Tag: Microsoft Corp

Bill Gates Meets Xi Jinping in First Visit to China Since 2019

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In a rare encounter with an American business figure, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, met Friday with Bill Gates as officials from Washington were set to arrive in Beijing in an effort to restart bilateral discussions. Mr. Xi told Mr. Gates that he was “the first American friend I met in Beijing this year,” according to People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper. Mr. Xi also said he wanted to build stronger ties with Mr. Gates’s philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to help with aid to developing countries. The…

Chinese Malware Hits Systems on Guam. Is Taiwan the Real Target?

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Around the time that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was examining the equipment recovered from the wreckage of the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast in February, American intelligence agencies and Microsoft detected what they feared was a more worrisome intruder: mysterious computer code that has been popping up in telecommunications systems in Guam and elsewhere in the United States. The code, which Microsoft said was installed by a Chinese government hacking group, raised alarms because Guam, with its Pacific ports and vast American air base, would…

LinkedIn Will Cut Over 700 Jobs Worldwide and Shut Its China App

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LinkedIn, the networking platform used by millions of employees and companies, said on Monday it will pare down its operations in China, capping a multiyear pullback that exemplified the challenges of running a foreign business in China. The company, owned by Microsoft, said it will lay off 716 employees worldwide, including teams dedicated to engineering and marketing in China, because of slumping demand. It did not say how many of those layoffs will be in China. LinkedIn will also shut its China job posting app, a bare-bones version of its…

China’s Search Engines Have More Than 66,000 Rules Controlling Content, Report Says

Chin@Strategy

China’s internet censorship is well known, but a report has quantified the extent of it, uncovering more than 66,000 rules controlling the content that is available to people using search engines. The most diligent censor, by at least one measure, is Microsoft’s search engine Bing, the only foreign search engine operating in the country, according to the report, which was released on Wednesday by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group at the University of Toronto. The findings suggested that China’s censorship apparatus had become not only more pervasive, but…

Why Chatbots like ChatGPT Weren’t Invented in China

Chin@Strategy

Along the way, Beijing tamed the industry’s ambition and blunted its innovative edge. But tech companies and investors also have themselves to blame for falling behind their Silicon Valley counterparts. Even before the government started to impose a stronger hand on them, Chinese tech leaders were laser-focused on making money and reluctant to spend on research projects that weren’t likely to yield revenue in the short term. After the government’s onslaught in the past few years, executives are even less inclined to invest in long-term ventures. In 2021, the United…

Big Tech Reconsiders the “Made in China” Way

Chin@Strategy

Looking beyond China This month, Apple is expected to release the iPhone 14. Beyond rumors, little is known about what the crew from Cupertino, Calif., has planned for the company’s newest version of its nearly ubiquitous smartphone. But there is one major change that most consumers will probably fail to notice: A small but growing number of the latest iPhones will be manufactured outside China, report The Times’s Daisuke Wakabayashi and Tripp Mickle. That’s a big change for Apple, and it is not alone. After years of growing their Chinese…

Microsoft Seizes 42 Websites From a Chinese Hacking Group

Chin@Strategy

Microsoft said on Monday that it had seized 42 websites from a Chinese hacking group in an effort to disrupt the group’s intelligence-gathering operations. The company said in a news release that a federal court in Virginia had granted Microsoft’s request to allow its Digital Crimes Unit to take over the U.S.-based websites, which were being run by a hacker group known as Nickel or APT15. The company is redirecting the websites’ traffic to secure Microsoft servers to “help us protect existing and future victims while learning more about Nickel’s…

LinkedIn to End Service in China, Citing ‘Challenging’ Environment

Chin@Strategy

Since Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, revenue from the business has tripled. Mr. Nadella told investors in July that LinkedIn’s revenue had surpassed $10 billion in annual sales, up 27 percent from the previous year. LinkedIn declined to comment beyond its announcement. While Microsoft has tried to build a market in China for more than a decade, it has had only modest success. Last year, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said the country accounted for less than 2 percent of its revenue. Microsoft Windows and Office are common…