LG Electronics opened a new research and development center within the Gasan R&D Campus in southwestern Seoul that is dedicated to air-cleaning technologies and solutions, the company said Wednesday.

Called the Air Science Research Center, it will focus on developing solutions for use in all LG air purifiers, air conditioners and dehumidifiers to upgrade their ability to eliminate dust, odors and microorganisms.

By examining the properties of dust, toxic gases and microorganisms that accumulate under different conditions, researchers at the center will seek more effective methods of cleaning the air in different spaces within a home — for example, the living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

“As consumers are paying more attention to clean air, the company is ramping up R&D efforts for air solutions that will enhance LG’s current air-solution products,” a company representative said.

The report evaluated 11 vendors on Strategy, Market Presence and Current Offering, and Nutanix was positioned as the overall leader, Nutanix said in a press statement.

Nutanix believes that these results, combined with its history of high rankings in analyst research, further solidifies its place as a continued market leader across enterprise cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure.

“We believe our leadership position is a result of our strong product offering and commitment to providing our customers with the freedom they need to build their infrastructure and choose their cloud provider on their terms,” said Dheeraj Pandey, Chairman, Founder and CEO of Nutanix.

“We couldn’t agree more with the Forrester report, which states that ‘hyperconvergence is evolving rapidly to reach the mainstream as flexible, integrated compute and storage infrastructure is central to a firm’s ability to do business in a marketplace with changing customer expectations.’ We are seeing enterprises of all industries embracing our solution, and we are proud to be the market leader. We’ll continue to be hyper-focused on our customers, to enable their success and support their missions.”

The Forrester report shows that Nutanix has maintained its position atop the HCI market, with its commitment to innovation for its customers across all segments and geographies, and strong sales momentum extending its lead and strategic acquisitions. Acquiring technology vendors like Calm, Minjar and Netsil earlier this year has enabled the company to continue innovating and provide additional capabilities, the statement added.

In September, Nutanix announced its largest deal in company history. In August, Nutanix announced its Enterprise Cloud OS Hyperconvergence-based solution was certified for SAP HANA, and closed to acquisition of Frame.

The report further states “Nutanix has a clear, impressive road map for its product lines. It switched from solely offering an appliance to a solution with a software-only stack for certified hardware platforms, a strategy that has delivered results.” Announcing its fourth quarter financial results in August, the company proved its strategy is working, driving 66 percent year-over-year growth software and support billings in Q4, a 49 percent year-over-year increase in Q4 software and support revenue, and achieving 78 percent non-GAAP gross margin.

The Office of National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB), the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (NECTEC), the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) and the Ministry of Science and Technologies have joined up to help alleviate poverty in Thailand.

Sarun Sumriddetchkajorn, executive director of NECTEC, said the centre had developed the Thai People Map and Analytics Platform (TPMAP) to pinpoint the problems people in different parts of Thailand are facing.

He explained that policymakers can use TPMAP to come up with precise poverty programmes that are suitable for each poverty-stricken person in each province, district or sub-district.

TPMAP’s “Big Data” system can help improve the quality of people’s life in terms of increasing income, reducing living costs and boosting employment opportunities.

Suttipong Thajchayapong, a senior researcher at NECTEC, said that to understand poverty in the country, three questions first need to be answered: Who are the poor? What are their basic needs? And how can their poverty be alleviated?

These questions can be more precisely answered using the TPMAP, which integrates data from different government agencies.

The individual data sources do not need to be 100-per-cent accurate and different sources can be used to confirm facts.

At present, TPMAP uses the census-based Basic Minimum Needs (BMN) data of approximately 36 million individuals from the Interior Ministry’s Community Development Department and register-based data of approximately 11.4 million

individuals from the Finance Ministry.

“Basically, if a person is found to be poor from both sources, then he or she can be identified as the target poor,” Suttipong said.

