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"The Solomon Islands government is preparing to ban Facebook - an attempt, it says, to limit "abusive language" and "character assassination" but which critics argue is an attempt to curtail criticism of the government. "

"But last month, Rocket Systems, who administered the .nu deal and the free Internet connection, announced that they would be shutting down the free link and replacing it with a paid one, because the .nu royalties had been cut. Under the new mandate, the 75% of people in Niue who relied on the service will begin paying an eye-popping NZD50/10gb to access the service. This is moderately competitive for satellite data, but by the standards of the developed world, it's amazingly expensive, especially given the country's low median per capita income."

"Given everything the Pacific, and the world, have sacrificed this pandemic, a forum reduced to a virtual meeting is far from the greatest loss. But it is already having consequences, with threats from some countries to abandon the forum altogether because of a lack of consensus over who, now, will lead it."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."

"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

""When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off," he says. "If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden's largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.""

"SINGAPORE - In the not too distant future, surveillance cameras sitting atop over 100,000 lampposts in Singapore could help authorities pick out and recognise faces in crowds across the island-state. The plan to install the cameras, which will be linked to facial recognition software, is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to "perform crowd analytics" and support anti-terror operations."

"But the uniqueness of TSMC and its location on an island that the Chinese regime regards as part of the mainland is giving rise to strategic panic. Both the US and the EU are racing to try to ensure that they have 2nm chip-fabrication capability within their respective jurisdictions. The problem is that one cannot conjure up such capacity just by throwing money at it. TSMC itself has built a fabrication plant in Arizona. But in his speech marking the ceremonial opening of the facility last December, Morris Chang, the firm's founder, said that it could not find enough qualified American workers to run it. It was sending every new American recruit to Taiwan for 18 months of training and was even importing engineers from Taiwan to make the Arizona plant operational. Hopefully it will all be up and running before Xi decides to "do a Putin" and we will no longer to be able to have chips with everything."

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."