Huawei Says it Has Made Huge Strides, from Operating Systems to AI 

A view shows a Huawei logo at Huawei Technologies France headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, France, February 17, 2021. (Reuters) 
A view shows a Huawei logo at Huawei Technologies France headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, France, February 17, 2021. (Reuters) 
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Huawei Says it Has Made Huge Strides, from Operating Systems to AI 

A view shows a Huawei logo at Huawei Technologies France headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, France, February 17, 2021. (Reuters) 
A view shows a Huawei logo at Huawei Technologies France headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, France, February 17, 2021. (Reuters) 

China's Huawei Technologies said on Friday it had made breakthroughs in fields from operating systems to artificial intelligence, and that it had taken the company 10 years to do what the United States and Europe took 30 years to achieve.

Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, was speaking at the opening of a three-day developer conference in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, where he said the company's Harmony operating system was now available on more than 900 million devices.

"Harmony has made major breakthroughs. You can say in 10 years we've achieved what it took our European and American counterparts more than 30 years to do, in terms of building the core technology of an independent operating system," Yu said.

The company's Ascend artificial intelligence infrastructure - the most powerful from a Chinese company - was now the second most popular after Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips, Yu added.

Operating systems and other software have been dominated by Europe and the United States for a long time, although the era of internet of things has given Huawei an opportunity to overtake them, he said.

In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's HarmonyOS, its in-house version of the operating system, surpassed Apple's iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China behind Android with a 17% market share, research firm Counterpoint said.



EU Privacy Regulator Fines Meta 91 Million Euros over Password Storage

A logo of Meta Platforms Inc. is seen at its booth, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
A logo of Meta Platforms Inc. is seen at its booth, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
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EU Privacy Regulator Fines Meta 91 Million Euros over Password Storage

A logo of Meta Platforms Inc. is seen at its booth, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
A logo of Meta Platforms Inc. is seen at its booth, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 17, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

The lead European Union privacy regulator fined social media giant Meta 91 million euros ($101.5 million) on Friday for inadvertently storing some users' passwords without protection or encryption.

The inquiry was opened five years ago after Meta notified Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) that it had stored some passwords in 'plaintext'. Meta publicly acknowledged the incident at the time and the DPC said the passwords were not made available to external parties.

"It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data," Irish DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement, according to Reuters.

The DPC is the lead EU regulator for most of the top US internet firms due to the location of their EU operations in the country.

It has so far fined Meta a total of 2.5 billion euros for breaches under the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR), introduced in 2018, including a record 1.2 billion euro fine in 2023 that Meta is appealing.