He explained that TPMAP uses the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by Oxford Poverty, the Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). TPMAP also uses five poverty benchmarks: healthcare, education, income, living standards and access to public services.

As for answering the question of what poverty-stricken people’s basic needs are, the TPMAP uses details from the BMN data collected annually by the Community Development Department.

The platform processes and analyses BMN data to calculate the number of individuals who can be identified as the target poor.

TPMAP also compares individual indicators from one year to the next to see if poverty has in fact been reduced.

These year-to-year comparisons can be used to assess and choose suitable poverty alleviation programmes.

Following the yardstick

As for its benchmarks, in healthcare, for instance, it focuses on information such as the weight of a newborn in a family – if it is above 2.5 kilograms and if medication is used in a suitable manner.

In terms of living standards, the condition of the house is checked, along with whether there is access to drinking water and if it is in a tidy and hygienic condition.

In terms of education, which is designed for children aged between six and 14 in the household, the survey checks to see if the children have received their mandatory nine years of education.

The platform also checks to see if the family earns less than Bt2,667 per head per month, and for access to public services, it focuses on the elderly and disabled people in the household, to see if they are properly taken care of by their family, the community, government or private agencies.

Sarun said 36,647,817 people were surveyed according to TPMAP this year, and 1,032,987 were targeted as poor people.

The top five poorest provinces in the country were identified as Mae Hong Son, Nan, Tak, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai has the largest number of poor people at 54,887, and Mae Hong Son has some 22,783 people living in poverty.

Samut Songkhram appears to be the richest province in the country, with only 903 people living in poverty. “I think TPMAP will help provincial authorities come up with policies that help poor people and improve the quality of life for Thais in general,” Sarun said.

Suttipong added that TPMAP will also provide an insight into the problems that contribute to

poverty in certain regions, which in turn will help policymakers and government agencies formulate and implement “solutions” more precisely.

TPMAP will also integrate more data from other government

agencies, which will cover a

larger section of the population, and in turn enhance data analysis for optimising government welfare programmes.

He added that TPMAP has been made available in Lamphun, Mukdahan and Nakhon Phanom provinces, and local officials have been trained to use it.

Feedback from these agencies will be further used to adjust and enhance the abilities of TPMAP, so precision in poverty alleviation can be realised.

ALTHOUGH security as a percentage of IT spending continues to grow at a robust rate, the cost of security breaches is growing even faster.

According to Frost & Sullivan, IDC, and Gartner, in 2017 Thailand spent Bt6.71 billion on cybersecurity. This is expected to grow to Bt16.2 billion in 2025, or 0.07 per cent of GDP. However, on the flipside, the potential economic loss in Thailand due to cybersecurity incidents could hit a staggering Bt286 billion or 2.2 per cent of the country’s total GDP, according to Frost & Sullivan.

Why isn’t cybersecurity working as it should?

Most security products are focused on understanding malware or attacks. As a result, we are always playing catch-up with malicious actors. We must figure out a way to bind the problem.

How can cybersecurity threats be contained?

The principle of least privilege is one of the oldest information security principles, with the original formulation stating: “Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job.”

If we had enforced this principle within our IT environments, we’d have dramatically reduced the attack surface, and would consequently have bounded the problem.

While this doesn’t eliminate the need to monitor for threats, it simplifies the problem. So, the right solution architecture would include two components:

1 A foundational piece that shrinks the attack surface by enforcing least privilege (also known as cyber-hygiene);

2 A complementary piece that controls residual risk by monitoring for threats.

What are the limits of “least privilege” in cybersecurity?

Customers have tried implementing least-privilege environments in the past through whitelisting.

While whitelisting solutions can be effective, they have been a nightmare to operationalise.

The constant changes during the normal course of operating an IT environment at scale are very hard to keep up with.

So, in this case, instead of playing catch-up, we were chasing our own tails.

Can AI and ML help to shrink the attack surface?

