Chinese Govt Summons Gaming Firms, Says Will Crack Down on Ride-Hailing

A Rogue Warriors esports team member trains for the game “Arena of Valor” at his club in Shanghai, China September 3, 2021. Picture taken September 3, 2021. (Reuters)
A Rogue Warriors esports team member trains for the game “Arena of Valor” at his club in Shanghai, China September 3, 2021. Picture taken September 3, 2021. (Reuters)
TT

Chinese Govt Summons Gaming Firms, Says Will Crack Down on Ride-Hailing

A Rogue Warriors esports team member trains for the game “Arena of Valor” at his club in Shanghai, China September 3, 2021. Picture taken September 3, 2021. (Reuters)
A Rogue Warriors esports team member trains for the game “Arena of Valor” at his club in Shanghai, China September 3, 2021. Picture taken September 3, 2021. (Reuters)

China’s government on Wednesday summoned gaming firms including Tencent Holdings Ltd and NetEase Inc to ensure they implement new rules for the sector.

It also said it would crack down on illegal behavior in the ride-hailing industry.

Beijing last month moved to ban under-18s from playing video games for more than three hours a week in a tighter set of regulations for gaming as it looks to strengthen control over sectors of its economy such as tech, education and property.

Gaming firms were told by the government on Wednesday to implement measures such as curbing minors’ hours of access to their video games to protect their physical and mental health, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Those that are found to have “inadequately” implemented the regulations will be severely punished, it said, adding that the firms present were also asked to resist engaging in improper competition and should instead focus on driving innovation.

Xinhua named the authorities involved as the ruling Communist Party’s Publicity Department, the National Press and Publication Administration, the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Separately on Wednesday, the Transport Ministry said it would intensify a crackdown on illegal behavior in the ride-hailing industry and deal with online platforms that are still using noncompliant vehicles and drivers.

The statement comes after Chinese government regulators launched a cybersecurity probe into ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc in July.

Meanwhile, the Cyberspace Administration of China said it has shut down and banned 1,793 so-called self-media accounts on online platforms since Aug. 27, when it announced a probe into the illegal release of financial information and badmouthing of financial markets.

The term “self-media” is mostly used describe independently operated accounts that produce original content but are not officially registered with the authorities.

The accounts closed include three with more than a million followers, while more than 47,000 pieces of “harmful information” have been cleaned up, the administration added.



Microsoft Creates Chip It Says Shows Quantum Computers Are ‘Years, Not Decades’ Away

Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
TT

Microsoft Creates Chip It Says Shows Quantum Computers Are ‘Years, Not Decades’ Away

Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quantum computing holds the promise of carrying out calculations that would take today's systems millions of years and could unlock discoveries in medicine, chemistry and many other fields where near-infinite seas of possible combinations of molecules confound classical computers.

Quantum computers also hold the danger of upending today's cybersecurity systems, where most encryption relies on the assumption that it would take too long to brute force gain access.

The biggest challenge of quantum computers is that a fundamental building block called a qubit, which is similar to a bit in classical computing, is incredibly fast but also extremely difficult to control and prone to errors.

Microsoft said the Majorana 1 chip it has developed is less prone to those errors than rivals and provided as evidence a scientific paper set to be published in academic journal Nature.

When useful quantum computers will arrive has become a topic of debate in the upper echelons of the tech industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the technology was two decades away from overtaking his company's chips, the workhorses of artificial intelligence, reflecting broad skepticism.

Those remarks prompted Google, which last year showed off its own new quantum chip, to say that commercial quantum computing applications are only five years away. IBM has said large-scale quantum computers will be online by 2033.

Microsoft's Majorana 1 has been in the works for nearly two decades and relies on a subatomic particle called the Majorana fermion whose existence was first theorized in the 1930s. That particle has properties that make it less prone to the errors that plague quantum computers, but it has been hard for physicists to find and control.

Microsoft said it created the Majorana 1 chip with indium arsenide and aluminum. The device uses a superconducting nanowire to observe the particles and can be controlled with standard computing equipment.

The chip Microsoft revealed Wednesday has far fewer qubits than rival chips from Google and IBM, but Microsoft believes that far fewer of its Majorana-based qubits will be needed to make useful computers because the error rates are lower.

Microsoft did not give a timeline for when the chip would be scaled up to create quantum computers that can outstrip today's machines, but the company said in a blog post that point was "years, not decades" away.

Jason Zander, the Microsoft executive vice president who oversees the company's long-term strategic bets, described Majorana 1 as a "high risk, high reward" strategy.

The chip was fabricated at Microsoft labs in Washington state and Denmark.

"The hardest part has been solving the physics. There is no textbook for this, and we had to invent it," Zander said in an interview with Reuters. "We literally have invented the ability to go create this thing, atom by atom, layer by layer."

Philip Kim, a professor of physics at Harvard University who was not involved in Microsoft's research, said that Majorana fermions have been a hot topic among physicists for decades and called Microsoft's work an "exciting development" that put the company at the forefront of quantum research.

He also said that Microsoft's use of a hybrid between traditional semiconductors and exotic superconductors appeared to be a good route toward chips that can be scaled up into more powerful chips.

"Although there's no demonstration (of this scaling up) yet, what they are doing is really successful," Kim said.