TikTok reprieved - Asian Tech Roundup
Plus: Hyundai’s ICE arrests
Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look a US-Chinese deal to allow the social media app to continue operating in America, South Korea’s shock at Hyundai workers being rounded up and shackled at a US facility and Tata’s moves to attract Apple.
Never say never, but the long saga of the TikTok-ban-that-wasn’t may be drawing to a close. The sanction, voted for by the US Congress ostensibly on national security grounds, came after an attempt to force Chinese owner ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company was stymied in the courts. However, since returning to power, and having found TikTok rather useful for his purposes, Donald Trump has repeatedly shifted the goalposts, ignoring Congress and delaying the deadline.
Now the US and China have reached a deal to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US. The agreement involves shifting TikTok’s US operations into a new company, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake (below the 20% threshold defined in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) and American companies holding the majority ownership. American users will have a US-specific app with their data kept separate from that from other countries, and TikTok US will likely licence ByteDance’s algorithms.
China has hailed the deal as a win-win, seeing it as a successful move in a wider game of trade negotiations that also saw it drop an antitrust probe into Google, while some on the US side have questioned the algorithms remaining in ByteDance’s hands.
Australia
- Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued guidance for social media firms on how to implement age assurance to keep under-16’s off social media from this December. The Commissioner has made clear that multiple forms of age assurance technologies should be deployed. Source
- Atlassian is to acquire developer productivity insight platform DX for $1 billion. DX allows organisations to analyse how productive their engineering teams are and identify bottlenecks slowing them down. Source
China
- Donald Trump confirmed an extension of the deadline to close TikTok, after negotiations with China seem close to an agreement. However, US critics argue that China will retain control of the algorithms that made the social media app contentious in the first place. Source
- China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has stated that a preliminary investigation has found Nvidia violated the country’s anti-monopoly law when it acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2020. Nvidia share price has responded accordingly. Source
- China's Cyberspace Administration has reportedly told tech companies to stop using the Nvidia H20 chips which had specifically been manufactured for the Chinese market. CEO Jensen Huang said he will be patient in the face of the latest back and forth over high-performance chips for China. Source
- China has also launched an anti-discrimination investigation into US trade policy over chips and a separate investigation into the suspected dumping of imports of US produced analogue chips. The investigations coincide with a fresh round of US -China trade talks. Source
- From 1st November, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) will enforce its new incident reporting measures which stipulate network operators in China reporting serious incidents within the hour, or for very serious events, within 30 minutes – or face penalties. Source
- Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) which is China’s leading chip producer is trialling the country’s first domestically produced advanced chipmaking equipment in a bid to challenge western rivals in producing AI processors. Source
- DeepSeek has demonstrated improved reasoning of its R1 LLM through trial-and-error based reinforcement learning. Source
- A Chinese threat actor TA415 has been observed using spear phishing against the US. government, think tanks and academic organizations, masquerading as the current Chair of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition. Source
- Huawei is targeting emerging markets with datacentres and AI chips, in competition with US players. Source
India
- Madhya Pradesh state high court has stopped live-streaming hearings to prevents lawyers being clipped and memed on social media. Source
- A group of Indian startups is urging the government to be more transparent in its investigation of digital competition, claiming that US tech giants are acting as gatekeepers, extracting fees and quashing competition. The Digital Competition Bill is currently on hold. Source
- Tata is moving to position itself as India’s go-to manufacturer for Apple as the iPhone maker seeks to divest from China for the US market . Source
Japan
- X's requirement that non-members must subscribe in order to request the deletion of harmful posts likely violates Japanese laws against imposing excessive burdens on victims of abuse, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications says. Source
- Sony is pushing ahead with deploying AI in video game development and media, to the dismay of creatives, insisting it wants to enhance - not replace - human activities.Source
South Korea
- 316 South Korean workers returned home on Friday after being held for a week following a raid by now notorious ICE agents of a Hyundai plant in the US. The South Korean government expressed “strong regret” at the raid, which is probably diplomatic speak for “livid.” The government now says it is investigating potential human rights violations during the raid and detention of Korean workers after some of the workers reporting access to medication being withheld and being barred from making calls. Source
- Samsung has begun the rollout of its long awaited One UI 8 update for Android 16 for Galaxy devices. Source