The latest technology news from across Asia-Pacific
Snapchat has blocked over 415,000 Australian accounts citing "technical limitations" as it prepares for the country's under-16 social media ban. The blocks expose the gap between policy ambition and implementation reality, with platforms facing A$49.5M fines if they can't verify age and location by December 10.
Bazaars' ORC-55 token standard launches on ten chains simultaneously at identical contract addresses, eliminating bridge dependencies. The commerce-focused spec locks out admin functions—no minting, upgrades, or pauses post-deployment. Whether enterprise payment systems need blockchain tokens this rigid remains an open question.
A charity organisation needed synchronized radio playback across all listeners without budget for Icecast or WebRTC. The solution: schedule-driven MP3 serving with client-side offset calculations using PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL. It's clever, but it won't scale.
Music Sharity addresses the streaming silo problem - convert links between Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube Music, and Tidal without handing over listening data. Built on Flutter, uses the Odesli API, and works offline. No iOS version yet.
New dependency-free Go library offers single API across OpenAI, Anthropic, and six other LLM providers. Addresses real production pain: companies like Assembled already handle millions of monthly LLM requests via custom Go infrastructure, suggesting demand for standardised tooling.
Replit's Agent now scaffolds, codes, tests and deploys functional web apps from natural language prompts. A developer built a complete Pokémon search application in under two hours without writing code. The shift signals AI-assisted development moving from novelty to viable workflow.
Developers are using conversational AI editors like Cursor to build applications through prompts rather than manual coding. Engineering leader Nikola Brežnjak demonstrates the approach with a Pokémon search app that required zero hand-written code. The technique raises questions about what 'coding' means when the syntax becomes conversational.
The US government's $42.5 billion rural broadband rollout faces a 58,000-worker shortage, pushing wages up across fiber installation roles. The crunch affects overlapping pools for data center construction—relevant for APAC enterprises eyeing US edge infrastructure or hiring from shared talent markets.
Sklad, an open-source snippet manager built with Rust and Tauri v2, promises offline-first operation with AES-256 encryption. The project highlights Tauri's positioning against Electron for security-focused desktop tools, though minimal GitHub traction (3 stars, zero forks) suggests niche appeal in a space dominated by IDE extensions.
A pushback is emerging against Model Context Protocol implementations in production environments. Critics argue the protocol adds unnecessary complexity - dual codebases, context bloat, debugging nightmares - when simpler 'Skill Pattern' approaches can integrate AI with existing business logic at lower cost.
NBCUniversal is streaming every 2026 Winter Olympics event exclusively through Peacock Premium ($11/month, $18 ad-free), marking the network's most aggressive streaming push yet. While select events air on NBC, CNBC, and USA Network, cord-cutters need a subscription. The strategy doubles as a test of NBCUniversal's connected TV infrastructure during a major live event.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are in Italy for the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, officially to protect American officials. Italian public outcry follows recent ICE-related deaths in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Qatar deployed over 100 security personnel and military vehicles.