Welcome to the October 15, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Trio Win Nobel Economics Prize for Work on Tech-Driven Growth
• Chip Supply Chains Brace for China’s Rare-Earth Curbs
• Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets
• Digital Hand Enables Hands-Free Virtual Reality
• Apple Offers Hackers Bug Bounty of up to $2 Million
• Can Self-Flying Planes Transform the Skies?
• Beware of Radio Network Surveillance
• A New Job for Super Mario: Driving Instructor
• A DNA Search Engine
• End-to-End Encryption for Git Services
• Instagram to Limit Content for Teens Based on PG-13 Ratings
• AI Bots Wrote, Reviewed All Papers for Upcoming Conference
• 'Quantum Leap' in Secure Communication

Trio Win Nobel Economics Prize for Work on Tech-Driven Growth

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France, and Peter Howitt of Brown University for their work on technology-driven economic growth. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work explained how innovation and “creative destruction” fuel long-term prosperity. Aghion said AI had “fantastic growth potential” but called on governments to develop strict competition policies to manage the growth of new technology companies.
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Chip Supply Chains Brace for China’s Rare-Earth Curbs

China’s new export restrictions on rare earth minerals threaten to disrupt the global semiconductor supply chain. The curbs, which require licenses for any materials containing Chinese rare earths, could delay shipments for ASML, the only manufacturer in the world of machines that make the most advanced semiconductors, and raise costs for chipmakers reliant on rare-earth magnets and components. In response, U.S. President Donald Trump announced new export controls on "critical software," among other measures.
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Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets

About half of geostationary satellite communications, which carry sensitive data, are unencrypted and vulnerable to eavesdropping, according to researchers at the universities of California, San Diego, and Maryland. Over three years, the team used an $800 satellite receiver to capture unsecured communications, including phone calls, text messages, and military data. These findings exposed private data, including the location of military personnel, critical infrastructure communication, and personal information from cellular networks.
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Digital Hand Enables Hands-Free Virtual Reality

An AI-powered digital hand developed by University of Michigan computer scientists enables hands-free interaction in virtual and augmented reality. Controlled by voice commands, the HandProxy software allows users to grab, move, and resize virtual objects or even perform complex actions like “clear the table” without detailed instructions. Powered by GPT-4o, HandProxy interprets natural language to complete tasks.
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Apple Offers Hackers Bug Bounty of up to $2 Million

Apple has raised its bug bounty rewards to as much as $2 million (double the previous maximum) to motivate security researchers to uncover critical vulnerabilities in iPhones and Macs before they can be exploited. The increased payouts target zero-click flaws, proximity-based exploits, and physical-access vulnerabilities, with bonuses for bypassing features like Lockdown Mode and Gatekeeper. Apple also is adding tools to speed up payouts and improve transparency in its bug reporting program.
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Can Self-Flying Planes Transform the Skies?

Reliable Robotics and other aviation companies are testing fully autonomous flight systems for aircraft that eventually could eliminate the need for onboard pilots. Reliable’s Cessna Caravan recently flew itself in California as part of a U.S. Air Force contract. Joby Aviation also recently tested a pilotless Cessna for the Air Force. Autonomous aviation could significantly improve fuel efficiency through optimized flight paths, while reducing human labor demands and supporting more sustainable regional logistics by enabling aircraft to operate at lower cost.
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Beware of Radio Network Surveillance

Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology demonstrated a method for identifying individuals using standard Wi-Fi devices. They found Wi-Fi devices communicating with each other in a person's surroundings produce patterns based on radio waves that are similar to images captured by cameras. The individual does not need to have a Wi-Fi device in their possession, and special hardware is not needed to identify anyone in range of a wireless local area network.
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A New Job for Super Mario: Driving Instructor

University of Maryland researchers used AI to train a computer to play the 1992 Super Nintendo version of Mario Kart without error. They leveraged deep reinforcement learning to train an autonomous simulator to avoid collisions, rewarding it with points for passing checkpoints and taking points away for slowing down or spinning out. The goal is to create a roadmap for certifying AI technologies in self-driving vehicle fleets.
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A DNA Search Engine

A digital tool developed by computer scientists at Switzerland's ETH Zurich can search raw data of all DNA or RNA sequences stored in databases. The MetaGraph tool indexes and presents data in compressed form via complex mathematical graphs. MetaGraph provides complex linking of raw data and metadata and compression by a factor of about 300, making the data compact without losing any relevant information. MetaGraph has already indexed slightly less than half of the DNA/RNA sequence datasets available worldwide.
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End-to-End Encryption for Git Services

Computer scientists at Australia's University of Sydney have developed end-to-end encryption to safeguard git services. The method, compatible with Github, Bitbucket, and other existing git platforms, employs character-level encryption to reduce the amount of computational power and storage necessary to accomplish this by treating edits as new data that must be encrypted and appended to the existing data collection.
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Instagram to Limit Content for Teens Based on PG-13 Ratings

Instagram will begin limiting content that can be accessed by teenage users based on the PG-13 movie rating system, as part of Meta’s efforts to address child safety concerns. The new policy, set to roll out by year’s end, will apply to teens' feeds, searches, and conversations with AI chatbots. The move follows last year’s shift to default private accounts for users under 18.
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AI Bots Wrote, Reviewed All Papers for Upcoming Conference

A conference where all papers and their reviews were generated by AI will take place online on Oct. 22. Agents4Science 2025 will feature submissions from over 300 AI agents, of which 48 papers were accepted after AI-led peer review. Topics ranged from psychoanalysis to mathematics, with a focus on computational research. The conference was designed to capture a “paradigm shift” in how AI is used in science that has taken place over the past year, said James Zou, an AI researcher at Stanford University who co-organized the event.
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'Quantum Leap' in Secure Communication

Researchers participating in Germany's QuNET initiative demonstrated that individual photons can be transmitted from a moving aircraft. Working as a mobile node in a quantum network, the aircraft was equipped with an optical communication terminal featuring a module that produces quantum-entangled photons. The photons were beamed to a specialized mobile ground station where they were captured, coupled into a fiber optical cable, and sent to an ion trap to verify their quantum states.
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