Welcome to the February 28, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• U.K. Government Delays New AI Bill for Six Months
• Chinese Team's Record Transmission Lays Ground for Quantum Internet
• Larry Ellison's Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust
• Mozambique Retools Weather Tech for Effective Forecasting
• Computing Leaders Propose Measures to Combat Tech-Facilitated Partner Violence, Human Trafficking, Child Exploitation
• Apple Pulls Data Protection Tool After U.K. Government Security Row
• Head-Mounted Robot Aids Eye Surgery
• AI Can Decode Digital Data Stored in DNA in Minutes
• China Struggles to Master High-End Machine Tools
• EU to Spend Nearly a Billion Euros to Protect Undersea Cables
• California's Radical Idea for Data Privacy: Enforce the Law
• Trump Team Seeks to Toughen Biden's Chip Controls Over China
• AI Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Startups

U.K. Government Delays New AI Bill for Six Months

The U.K. government has delayed publication of its AI Bill until the summer. The bill is expected to require companies to submit their AI models to the U.K. AI Security Institute for testing. A senior Labor Party source noted that there still are "no hard proposals in terms of what the legislation looks like."
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Chinese Team's Record Transmission Lays Ground for Quantum Internet

Researchers at China's Tsinghua University, the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, and the North China University of Technology developed a quasi-quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol, which achieved a record data transmission rate of 2.38 kbps over 104.8 km (65 miles) of standard telecommunications optical fiber. The protocol, which can detect eavesdropping, could help pave the way for a quantum Internet.
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Larry Ellison's Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust

Oracle's Larry Ellison co-founded Sensei Ag on the Hawaiian island of Lanai with the goal of using technology to revolutionize the way people eat and to feed the world. Sources say the challenges Sensei has faced from the island’s winds, weather, and more, has resulted in the company producing only enough lettuce and cherry tomatoes to supply local groceries and restaurants. The company’s focus has shifted to developing a software/hardware package to boost indoor farming productivity.
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Mozambique Retools Weather Tech for Effective Forecasting

Mozambique's National Institute for Disaster Management and Italy's International Center for Environmental Monitoring Research Foundation (CIMA) have partnered to revamp Mozambique's early warning system to improve forecasts and responses to extreme weather. The institute has implemented an upgraded version of CIMA's Mydewetra platform, which produces maps and issues alerts based on satellite imagery, meteorological station data, and numerical models. The system has been updated to integrate Mozambique's disaster-risk data into the African Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Early Action System.
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Computing Leaders Propose Measures to Combat Tech-Facilitated Partner Violence, Human Trafficking, Child Exploitation

A new report from ACM's Technology Policy Council (TPC) looks at how computer technologies are used to commit intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and child exploitation. In "TechBrief: Technology Policy Can Curb Domestic Violence, Human Trafficking, and Crimes Against Children," the TPC calls for legislators and policymakers to assess the technologies that facilitate tech abuse crimes and expand laws, regulations, and policies to enhance protections against tech abuse.
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Apple Pulls Data Protection Tool After U.K. Government Security Row

Apple's Advanced Data Protection (ADP) tool is unavailable to U.K. customers following a request from the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act to access user data to which Apple itself has no access. The ADP tool allows account holders to view photos, documents, and other items stored on Apple's iCloud via end-to-end encryption. U.K. Apple users have been unable to activate the ADP service as of Feb. 21, and access for existing users will be disabled at some point.
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Head-Mounted Robot Aids Eye Surgery

A robotic surgery device developed by University of Utah researchers can assist surgeons in making small, precise movements while performing eye surgery. The robot, mounted to the patient's head, employs a haptic interface that compensates for hand tremors and head motion and scales the surgeon's movements down to as small as 1 micrometer.
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AI Can Decode Digital Data Stored in DNA in Minutes

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed an AI system that can accurately decode data stored in DNA sequences within 10 minutes. The system, called DNAformer, features a deep learning model that can reconstruct DNA sequences, an error detection and correction algorithm, and a decoding algorithm that corrects any remaining errors while converting the information to digital data.
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China Struggles to Master High-End Machine Tools

China has long faced difficulty in developing the hardware and software that operate high-precision computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools. Challenges range from the government's shift in focus to robotics, profitability issues, and Siemens' and Fanuc's market dominance. While Chinese firms dominate the middle- and low-end of the industry, Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Robert Voyle is confident China eventually will enter the high-end CNC market.
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EU to Spend Nearly a Billion Euros to Protect Undersea Cables

The European Commission's executive vice president in charge of security, Henna Virkkunen, said on Feb. 21 that nearly €1 billion of its budget will be redirected to increasing undersea cable surveillance and assembling a fleet of emergency repair vessels. Said Virkkunen, "We want to make sure Europe is equipped not only to prevent and detect sabotage to cables but also to actively deter, repair, and respond to any threat to critical infrastructure."
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California's Radical Idea for Data Privacy: Enforce the Law

California requires data brokers to register with the state or face fines of $200 per day, a requirement that could give its Delete Act some teeth at a time when noncompliance with state data privacy laws is a significant issue. The state’s privacy watchdog recently filed suit against National Public Data for failure to comply with the registration requirement.
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Trump Team Seeks to Toughen Biden's Chip Controls Over China

The Trump administration is working to expand the Biden administration's efforts to prevent China from gaining an edge in the semiconductor industry. U.S. officials recently met with their counterparts from Japan and the Netherlands about restricting Tokyo Electron Ltd. and ASML Holding NV engineers from maintaining semiconductor gear in China. The administration could impose additional restrictions on the quantity of AI chips that can be exported worldwide without a license, and could tighten restrictions on Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co.'s main chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.
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AI Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Startups

Today's AI startups are achieving tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with small teams, using AI to improve efficiency, and many have no need for investors. Afore Capital's Gaurav Jain likens it to the wave of companies that emerged after Amazon rolled out low-cost cloud computing services, but noted that "this time, we're automating humans as opposed to just the datacenters."
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