Private Tech
PLUS: China-linked cyber-attack on central Asian oil sector; Backside falls out of Indian smartphone gross sales; And extra!
Samsung discovered itself dealing with down controversy in South Korea final week, when the climate app pre-installed on a lot of its gadgets incorrectly labelled an island territory named Dokdo as a part of North Korea.
Dokdo is a bunch of volcanic islets that’s the topic of a territorial dispute between South Korea, North Korea, and Japan. Netizens had been subsequently outraged by a champion of South Korean trade handing the islands to foes in North Korea.
Mislabelling the map was subsequently sufficiently controversial that Samsung rapidly pushed an replace to repair the error – and blamed information from The Climate Channel because the supply of the error.
Whereas we’re speaking about islands …
The Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Kiribati, and the Republic of Nauru final week linked to the world over a submarine cable for the primary time.
The three Pacific island nations hooked as much as the East Micronesia Cable System, which NEC Company constructed and final week handed over to telecoms corporations within the three nations.
The cable can carry 100Gbps to every nation the place it lands, and has capability to achieve 10 Tbps.
The three nations are collectively dwelling to round 100,000 individuals.
The governments of Australia, Japan, and the USA funded development of the cable as a part of ongoing diplomatic efforts to woo Pacific nations at a time China can also be energetic within the area.
Bitdefender spots alleged Chinese language assault on Azerbaijan
Antivirus vendor Bitdefender final week published what it says is proof of a China-backed “multi-wave intrusion focusing on an Azerbaijani oil and gasoline firm from late December 2025 via late February 2026.”
Bitdefender linked the assaults to the resurgent FamousSparrow crew, which apparently deployed “an developed DLL sideloading method” to drop the Deed RAT and Terndoor backdoors. The corporate’s researchers suppose attackers focused a susceptible Microsoft Alternate server.
Senior safety researcher Victor Vrabie advised the assault is an indication that Russia and China are each making an attempt to achieve a foothold in Azerbaijan’s power infrastructure, to achieve leverage over power provides to Europe. The central Asian nation is a serious oil and gasoline producer, and exports a lot of its output via pipelines that attain Turkey and Georgia. The significance of these routes has grown because of slowing gasoline exports from the Center East.
China seemingly shuns Nvidia to focus by itself options
The USA has allowed a number of Chinese language corporations to amass Nvidia’s H200 accelerators, however Beijing received’t let native consumers do the deed.
That’s the washup of President Trump’s go to to China final week, throughout which US authorities reportedly issued licenses permitting Nvidia to promote its wares to Chinese language tech corporations together with Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com.
However President Trump later remarked that China has not allowed its tech corporations to purchase H200s “as a result of they selected to not, they wish to develop their very own.”
That’s maybe the strongest sign but that China has determined to decouple from international tech stacks.
Backside drops out of India’s smartphone market
Analyst agency IDC final week reported that smartphone shipments in India slumped by 4.1 p.c within the first quarter of 2026.
IDC mentioned that subdued end result would have been worse had manufacturers not determined to front-load channel stock earlier than the price of smartphone rise as a result of hovering price of reminiscence.
The agency mentioned the end result “alerts a structural turning level for one of many world’s largest smartphone markets” as a result of device-makers who promote entry-level gadgets “face shrinking margins and diminished market viability as reminiscence prices proceed to rise.”
When shoppers who purchase sub-US$100 telephones do improve, they “are being pushed upmarket by necessity moderately than aspiration” – that means demand is muted and can probably stay so for fairly a while. ®
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