The Chinese army has put a blanket ban on the entry of Tesla vehicles in its office premises, following security concerns over cameras installed on the cars, as per a Reuters report said citing two people. The experts believe that the ban is similar to the USA’s move against Chinese telco Huawei citing national security. Share of Tesla, which sold around 1.5 lakh cars or 30% of its total deliveries in China in 2020, ended up 0.3% after falling 4.4% during the trade.
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A Russian man by the name of Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov has pleaded guilty in the USA district court of offering a Tesla worker $1 mn to bring down the company’s electric battery plant-based out in Nevada with ransomware and steal sensitive data for a ransom demand. Prosecutors alleged that Kriuchkov acted on behalf of foreign-based co-conspirators. Ransomware groups, in general, operates operating from safe havens hack into networks over the internet.
Chinese authorities summoned Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and eight other local tech firms over concerns of ‘deepfake’ tech on their content platforms. The country’s cyberspace administrator, in a statement, said that the officials of the public security ministry had a meeting with the tech firms to discuss “security assessments” and potential problems with deepfakes and audio social apps. Deepfakes use AI to create hyper-realistic but fake videos or audios.
The govt, in a written reply, told the Parliament that there was no proposal to appoint a regulator for social media platforms. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communications, Electronics and IT, in the statement, said that social media should not be abused or misused to defame, promote terrorism, rampant violence and compromise the dignity of women. The Minister said that social media platforms are enjoined to develop a robust grievance redress system.
Beijing has asked Alibaba to dispose of its media assets, said a Wall Street Journal report. Alibaba, having a key interest in online retail, has stakes in Chinese Twitter- called Weibo, Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post and others. The report said that the Chinese government see such influence as a potential challenge to the Chinese Communist Party authority and its own powerful propaganda assets.
Signal’s app and website have stopped working in mainland China without the use of a VPN. Cyber authorities of the countries have been very strict in the recent past. They were restricting the access of apps, media outlets and social media sites by banning them in the country. The app, however, was still available on Apple’s China app store. Both the website and app were reportedly working normally in Hong Kong.
Microsoft is rolling out a fix for the recovery of its services as users are facing access issues due to the publishing of a new update. The products affected include workplace messaging app Teams, Office 365, Exchange Online email, Azure cloud computing services etc. Over 26,000 people had reported issues with Teams, while 3,000 posted about problems with Office 365, and another 2,300 reported problems with Azure, as per Downdetector.
India will table a bill to ban cryptocurrencies, fine traders or even holding such digital currencies. The bill is said to be one of the world’s strictest law against cryptocurrencies as it will criminalise possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring of cryptocurrencies. India, when the bill become law, will be the first major country in the world to make even holding these digital currencies illegal. China has banned mining and trading but does not penalise possession.
Tencent has been put on notice by the Chinese authorities. The conglomerate was censured by the local antitrust watchdog on Friday. Media reports suggest that the token fine was just a beginning, as Tencent is said to be the next in line for larger scrutiny after the clampdown on Ant Group. Ant and Tencent, reports said, will set an example by the authorities for other fintech players. Tencent, Alibaba, JD.com and Baidu together control over 40 financial licenses.