Asia in Brief Police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have reportedly charged a Google employee after the deaths of three men who followed a route set by Google Maps that led their car off an unfinished bridge.
The three were reportedly on their way to a wedding. Staff at the local public works department are also under investigation, as the unfinished bridge allegedly did not have barriers preventing entry.
Google has expressed sympathy for the deceased men’s families, and is co-operating with investigators.
Broadband in China is fast!
Statistics released last week by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reveal that as of October 31 the nation had 683 million broadband users – 663 million of whom enjoy speeds of at least 100 megabits per second. What’s more, 200 million have gigabit connections.
The stats also reveal that China has 126.9 mobile phone connections per 100 people, and 2.6 cellular Internet of Things devices in operation. Little wonder the Ministry also found downloads made by mobile devices in China topped 276,000 terabytes from January to October.
Indian supercomputer reportedly suffers outages, data loss
Indian outlet MediaNama last week reported that the AIRAWAT-PSAI supercomputer has experienced multiple serious outages, plus data loss.
The report claims a catastrophic failure in storage systems were the root cause of the incident, which saw the machine go offline from late July until early September.
The manufacturer of the computer’s storage systems scrambled experts from the UK, US, and Australia to repair the rig, but ten terabytes of data were lost.
AIRAWAT was once ranked Earth’s 135th mightiest supercomputer, and runs 81,344 cores provided by AMD EPYC 7742 processors.
The Register sought comment from the machine’s operator, India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing, but did not receive a response.
Yahoo! Japan photo SNAFU
Line Yahoo!, the Japanese/Korean social media and messaging giant, has fixed a glitch that meant users saw other account-holders’ images via a photo album app.
The platform apologized for the incident, which meant some users’ thumbnail views of photos displayed images belonging to someone else. The problem persisted for over a day.
The mess is yet another blow for the troubled biz. Earlier this year its plans to remediate significant infosec and privacy problems were rejected by Japan’s government, which sought a more rigorous fix.
Baidu robocabs approved for Hong Kong trial
Hong Kong’s government last Friday announced it had granted China’s Baidu a permit to run its Apollo robotaxis in the special administrative region.
Baidu’s cabs already operate in many cities across China. Hong Kong’s trial will see just ten of the robotaxis operate on North Lantau Island – the territory’s largest island, but also an area of very low population density. The island is, however, home to Hong Kong’s airport and Disneyland, so the robotaxis could be attractive for tourists.
Pakistan delays VPN registration deadline
Pakistan’s government has decided to extend the November 30 deadline for registration of all VPNs in use within the country.
Local outlet Dawn reported telecoms regulators have not set a new date for registration. The requirement is controversial as many Pakistanis rely on VPNs to do business with offshore clients. The government argues registration of VPNs will enhance national security, and has apparently admitted a proper public education campaign is needed to explain that position.
APAC Dealbook
Deals and alliances we spotted across the region last week included:
- Japan’s NTT Data acquired Niveus Solutions, a services org that specializes in Google Cloud Platform. Google named Niveus its “breakthrough partner” in Asia-Pacific for 2024. NTT will gain around 1,000 engineers with G-cloud skills from this deal, the value of which was not disclosed.
- Equinix and the National University of Singapore teamed up to explore sustainability and energy efficient solutions for datacenters in the region, and beyond.
- Japan’s SoftBank invested $1.5 billion in OpenAI.
- Toshiba last week revealed that its “revitalization plan” has already resulted in the early retirement or reallocation of 3,500 staff and will move into the next phase, in which its 23 staff divisions will be consolidated into 13 groups.
- South Korea is willing to offer local semiconductor firms low interest loans from a ₩14 trillion ($10 billion) fund it has set up to help them build infrastructure such as power transmission lines to support their new manufacturing facilities.
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