India's top telco plans cloud PCs for its 475 million subscribers

PLUS: China bans AI leaders from visiting USA; Acer data leak suspect cuffed; and more

Asia In Brief India’s top telco Reliance Jio , which boasts over 460 million subscribers, will soon introduce a cloud PC.

Company chair Akash M Ambani on Saturday revealed the plan at Mumbai Tech Week. He said the device would be device-agnostic and require a user-provided screen.

Reliance Jio became India’s top mobile telco by creating its own handsets and selling them at very low prices, along with bundles of data and content. Similar offers from rivals have seen mobile phones become ubiquitous in India. Many are feature phones capable of running apps, but smartphones are also becoming highly prevalent. In November 2024 the nation’s telco regulator counted 896 million wireless subscriptions, 475 million at Reliance Jio alone.

The nation’s PC market is tiny by comparison: analyst firm IDC recently reported Q3 2024 sales of 4.49 million PCs. That number was a record but was also just 6.5 percent of the 68.8 million machines sold around the world in the quarter.

That’s a disproportionately small slice of the global market given India accounts for 18 percent of the world’s population.

If Reliance Jio can bring cloudy PCs to even ten percent of its customer base in a year, it will dramatically change the market.

Ambani didn’t detail when the cloud PCs will debut, but said the tech will scale to serve “hundreds of millions” of potential customers and be keenly-priced like the company’s other services and able to serve. He also said developers will be able to target the cloud PC platform, under terms that see them charged “less than 30 percent” to have their wares sold through a Jio service.

China fires tech minister, warns AI leaders

China has advised its AI leaders not to visit the USA, due to fears they could divulge secrets or be detained, the Wall Street Journal has reported

Beijing is apparently keen to avoid a repeat of the 2018 incident that saw Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou arrested in Canada at the behest of US authorities who wanted a word over the Chinese company’s activities in Iran. The CFO spent three years in Canada before a deferred prosecution deal allowed her to leave.

The advice to stay home means China’s AI leaders won’t put themselves in a position for similar legal strife. The Journal also reports that Beijing worries Chinese tech execs could accidentally reveal info about the extent of the nation’s AI capabilities.

Also in China, the nation’s minister for industry and information technology, Jin Zhuanglong, was replaced by Li Lecheng. Jin led China’s drive to develop semiconductor and AI tech. The reason for his replacement is not known, but he has apparently been out of the spotlight since December 2024 amid suggestions he may have been investigated for corruption.

Over-the-air upgrades for electric vehicle software also made news in China over the weekend, after the new rules governing the testing and distribution of such software came into force. Beijing won’t allow shipments of new cars known to have buggy software, and wants to establish a sandboxed environment in which it can test car firmware.

Thailand and Singapore arrest suspected serial data leaker

Royal Thai Police last week arrested a 39-year-old man suspected of 75 or more ransomware attacks.

Singapore’s Police Force alleged the man operated under names including “ALTDOS”, “DESORDEN”, “GHOSTR” and “0mid16B”, and is suspected to have “exploited vulnerabilities in the victims’ networks before stealing the victims’ data. The threat actor is also suspected to have published the stolen data for sale online when victims failed to pay the ransom demanded.”

Cybersecurity vendor Group-IB claimed it provided intelligence to help in the investigation and that the accused was behind “more than 90 instances of data leaks worldwide, including 65 across the Asia-Pacific region. It resulted in over 13TB of personal data which has been sold on the dark web.”

The accused has operated since at least 2020, and came to The Register’s attention in 2021 for an alleged attack on systems vendor Acer.

Google wants better maps of South Korea

Google has asked South Korea’s National Geographic Information Institute for access to its high-resolution maps, a request that’s previously failed.

Local media report that Google has requested of 1:5,000 scale map data and wants to export it to be used in its products. South Korea has refused such requests before, in 2007 and 2016, citing national security concerns.

Maps at the resolution Google wants are offered by South Korean web companies, which take care to obscure military installations and other sensitive locations. Google has promised to do the same.

National security and military authorities are apparently considering Google’s request. ®