Welcome to the August 13, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• China Urges Firms to Avoid Nvidia H20 Chips after U.S. Ends Ban
• These Workers Don't Fear AI
• Russia Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System
• Robot Antelope Surveils Real Herds in Tibet
• The Hunt for a Lost Microscopic Art World
• Wikipedia Operator Loses Court Challenge to U.K. Online Safety Act
• Remote Work Comes to Piloting Ships
• South Korean White Hat Hackers Win World’s Top Hacking Contest, Again
• IBM, Moderna Model Longest mRNA Molecule Using Quantum Simulation
• LHC Poised to Receive Major Tech Upgrade
• Conversations Remotely Detected from Cellphone Vibrations
• NSF Invests in AI-Ready Test Beds
• Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked

China Urges Firms to Avoid Nvidia H20 Chips after U.S. Ends Ban

Chinese authorities have sent notices to firms discouraging use of less-advanced semiconductors, particularly Nvidia’s H20, though the letters did not call for an outright ban. Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. both recently secured U.S. approval to resume lower-end AI chip sales to China, reportedly on the condition that they give the federal government a 15% cut of the related revenue.
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These Workers Don't Fear AI

Amid concerns about job displacement due to AI, some workers are seeking degrees to help them succeed in an AI-powered economy. Several U.S. universities offer master's programs in AI, and required undergraduate courses in AI are being rolled out at Ohio State University this fall. Said World Economic Forum's Till Leopold, "A combination of technology literacy and human-centric skills is a sweet spot in terms of future labor market demands."
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Russia Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

U.S. investigators believe Russia is at least partly responsible for a yearslong hack of the federal court system, compromising sealed records tied to national security and overseas criminal cases. Affecting at least eight district courts, the breach prompted urgent instructions to remove sensitive files from PACER and the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system. Recent orders bar uploading sealed documents to PACER in some districts.
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Robot Antelope Surveils Real Herds in Tibet

China has deployed a lifelike “robot antelope” on Tibet’s Hoh Xil plateau to monitor endangered Tibetan antelope. Developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and DEEP Robotics, the 5G- and AI-equipped machine mimics the real animal’s appearance while gathering data on migration, feeding, and mating. Part of Beijing’s broader push into remote surveillance, the project builds on extensive 5G expansion in Tibet, completed in 2023.
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The Hunt for a Lost Microscopic Art World

In the 1970s and ’80s, chip designers at companies like AMD, Qualcomm, and Hewlett-Packard secretly embedded “silicon doodles”—microscopic images such as logos, animals, or personal initials—onto integrated circuits. These etchings served as creative signatures and occasional security markers. The practice has largely vanished due to stricter manufacturing tolerances, but collectors now hunt these rare artifacts through flea markets, eBay, and “hardware archaeology.”
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Wikipedia Operator Loses Court Challenge to U.K. Online Safety Act

The Wikimedia Foundation, operator of Wikipedia, lost a legal challenge to parts of the U.K.'s Online Safety Act, which sets tough new requirements for online platforms. The foundation argued that if it was subject to Category 1 requirements, which mandate that Wikipedia's users and contributors' identities be verified, it would need to greatly reduce the number of U.K. users who can access the site.
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Remote Work Comes to Piloting Ships

A project in Denmark is testing technology that allows marine pilots to virtually board vessels, guiding them remotely from an onshore control room. According to Brian Schmidt Nielsen, head of Danish-owned pilot service DanPilot’s project, remote piloting could make up for a looming shortage of pilots. Detractors cite safety concerns and potential job losses, while unions push back against automation.
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South Korean White Hat Hackers Win World’s Top Hacking Contest, Again

White hat hacker team Maple Mallard Magistrates (MMM) from South Korea won the Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking competition at this year’s DEF CON conference, clinching the top prize for the fourth straight year at the world's largest open computer security hacking competition. MMM's victory came just a day after a team from Samsung, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, and Pohang University of Science and Technology claimed first place in the conference’s AI Cyber Challenge.
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IBM, Moderna Model Longest mRNA Molecule Using Quantum Simulation

Researchers at IBM and Moderna used a quantum simulation model to predict the secondary structure of a 60-nucleotide mRNA sequence, up from the previous best of a 42-nucleotide sequence. The use of modern error-correction methods to eliminate noise enabled researchers to scale up the simulation. A preliminary study showed that up to 354 qubits could be used for the same algorithms without noise.
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LHC Poised to Receive Major Tech Upgrade

Researchers are designing chips capable of withstanding the harsh radiation conditions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Currently, about 400 million particle collisions occur per second in the LHC, but that number is set to jump to 1.5 billion as the LHC undergoes upgrades. The researchers, from Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin, designed a “trigger” analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chip capable of sifting through about 60 petabytes of raw data, as well as a higher resolution ADC chip that reads out the signals from the detector and converts it to digital data for analysis.
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Conversations Remotely Detected from Cellphone Vibrations

Computer science researchers demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to three meters (about 10 feet) from a cellphone. The team at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) used a radar sensor and voice recognition software to wirelessly identify 10 predefined words, letters, and numbers with up to 83% accuracy. Explained Penn State's Suryoday Basak, "If we capture these same vibrations using remote radars and bring in machine learning to help us learn what is being said, using context clues, we can determine whole conversations."
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NSF Invests in AI-Ready Test Beds

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced over $2 million in planning grants to support the development of AI-ready test beds to accelerate the design, evaluation, and deployment of AI technologies. NSF's Ellen Zegura said the initiative "not only builds the foundation for new breakthroughs in AI research but also helps bridge the gap between research and applications by connecting researchers with real-world challenges and enabling them to explore how AI can be most effectively applied in practice.”
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Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked

Researchers in the Netherlands uncovered critical vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms for the TETRA radio standard, widely used by police, military, and intelligence agencies. Earlier, the team, from Midnight Blue, uncovered intentional backdoors and weak key reductions in TETRA's TEA1 algorithm. More recently, they found similar flaws in the end-to-end encryption solution through reverse-engineering. One flaw enabled a 128-bit key to be reduced to just 56 bits, enabling eavesdropping.
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