Welcome to the May 30, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• ACM Recognizes Builders of a Vibrant Technical Community
• U.S. Tightens China Chip Curbs by Targeting Design Software
• DOE Unveils Supercomputer That Merges With AI
• Visa Clampdown for Chinese Students
• Virgin Media O2 Network Flaw Allowed Customer Phones to Be Tracked
• E-Tattoo Gauges Mental Strain
• Smart Fabric Uses Sound to Measure Touch, Pressure, Movement
• Czech Republic Accuses China of 'Malicious Cyber Campaign' Against Foreign Ministry
• Driverless Semi Trucks Are Here, with Little Regulation
• Issues with Rural Internet Leads Some States to Outer Space
• ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network
• Pakistan Allocates 2,000 Megawatts of Electricity to Bitcoin Mining, AI Datacenters
• 'Alarming' Rise in Regional Internet Censorship in China

ACM Recognizes Builders of a Vibrant Technical Community

ACM on Wednesday recognized five individuals for their contributions to building a vibrant technical community. Dan Garcia and Brian Harvey of the University of California, Berkeley, received the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for their advocacy of and advances in education to bring computing to all students. University of Utah's Manish Parashar received the ACM Distinguished Service Award for service and leadership in furthering the impact of computer and computational science on science and engineering. Judith Gal-Ezer at the University of Israel received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in recognition of her contributions to computer science education policy and research. The University of Southern California's Maja Mataric received the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for pioneering socially assistive robotics.
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U.S. Tightens China Chip Curbs by Targeting Design Software

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security reportedly ordered leading providers of electronic design automation software to stop shipments of their software to Chinese customers. This comes as a department spokesperson said it "is reviewing exports of strategic significance to China." The software is used to design everything from the highest-end chip processors to simple parts like power-regulation components.
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DOE Unveils Supercomputer That Merges With AI

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected Dell Technologies to deliver its next flagship supercomputer in 2026. The system will use Nvidia chips tailored for AI calculations and the simulations common to energy research and other scientific fields. DOE Secretary Chris Wright, who has compared AI’s development to the Manhattan Project, called the supercomputer a key tool for winning the global AI race.
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Visa Clampdown for Chinese Students

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, “including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” With an estimated 277,398 students pursuing primarily undergraduate and graduate degrees, China ranks only behind India among foreign countries with the highest number of students attending college in the U.S. For the 2023-2024 academic year, nearly a quarter of Chinese students were pursuing math and computer science, while 17% were majoring in a form of engineering.
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Virgin Media O2 Network Flaw Allowed Customer Phones to Be Tracked

IT specialist Dan Williams discovered that Virgin Media O2's failure to correctly configure its 4G calling software exposed the locations of tens of millions of its mobile customers for as long as two years. The network security flaw allowed anyone with a Virgin Media O2 sim card to track the location of any Virgin Media O2 mobile customer to the nearest mobile mast. Virgin Media O2 said the problem has been resolved.
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E-Tattoo Gauges Mental Strain

A device developed by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo and monitors brain signals and eye movements to gauge mental strain. The device captures both brainwave activity and eye movement, with a machine-learning algorithm classifying whether the wearer is in a low or high mental-load state based on subtle shifts in neural and ocular patterns.
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Smart Fabric Uses Sound to Measure Touch, Pressure, Movement

Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed smart textiles that use acoustic waves to measure touch, pressure, and movement. The SonoTextiles are made with woven glass fibers equipped with a small transmitter that emits sound waves at one end, and a receiver that measures whether the waves have changed at the other. Each transmitter works at a different frequency, so little computing power is needed to determine which fiber the sound waves have changed on.
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Czech Republic Accuses China of 'Malicious Cyber Campaign' Against Foreign Ministry

The Czech Republic is attributing cyberattacks against its Foreign Ministry's communication network to the Advanced Persistent Threat 31 (APT31) hacking group associated with the Chinese Ministry of State Security. According to the Foreign Ministry, the attacks, which began in 2022, targeted the nation's critical infrastructure, but a new communication system has been implemented already.
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Driverless Semi Trucks Are Here, with Little Regulation

Aurora Innovation's driverless truck has racked up more than 1,000 miles on Interstate 45 in Texas after becoming the first to drive on a U.S. highway without a human behind the wheel. Some auto safety experts and veteran truck drivers are concerned about the safety of autonomous trucks, especially given the lack of regulation and the bumpy rollout of robocars. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, "Comprehensive federal regulations specific to automated trucks are still under development."
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Issues with Rural Internet Leads Some States to Outer Space

Some U.S. states are beginning to offer subsidies to rural residents to provide them with satellite Internet, because installation of such a service is less expensive than that of fiber-optic cables, which can run more than $100,000 for a single home in remote areas. Nevada plans to devote $12.7 million in funding from a federal broadband subsidy program to Amazon's Project Kuiper, which aims to bring satellite Internet to around 4,400 rural addresses. State-funded programs in South Carolina and Maine will provide subsidies for Starlink satellite Internet in some rural areas.
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ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network

A group of anonymous researchers found local and state police across the U.S. are using Flock's AI-powered automatic license plate reader system to perform immigration-related searches as part of U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) investigations. Although federal law enforcement does not have a formal contract to use the system, the researchers identified more than 4,000 national and statewide searches performed by local and state police at the behest of the federal government or as an "informal" favor to federal law enforcement.
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Pakistan Allocates 2,000 Megawatts of Electricity to Bitcoin Mining, AI Datacenters

Pakistan's Finance Ministry said the country will allocate 2,000 megawatts of electricity as part of the first phase of a national initiative to use its surplus electricity to power AI datacenters and bitcoin mining. Headed by the government-backed Pakistan Crypto Council, the initiative is part of an expansive strategy to monetize surplus electricity, create high-tech jobs, and attract foreign investment.
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'Alarming' Rise in Regional Internet Censorship in China

A team including researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Stanford University identified instances of regional Internet censorship in China, with residents of Henan province denied access to five times more websites than average Chinese Internet users from November 2023 to March 2025. The researchers found close to 4.2 million domains, mainly from business-related websites, were blocked at some point during that period by the Henan firewall, compared with about 741,500 domains blocked by China's national firewall.
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