Asia in brief China’s Zhurong rover may have fallen victim to dusty solar panels, but while the robotic explorer was up and running, it found potential evidence of water on Mars.
The diary scientific advances published a paper last week describing “crusts, cracks, aggregates, and bright polygonal ridges on the surfaces of hydrated, salt-rich dunes” visited by the rover.
The product of “salt water from thawed frost/snow” is considered to be the most likely cause of these features.
The paper notes that Zhurong visited very low latitudes on Mars where temperatures could reach -5C, allowing very saline frost to form and then melt back into the dunes, causing the cracks and crusts observed by the rover.
That’s still a long way from finding water on Mars, but the paper explains: “This discovery sheds light on wetter conditions in the modern Martian climate and provides crucial clues for future scouting missions looking for signs of the presence of life, especially in comparatively low ones.” Wide warmer, more comfortable surface temperatures.”
AWS adds support in Korean
Amazon Web Services started offering support in Korean last week.
The decision means Korean language support is available via email, phone, and live chat for those with support contracts.
“As the number of Korean-speaking customers grows, AWS Support is investing in providing the best possible support experience,” said an AWS statement about the decision. This makes Korean, after English, Japanese and Chinese, only the fourth language in which the cloud colossus offers support.
Singtel re-org establishes digital infrastructure group
Singaporean telecoms company Singtel has undergone a reorganization, with the biggest change being the creation of a standalone infrastructure entity called Digital InfraCo, which will handle the company’s regional data center business, submarine cable and satellite carrier businesses, and the Paragon 5G MEC and cloud orchestration platform.
The company has also consolidated its consumer and corporate businesses in Singapore into a single operating company.
“Singtel has a large and unique portfolio of digital infrastructure assets across Asia, which is a key differentiator for the group,” said Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon. “Since COVID, accelerated digitization has transformed these assets, the passive backbone of our business, into an area of growth. Having invested heavily in these assets over the years, establishing ourselves as a standalone business will allow us to embrace new growth as their importance and appeal continues to grow.”
Deadline for SIM registration in the Philippines extended
The deadline for SIM card registrations in the Philippines has been extended by 90 days after less than half of the country’s more than 150 million SIM cards were registered under the program.
High rates of SMS spam and scams prompted the Philippines to require users to provide their carriers with their name, birthday, gender and address, and to provide details of a national ID card.
An April 26 deadline came and went, with less than half of users registering, leading to an extension announcement last week.
The main reason given for the extension was the difficulty of registering users in remote areas.
China’s digital spending tops $2 trillion
Analyst firm IDC forecast last week that China’s ICT spending on developing and running digital businesses will top $2 trillion over the next four years. “Regardless of the state of the economy, enterprises will not cut back on their investments in security, customer experience, systems integration services, workplace solutions, and infrastructure and IT operations optimization,” said Matthew Eastwood, IDC’s senior vice president, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Research. “We are in a period of transition from multiplied innovation to intelligent automation, with future digital infrastructure deployments becoming increasingly fragmented and enterprises entering into more partnerships with multiple public cloud providers as cloud becomes an operating model,” added Eastwood.
In other news
Our regional coverage last week included news that the US Department of Homeland Security is planning a 90-day sprint to assess threats emanating from China.
The Singapore government advocated the use of ad blockers to prevent fraud.
China said it is exploring 3D printing on the moon using lunar soil as a way to build structures needed to create a base on the natural satellite.
Singapore is bringing 5G internet to its southern islands — an area that includes arguably the city-state’s best beach as well as a key location for its massive maritime industry.
Samsung and SK Hynix both released difficult quarterly results as the semiconductor industry scrambles to overcome excess memory inventory.
The Chinese city of Changshu announced that it will start paying its employees salaries in digital yuan starting in May as the country strives to push ahead with e-currency adoption.
British politicians and big tech aren’t too happy about India’s forthcoming tech laws dealing with data localization.
South Korea announced it would prosecute Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin and others for their role in the collapse of the stablecoin Terra/Luna.
Japanese tech giant NTT said Tokyo should use its millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points to handle rising demand for wireless communications.
China has again signaled its desire to shape global IPv6 standards, aiming to have 750 million users actively using IPv6 by the end of 2023. – With Laura Dobberstein ®
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