Ensuring good is always going to be more effective than chasing bad. This approach gets even better with the rise of modern artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

AI/ML can offer IT security professionals a way to enforce good cybersecurity practices and shrink the attack surface, instead of constantly chasing after malicious activity.

AI/ML techniques are ideal for achieving cyber-hygiene and shrinking the attack surface at scale. There are two distinct advantages that make it ideal.

1. Rules exists for the behaviour of good software;

2. There is plenty of data labelled “data for goodware”.

The primary challenge has been the constant change at scale. The nature of change, though, is predictable and follows patterns. This is the kind of problem that AI/ML excels at. Using AI and ML to achieve cyber-hygiene and enforce least privilege environments at scale is the breakthrough idea that will help us secure modern IT environments against an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Vijay Ganti is ML/AI tech director at VMware.

Allen said in a tweet and at his website that non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he fought into remission nine years ago has returned.

The incurable cancer affects white blood cells.

“My team of doctors has begun treatment of the disease and I plan on fighting this aggressively,” Allen said.

“My doctors are optimistic that I will see good results from the latest therapies, as am I.”

Allen planned to remain active in Vulcan Inc., which manages his business and charitable endeavors, as well as in the Allen Institutes and his professional US sports teams the Seahawks and the Trail Blazers.

Allen, 65, is among the wealthiest people in the world, with a net worth estimated at more than $20 billion.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 and is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc.

He owns the National Football League team the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association and is a part owner of the Major League Soccer team the Seattle Sounders.

Allen is also a major philanthropist, supporting the environment, education, science and more.

For example, Google Korea and Korea’s tech giant Naver are estimated to have reported similar sales figures of around 4.7 trillion won ($5.2 billion) last year. The US tech giant is known to have paid only 20 billion won in corporate taxes, while Naver paid 423 billion won, according to Rep. Park Sun-sook of the Bareun Party.

In Korea, taxes are levied when a “fixed place of business” has been established — for instance, a server in the case of an online company. Most global tech firms, including Google, do not have their servers in Korea. When revenues are generated, often they are remitted to other nations, such as Singapore or Ireland, where the tax burden is lighter.

Last week, it was once again suggested that global firms may be avoiding value-added taxes in Korea because of legal loopholes.

During a conference held Friday on digital value-added taxes, Bang Hyo-chang, an information technology commissioner at the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice and a professor at Doowon University, said the global tech firms should have paid around 400 billion won in value-added taxes last year, given their estimated sales of over 5 trillion won.

For global tech providers to be liable for value-added taxes here, they should register their digital services with the National Tax Service in accordance with OECD guidelines that have been in force since 2015. But registration is voluntary, not compulsory, and there is no practical tool to regulate those that fail to register. Penalties for tax evasion are also much lighter in Korea than in the European Union or other OECD nations, according to Bang.

It is difficult to track down tax-payment histories too, as many global firms are not obliged to disclose their sales figures to the public here. This is because they are doing business in Korea as “limited-liability companies,” and the tax authorities do not publish such information for confidentiality reasons.

The value-added tax law itself is ambiguous, said Kim Bitmaro, a researcher at the Korea Institute of Public Finance.

Kim said, “In the law, it is uncertain whether companies engaging in the online advertising business need to pay value-added tax. The range of digital services in the law includes games, audio, video and software only.”

In the EU and other OECD nations, Kim added, online advertising is classified as a digital service.

Online advertising sales for Google Korea and Facebook Korea were estimated at around 1 trillion won each last year, according to the local advertising consulting firm Webloc.

Park Joon-young, an official from the Finance Ministry, said the government will review the concerns about value-added tax laws, adding that difficulties still remain as borderless “digital services” are more difficult to classify than “products.”

The forum on digital value-added taxes is the latest in a number of similar forums related to “Google tax” in Korea in recent months. “Google tax” refers to anti-tax-avoidance provisions targeting global companies that attempt to limit their taxable presence in high-tax jurisdictions.

Global tech companies maintain that their operations and tax-payment procedures are all lawful.

