China’s robotaxis charged ahead in 2021

Autonomous driving startups in China are in an arms race to put passengers in their machine-driven vehicles. Every few weeks, news arrives that another major player has got the greenlight to launch a new pilot program or a small-scale service. These press releases, often dotted with regulatory jargon and flowery language to aggrandize the companies’ […]

The long haul of Microsoft’s China localization

In 2019, when LinkedIn began asking for Chinese users’ phone numbers, it was clear that the professional social network would have to follow a different set of rules in the country. But it realized simply setting up the real-name verification regime required by Chinese authorities wasn’t enough; it faced a mounting task of balancing censorship […]

Apple iCloud, Twitter and Minecraft vulnerable to ‘ubiquitous’ zero-day exploit

A number of popular services, including Apple iCloud, Twitter, Cloudflare, Minecraft and Steam, are reportedly vulnerable to a zero-day exploit affecting a popular Java logging library. The vulnerability, dubbed “Log4Shell” by researchers at LunaSec and credited to Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba, has been found in Apache Log4j, an open source logging utility that’s used in […]

Baidu’s robotaxi service aims to be in 100 cities by 2030

Baidu keeps ramping up its autonomous driving ambitions. The Chinese tech company made its name in search engines and still relies greatly on search ads for revenues. But it’s hoping that its heavy bet on autonomous driving will pay off down the road. Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxi service, aims to be in 65 cities by […]

中国政府によるテック企業の規制強化が意味すること

中国政府が自国のテック企業に対する規制を強化している。アリババの金融子会社の不可解な上場中止、テック大手の独禁法違反による罰金処分、配車サーヴィス大手の滴滴出行のアプリ配信停止、TikTok運営元の海外上場保留──。相次ぐ締め付けの背景には、膨大なデータによって高まる市場支配に対する政府の不安と権威の強化、そして国家の利益を最優先にする戦略が関連している。
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