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Welcome to the July 16, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

President Trump at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit At the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday, U.S. President Trump touted more than $90 billion in corporate investment aimed at accelerating the development of AI in the state. Private equity firm Blackstone announced that it would invest $25 billion in new datacenters and energy infrastructure, while Google said it would invest $25 billion in datacenters and announced a $3-billion plan to upgrade two of Pennsylvania’s existing hydroelectric dams to produce more electricity.
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The New York Times; Brad Plumer (July 15, 2025)

A boy sits on a swing in a garden and looks at his smartphone EU members France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will test a blueprint for an age verification app to protect children online, the European Commission said on Monday. The setup for the age verification app is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallet set for rollout next year. Each country can customize the model according to its requirements, integrate it into a national app, or keep it separately.
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Reuters; Foo Yun Chee (July 14, 2025)

A woman uses her phone on May 7 by the People's Bank of China headquarters in Beijing China on Tuesday launched a government-run digital ID system that centralizes control over users' online identities. Replacing the existing "real-name registration" system managed by Internet companies, the new system issues a unique code tied to users' personal data, including facial scans. The system, currently voluntary, will allow the government to see the real identity behind online accounts across sites. Officials claim the system enhances privacy and data security, while critics argue it centralizes data in the hands of the government.
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The Washington Post; Katrina Northrop; Pei-Lin Wu (July 15, 2025)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with President Trump in April Nvidia has received assurances from the White House that it can sell its H20 AI chip in China days after CEO Jensen Huang met with U.S. President Trump. The U.S. Department of Commerce restricted sales of the chip to China earlier this year. The H20 chip was designed for Chinese customers and has been a top seller in the country since 2024.
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The Wall Street Journal; Raffaele Huang; Amrith Ramkumar (July 14, 2025)

The logo of the U.S. Department of Commerce The U.S. Commerce Department said Monday it has opened national security investigations into the import of drones and related components as well as polysilicon, a key component in semiconductors. U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month aimed at boosting the U.S. drone industry. The latest investigations could be used as a basis for even higher tariffs on imported drones, and on polysilicon and its derivatives.
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Reuters; David Shepardson (July 14, 2025)
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Monday that Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o, will be available to 30,000 workers across the city’s government. The move comes after a six-month test involving more than 2,000 city workers that showed the use of generative AI yielded productivity gains of up to five hours weekly. Lurie said he wants San Francisco to be “a beacon for cities around the globe on how they use this technology, and we’re going to show the way.”
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CNBC; Kate Rogers (July 14, 2025)

A packaged circuit board containing the chip Scientists at Northwestern University, Boston University, and the University of California, Berkeley, have built a photonic quantum system into a traditional one-square-millimeter electronic chip. The chip is capable of both generating quantum light and keeping the light stable with its built-in smart electronic system. It was manufactured in a commercial semiconductor foundry, demonstrating its large-scale production potential.
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Northwestern Now; Amanda Morris (July 14, 2025)

Cyborg Jellyfish Could Help Uncover Ocean Mysteries California Institute of Technology researchers developed biohybrid jellyfish by embedding microcontrollers and sensors into live moon jellyfish, enabling remote control of their movements. Electrodes stimulate muscle contractions in the cyborg jellyfish, allowing researchers to guide them to collect environmental data. They are equipped with a microcontroller, pressure and temperature sensors, and an SD card for data logging, all housed in a compact, 3D-printed neutrally buoyant structure.
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Los Angeles Times; Niamh Ordner (July 13, 2025)

UK Jobs Slowdown Is Concentrated in AI-Exposed Roles A new McKinsey & Co. study found a sharp decrease in U.K. employment postings, particularly in roles vulnerable to AI. Overall online listings fell 31% from March to May of this year compared to the same period in 2022, the year ChatGPT was released. Postings for AI-exposed jobs, such as in tech and finance, fell 38%, with some roles like programmers, management consultants, and graphic designers falling more than 50%.
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Bloomberg; Irina Anghel; Joe Mayes (July 13, 2025)

Security vulnerability on U.S. trains that let anyone activate the brakes on the rear car was known for 13 years — operators refused to fix the issue until now A critical security flaw in U.S. train systems first identified in 2012 allows attackers with software-defined radios to spoof signals between End-of-Train (EoT) and Head-of-Train (HoT) modules. This wireless link, meant to transmit telemetry data to the HoT, also permits remote brake commands to the EoT, so an attacker could trigger emergency braking without the operator's knowledge. The American Association of Railways took no action on the flaw until the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory last week.
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Tom's Hardware; Jowi Morales (July 13, 2025)

Training Process of LightShed and the calculation of individual loss function Researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt developed LightShed, a method for detecting and reversing image-based data poisoning tools designed to protect artists' work from being used in AI training by altering images to confuse machine learning models. The researchers aim to highlight the limitations of current defenses by showing that adversarial perturbations can be neutralized, similar to how image watermarking techniques have been removed by other machine learning methods.
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The Register (U.K.); Thomas Claburn (July 11, 2025)
The U.S.-backed National Vulnerability Database (NVD) halted updates in early 2024 due to funding cuts and staffing issues, creating a backlog of more than 25,000 unprocessed vulnerabilities. In April of this year, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system also faced disruption but received temporary funding from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which launched the "Vulnrichment" program to address gaps in analysis. Both the NVD and CVE teams are turning to AI to streamline data collection and analysis and reduce delays in processing security threats.
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MIT Technology Review; Matthew King (July 11, 2025)

Quantinuum has used its trapped-ion quantum computer to demonstrate a full set of quantum computations that can withstand error Researchers at quantum computing firm Quantinuum demonstrated key advances in fault-tolerant quantum computing using trapped-ion processors. Using the company’s 20-qubit H1-1 processor, the researchers created two magic states using only eight qubits and executed a two-qubit non-Clifford gate, achieving a logical error rate of 1 in 5,000, about one-tenth of the physical error rate. The researchers reported a record-low magic-state error rate of 7 per 100,000 operations.
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IEEE Spectrum; Charles Q. Choi (July 10, 2025)
Linking the World's Information: Essays on Tim Berners-Lee's Invention of the World Wide Web
 
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