“Google complies with the tax laws in every country where we operate, and we follow the laws and pay all applicable taxes in Korea. Google contributes to the tax revenue of Korea through the value added tax which comes from Google Play, as well as via corporate tax,” said a Google Korea spokesperson.

Facebook Korea said the company “follow(s) the tax laws in Korea” and plans to disclose a sales breakdown for its client countries, including Korea, in the first half of next year. Apple Korea did not immediately respond to the inquiry.

In politics, lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties are moving to propose bills to revise tax laws to more effectively enforce tax laws against global tech firms.

Early this month, Rep. Byun Jae-il of the ruling Democratic Party proposed a bill to revise the information communications network law to oblige foreign tech firms, such as Google, Facebook and Netflix, to have servers in Korea, as this would strengthen their legal responsibilities.

Rep. Park Young-sun and Rep. Kim Sung-soo from the ruling Democratic Party are preparing bills that would mandate the collection of taxes from the areas where services are offered. Rep. Park Sun-sook from the Bareun Party is preparing bills to revise the corporate tax laws and the value-added tax laws to prevent tax avoidance by global tech firms.

In 2014, Rep. Hong ji-man from the main opposition Liberty Korea Party proposed the first “Google Tax” bill, which would have involved the review of the corporate tax law, but it was discarded in the National Assembly two years later.

The company said Friday that DApps focusing on various service categories including prediction, question-and-answer, product review, food review and location review will be introduced in the coming weeks, kicking off Line’s efforts to build up a token economy system.

As part of the move, Line will also start offering its own digital token, Link, on its cryptocurrency exchange Bitbox starting from Oct. 16 in global markets, excluding Japan and the US. Users in Japan, Line’s main market, will instead be rewarded Link Points that can be used within the Line-operated DApps.

The Link coins were already distributed via Bitbox earlier this month, and will also be issued as part of a reward system for users of Line’s DApps in the future, the company explained.

Among the five upcoming DApps, two are already running as a beta version: Wizball Overview, which rewards users for contributing to a Q&A platform for knowledge sharing and 4CAST Overview, which brings users together to make future predictions.

Pasha Overview, which rewards users for writing product reviews, Tapas Overview, which rewards users for sharing restaurant reviews, and Step Overview, a social media platform for recreational activities, will be launched by the year’s end.

In doing so, Line said it wants to build a “co-creation economy” that aims to “flatten the relationship structure between users and service providers to promote co-creation and mutual growth.”

“Users simply need to register and begin using any of the DApp services announced today, or existing services that will become part of the Link ecosystem, to start earning Line’s universal coin Link Point (for Japan) or Link (for markets outside Japan),” Line said in a press release.

In addition to its own apps, Line is also looking to invite third-party developers into its custom blockchain network. Line plans to release a development kit in anticipation of third-party services to join the Link ecosystem, starting from next year at the earliest.

Line said it has leveraged its platform development expertise to create an outstanding blockchain network that guarantees stability and minimized processing time, therefore making it suitable for hosting an exceptionally large number of users.

India has the most number of Facebook registered users not only in Asia but in the world. Facebook users in India have crossed 251 million mark, becoming the largest audience country for the social media giant. However even though strong gains social media penetration remains relatively low in India as compared to other high Facebook user regions.

At 131 million Indonesia has the second highest number of Facebook users in Asia. The number of users has increased by six percent in the last year. It is followed by Japan with 71 million users. Surveys however show that most Facebook users in Japan are adults while as younger ones take to other social sites like Instagram and Twitter.

Philippines has the fourth highest number of Facebook users in Asia with 62 million people registered on the social networking site. It is the most popular networking site in the country and the number of Facebook users almost matches the number of internet users in the country.

Vietnam has fifth highest Facebook users followed by Thailand. South Korea has seventh highest number of Facebook users and almost half of the internet users are registered on Facebook. Pakistan and Bangladesh have 32 million and 28 million users respectively. Bangladesh is followed by Malaysia and Myanmar.

