Personal Tech

PLUS: China-linked cyber-attack on central Asian oil sector; Bottom falls out of Indian smartphone sales; And more!

Samsung found itself facing down controversy in South Korea last week, when the weather app pre-installed on many of its devices incorrectly labelled an island territory named Dokdo as part of North Korea.

Dokdo is a group of volcanic islets that is the subject of a territorial dispute between South Korea, North Korea, and Japan. Netizens were therefore outraged by a champion of South Korean industry handing the islands to foes in North Korea.

Mislabelling the map was therefore sufficiently controversial that Samsung quickly pushed an update to fix the error – and blamed data from The Weather Channel as the source of the mistake.

While we’re talking about islands …

The Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Kiribati, and the Republic of Nauru last week connected to the world over a submarine cable for the first time.

The three Pacific island nations hooked up to the East Micronesia Cable System, which NEC Corporation built and last week handed over to telecoms companies in the three nations.

The cable can carry 100Gbps to each country where it lands, and has capacity to reach 10 Tbps.

The three nations are collectively home to around 100,000 people.

The governments of Australia, Japan, and the USA funded construction of the cable as part of ongoing diplomatic efforts to woo Pacific nations at a time China is also active in the region.

Bitdefender spots alleged Chinese attack on Azerbaijan

Antivirus vendor Bitdefender last week published what it says is evidence of a China-backed “multi-wave intrusion targeting an Azerbaijani oil and gas company from late December 2025 through late February 2026.”

Bitdefender linked the attacks to the resurgent FamousSparrow crew, which apparently deployed “an evolved DLL sideloading technique” to drop the Deed RAT and Terndoor backdoors. The company’s researchers think attackers targeted a vulnerable Microsoft Exchange server.

Senior security researcher Victor Vrabie suggested the attack is a sign that Russia and China are both trying to gain a foothold in Azerbaijan’s energy infrastructure, to gain leverage over energy supplies to Europe. The central Asian nation is a major oil and gas producer, and exports much of its output through pipelines that reach Turkey and Georgia. The importance of those routes has grown thanks to slowing gas exports from the Middle East.

China seemingly shuns Nvidia to focus on its own alternatives

The United States has allowed several Chinese companies to acquire Nvidia’s H200 accelerators, but Beijing won’t let local buyers do the deed.

That’s the washup of President Trump’s visit to China last week, during which US authorities reportedly issued licenses allowing Nvidia to sell its wares to Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com.

But President Trump later remarked that China has not allowed its tech companies to buy H200s “because they chose not to, they want to develop their own.”

That’s perhaps the strongest signal yet that China has decided to decouple from foreign tech stacks.

Bottom drops out of India’s smartphone market

Analyst firm IDC last week reported that smartphone shipments in India slumped by 4.1 percent in the first quarter of 2026.

IDC said that subdued result would have been worse had brands not decided to front-load channel inventory before the cost of smartphone rise due to the soaring cost of memory.

The firm said the result “signals a structural turning point for one of the world’s largest smartphone markets” because device-makers who sell entry-level devices “face shrinking margins and reduced market viability as memory costs continue to rise.”

When consumers who buy sub-US$100 phones do upgrade, they “are being pushed upmarket by necessity rather than aspiration” – meaning demand is muted and will likely remain so for quite some time. ®