up to four times a second, using a separate motor attached to the base of each finger.
[ » Read full article ]
New Scientist; Alex Wilkins (January 17, 2025)

A satirical Doppelgänger cartoon posted in an advertisement on Facebook Finland's Check First, Reset.Tech in the U.K., and France's AI Forensics found that a Russian organization linked to Kremlin influence campaigns posted more than 8,000 political advertisements on the social media platform despite EU and U.S. restrictions. The organization, called the Social Design Agency, evaded lax enforcement by Facebook to place an estimated $338,000 worth of ads over a period of 15 months, even as the platform itself highlighted the threat.
[ » Read full article *May Require Paid Registration ]
The New York Times; Steven Lee Myers; Adam Satariano (January 18, 2025)

ELIZA creator Joseph Weizenbaum ELIZA, the world's first chatbot, was brought back to life by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, Stanford University, and colleagues. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joseph Weizenbaum (pictured) in a now-defunct programming language. Resurrecting ELIZA required the team to clean and debug the code and to create an emulator that would approximate the kind of computer that would have run ELIZA in the 1960s.
[ » Read full article ]
LiveScience; Kristina Killgrove (January 17, 2025)

Amazon's MK30 drones Amazon has suspended commercial drone deliveries after two of its newest models crashed in rainy weather at a testing facility. The company said drone deliveries in Texas and Arizona have been halted to fix the aircraft’s software. The MK30 drones were cleared to commence operations by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in October.
[ » Read full article *May Require Paid Registration ]
Bloomberg; Matt Day (January 17, 2025)
Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at Canada's University of Waterloo modified the Linux kernel in a way that could reduce energy consumption in datacenters by as much as 30%. The modification, presented at ACM SIGMETRICS 2024, rearranges operations within the Linux networking stack, improving the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking. The researchers said the kernel change was accomplished through just 30 lines of code.
[ » Read full article ]
University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science (Canada) (January 20, 2025)

FBI Warned Agents It Believes Phone Logs Hacked Last Year The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said that months of agents' call and text logs were likely stolen in a cyber breach that hit AT&T in April 2024, in which data from about 109 million customer accounts containing records of calls and texts from 2022 were illegally downloaded. The breach reportedly compromised all FBI devices using its AT&T public safety service. According to an FBI report, the stolen records could connect agents to their confidential sources.
[ » Read full article ]
Reuters; Surbhi Misra; A.J. Vicens (January 16, 2025)

he right sequence of lasers can group qubits into a perfect grid A quantum computer developed by researchers at China’s University of Science and Technology features 2,024 atoms assembled by AI into an ultracold grid. The researchers developed an AI algorithm capable of recommending a sequence of laser beams and atoms to form the grid within 60 milliseconds, regardless of the grid's size.
[ » Read full article *May Require Paid Registration ]
New Scientist; Karmela Padavic-Callaghan (January 14, 2025)
A new report from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) details how personal data is used by some companies to show different prices for the same products, dubbed by the FTC as "surveillance pricing." The agency said retailers are hiring "intermediary firms" to algorithmically tweak and target their prices. The findings come after the FTC last year asked eight “middlemen” companies to reveal how they combine computer algorithms and people’s personal information to adjust pricing.
[ » Read full article ]
PC Magazine; Will McCurdy (January 19, 2025)
ACM TechBriefs
 
ACM Queue Case Studies
 

Association for Computing Machinery

1601 Broadway, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10019-7434
1-800-342-6626
(U.S./Canada)



ACM Media Sales

If you are interested in advertising in ACM TechNews or other ACM publications, please contact ACM Media Sales or (212) 626-0686, or visit ACM Media for more information.

To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact: technews@hq.acm.org

Archives | Career News | Contact Us | Unsubscribe

About ACM | Contact us | Boards & Committees | Press Room | Membership | Privacy Policy | Code of Ethics | System Availability | Copyright © 2025, ACM, Inc.