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Asia In Brief China last week approved rules that will see Beijing issue identity numbers that netizens can use as part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can use one logon across multiple online services.
China’s government will issue the credential, sometimes referred to as “Cyberspace IDs” or “online numbers”, after citizens provide verifiable identity documents. A “National Network Identity Authentication Public Service Platform” will run the enrolment process and the federated authentication tools that make them usable by third-party services.
Beijing’s aim is to provide a single credential netizens can use to access multiple government and private online services, instead of needing to set up accounts at each. Authorities assert that doing so will reduce the amount of personal information netizens share online and should therefore improve security across the country.
It’s not compulsory for Chinese citizens to acquire these IDs, and platforms are prohibited from discriminating against users that chose to persist with other credentials.
China’s government launched this scheme last year and according to state media reports the app used to issue cyberspace IDs has been downloaded over 16 million times and has facilitated more than 12.5 million authentication processes.
That’s a drop in the ocean given China’s population exceeds a billion and local tech giant Tencent boasts over 1.4 billion monthly users for its messaging services WeChat and Weixin. However once Beijing starts to push an initiative of this sort, netizens understand the need to get on board.
Xiaomi to develop custom silicon
Chinese consumer tech champ Xiaomi last week announced it has developed custom system-on-chips for its smartphones and smartwatches.
Named the XRING O1 and XRING T1 4G company described the smartphone chip as “built on a cutting-edge second-gen 3 nm process with 19 billion transistors … features a 10-core CPU and 16-core Immortalis-G925 GPU” plus a 6-core NPU offering 44 TOPS.”
UK-based chip design firm Arm published a blog post celebrating Xiaomi’s decision to build the XRING O1 with its Armv9.2 Cortex CPU cluster, Immortalis GPUs, and CoreLink Interconnect system IP. However at the at the time of writing Arm’s post has disappeared from its site – the above link comes from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Xiaomi proclaimed the chips represent a “statement of … long-term commitment to becoming a leader in core technologies.”
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NTT Docomo, which invented emoji, retires its custom jobs
In the early years of mobile telephony, while most of the world played Snake and sent SMS messages, Japan’s NTT Docomo created an ecosystem called ‘iMode’ that brought interactivity and apps to mobile handsets. One feature of those apps was Emoji, which NTT Docomo pioneered before the Unicode Consortium assumed responsibility for them.
NTT persisted with Emoji by maintaining its own set of the colorful icons. Until last week when it announced it would discontinue them as of June. The company advised Apple and Samsung Galaxy smartphones soon won’t include its own Emoji collection.
The company’s announcement says change is needed “Considering the current usage of emojis on devices”. Japanese outlet Nikkei suggested that could be a nod to increased use of messaging apps that offer “stickers” and other non-Emoji ways to express one’s intentions with graphics.
Pakistan pumps 2,000MW of power into AI and crypto
The government of Pakistan has reportedly allocated 2,000 megawatts of electricity to mining bitcoin and running artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Local media report that the country’s Finance Division and the Pakistan Crypto Council cooked up a plan to use surplus electricity to grow the local tech industry and attract investment.
Government officials apparently said Pakistan has land and energy to spare, both at prices that investors will appreciate. They also hope mining will prove lucrative in the short term, while becoming a datacenter destination will help with longer-term economic development.
MediaTek promises 2nm chip
Taiwanese chip design firm MediaTek last week revealed it’s close to taping out its first 2nm chip.
Speaking at the Computex event in Taipei, company CEO Rick Tsai didn’t specify the role for the chip, but said it’s being fabbed by fellow Taiwanese titan TSMC.
Tsai used his Computex keynote to outline a plan to embed AI in all its products, from cloud to edge. MediaTek has decided to ensure its CPUs can connect to Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion interconnect protocol also announced last week at Computex. ®
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