Asian Tech Roundup: Philippines taxes Big Tech
Plus: Fire at Indian iPhone plant could force sourcing from China
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Philippines taxes Big Tech
Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at the Philippines levying 12% VAT on online platforms to level the playing field for local businesses, the fire at a Tata iPhone assembly plant and South Krea’s crackdown on sexually explicit deepfakes.
Australia
- Attackers are exploiting platforms like Atlassian to launch convincing phishing attacks on law firms and other corporations in Australia and the APAC region. Source
- Data from more than 300,000 customers of tech retailer digiDirect has been leaked online. Source
- Australians have lost at least $43.4 million in 2024 from social media scams. Meta has now removed 9,000 Facebook pages used in the scams. Source
China
- China has published daft rules for satellite broadband providers, including that they immediately delete and report any illegal material to the authorities. Source
- TikTok owner ByteDance plans to develop an AI model trained primarily with chips from Huawei as it seeks to mitigate possible US sanctions. Source
- The government is reportedly seeking to dissuade Chinese companies from using AI chips made by Nvidia. Source
- China Telecom claims to have trained a 100-billion parameter AI model using only domestic hardware, including AI chips from Huawei, as the country seeks to overcome US-led trade restrictions on AI chips. Source
- A China-linked threat actor called CeranaKeeper is stealing data from organisations in Southeast Asia, according to security vendor ESET. Source
- China has unveiled a new lunar spacesuit which the authorities say will enable astronauts to walk, climb, drive rovers and conduct scientific experiments during future moon landings. Source
- Investment by Chinese companies in overseas clean energy technology projects has exceeded $100 billion since the start of 2023. Source
- Chipmaker XMC which specialises in NOR Flash memory chips is to float on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Source
India
- Extensive fire damage at Tata’s iPhone component plant in Tamil Nadu could force Apple suppliers to turn back to Chinese manufacturers. Source
- India is the holder of a dubious record: the government shuts down the internet way more than any other country. Internet Society Pulse estimates this has cost the economy $216 billion in the last 10 years. Source
- Amazon workers in New Delhi have complained of being dangerously overworked during a heat wave earlier this year. Source
- Chennai police arrested 600 Samsung employees who had organised a protest demanding union recognition and higher wages . Source
- Google is looking to clamp down on the sideloading of apps to Android in India, after a spate of scams and frauds involving malicious unofficial apps. Source
- Google’s Gemini Live AI chatbot is now available in Hindi with support for eight other Indian languages to follow. Source
Japan
- Japan has launched an antitrust investigation into the GenAI market which is currently dominated by US tech giants. Source
- SoftBank is to invest $500 million in OpenAI’s latest fundraising round. Other investors in the round include Thrive Capital and Microsoft. Source
- Fujitsu is to partner with Supermicro to build liquid-cooled servers based on Fijitsu’s soon-to-be-released Arm-based MONAKA processor. Source
- Toyota is investing an additional $500 million in air taxi EV startup Joby Aviation. Source
Malaysia
- Malaysia is drawing up a national cloud policy and regulations to encourage the ethical use of AI. Source
- Oracle is to invest more than $6.5 billion in cloud infrastructure in Malaysia. Source
Philippines
- The Philippines is to levy a 12% tax on online services provide by mainly US-based big tech firms in order to protect domestic suppliers. Source
- IT outsourcing and business process management will continue to grow strongly in the Philippines despite fears about AI disruption, according to Jack Madrid, CEO of the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines . Source
Singapore
- Singapore is mulling new legislation to force platform providers to be more responsive to user complaints of online abuse. Source
- Singapore has introduced biometric immigration screening in Changi Airport. Source
South Korea
- Viewing sexually explicit deepfake images and video in South Korea now carries a penalty of up to three years in jail after lawmakers passed new legislation banning their possession. Source
- Samsung is to start shipping the automative industry’s first PCIe 4.0 solid state disk based on eighth-generation vertical NAND. Source