One of the lesser developed South Asian countries, Nepal has 8.7 million Facebook users followed by Cambodia with 6.3 million users.  Sri Lanka has 5.5 million Facebook users.

Singapore has around 4.3 million Facebook users and more than fifty two percent are male and 48 per cent are female. Over all the Facebook users in the country are less than 45 years of age. Laos and Mongolia have 2.2 million and 1.9 million  Facebook users respectively.

China, despite its huge population, has only 1.8 million Facebook users. However these figures do not include Facebook users in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Bhutan and Brunei Darusalam have the least number of Facebook users

The social network is investigating the extent of harm done when hackers exploited a trio of software flaws to steal “access tokens,” the equivalent of digital keys that enable people to automatically log back into the social network.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said engineers discovered the breach on Tuesday, and patched it on Thursday night.

“We don’t know if any accounts were actually misused,” Zuckerberg said. “This is a serious issue.”

As a precaution, Facebook is temporarily taking down the “view as” feature — described as a privacy tool to let users see how their profiles look to other people.

“It’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code,” said vice president of product management Guy Rosen.

“We’ve fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement.”

Facebook reset the 50 million breached accounts, meaning users will need to sign back in using passwords.

Democratic US Senator Mark Warner cited the breach as further proof of the privacy danger of companies such as Facebook and Equifax not adequately protecting the massive amounts of information they gather about people.

“This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users,” Warner said in a statement.

“As I’ve said before — the era of the Wild West in social media is over.”

The breach is the latest privacy embarrassment for Facebook, which earlier this year acknowledged that tens of millions of users had personal data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, a political firm working for Donald Trump in 2016.

“We face constant attacks from people who want to take over accounts or steal information around the world,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page.

“While I’m glad we found this, fixed the vulnerability, and secured the accounts that may be at risk, the reality is we need to continue developing new tools to prevent this from happening in the first place.”

Facebook said it took a precautionary step of resetting “access tokens” for another 40 million accounts where the “view as” was used. This will require those users to log back in to Facebook.

“People’s privacy and security is incredibly important , and we’re sorry this happened,” Rosen said.

Sophisticated hack

No passwords were taken in the breach, only “tokens,” according to Rosen.

Information hackers appeared interested in included names, genders, and home towns, but it was not clear for what purposes, the executives said in a telephone briefing.

The stolen tokens gave hackers complete control of accounts. Facebook is trying to determine whether hackers tampered with posts or messages.

Hackers could have also gotten into third-party applications linked to Facebook accounts, but it was too early to determine whether that happened, according to the social network.

Attackers would have been able to meddle with Instagram accounts lined to Facebook, but could not have tampered with the social network’s WhatsApp messaging service, according to executives.

Facebook said that it noticed an unusual spike in activity on September 16 and determined nine days later that it was malicious.

Hackers took advantage of a “complex interaction” between three software bugs, which required a degree of sophistication, according to Rosen. The vulnerability was created by a change to a video uploading feature in July of 2017.

“We may never know who is behind this,” Rosen said. “This is not an easy investigation.”

The 50 million figure was the total number of accounts Facebook determined were breached by the attack since July of last year, but the social network did not disclose the earliest incursion.

Facebook is working with data privacy regulators as well as law enforcement, according to Rosen.

Facebook this year is doubling to 20,000 the number of workers devoted to safety and security.

When asked why people should still trust Facebook with their personal information, Zuckerberg outlined anew ways the social network is ramping up defenses.

“As I’ve said a number of times, security is an arms race,” Zuckerberg said.

But Facebook may have deeper problems, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and co-founder of university’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

“There is a structural problem here,” Zittrain said in a tweet.

“Facebook has one of the best and most well-resourced cybersecurity outfits in the world, yet a breach of its servers appears to have compromised tens of millions of accounts in still-undisclosed ways.”