
How about removing the religious nutters from your government first?
Pakistan has become the latest Asian nation to declare it will roll out the welcome mat for foreign investors who want to do something to do with technology on its soil. Federal minister for science and technology Fawad Chaudhry tweeted over the weekend: “I call upon multinationals of USA, China, Russia, Korea, Japan and EU to …
Anyway there are probably not more religious nutters than in Trump's government, starting from the vice-president.
Actually Imran Khan government is accused to have too many people tied to Pakistan Peoples Party - nor its Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party is a religious one.
Internet interruption-watcher NetBlocks has reported internet outages across Pakistan on Wednesday, perhaps timed to coincide with large public protests over the ousting of Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The watchdog organisation asserted that outages started after 5:00PM and lasted for about two hours. NetBlocks referred to them as “consistent with an intentional disruption to service.”
Pakistan’s minister for IT and Telecom, Syed Aminul Haque, has floated the idea of a ten-year tax holiday for freelancers, suggesting the move could improve the nation’s services exports.
The idea was mentioned in Pakistan's 2021 Draft Freelancing Policy [PDF] and the minister minister raised the idea again last week at a meeting of Pakistan’s Committee on IT Exports Growth, a forum whose name says a lot about what the nation hopes to achieve with the policy.
In 2020 Pakistan revealed a plan to grow tech services exports from $1.25bn to $5bn within three years.
In what seems like an odd move for all involved, Pakistan's telecommunication regulator – the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) – has announced approval for Lucky Motor Corporation (LMC) to manufacture Samsung mobile devices.
The local automobile manufacturer is a joint venture between Lucky Group and South Korea's Kia Motors, and manufactures and distributes Kia cars built in a purpose-built plant in Karachi's Bin Qasim Industrial Park.
"The authorization to manufacture Samsung Mobile devices in Pakistan is a landmark achievement and will further revolutionize the vibrant mobile manufacturing ecosystem in the country by ensuring presence of major local and foreign players in the market," declared the regulator.
Pakistan has banned made-in-China social network TikTok for the fourth time, and there's no sign this one will prove any stickier than previous efforts.
A tweeted press release from the nation's Telecommunications Authority did the deed, at around 8:00AM on Thursday local time.
Analysis Pakistan has announced it has secured 19 cellphone manufacturers willing to work on its soil, and that their efforts will improve device affordability and availability for locals and help the nation’s prospects as a tech exporter.
An announcement from Pakistan's Telecommunication Authority doesn’t name any of the 19 chosen outfits but says they’re a mix of “foreign and local companies.”
All will be expected to promote their devices as having been made in Pakistan, in the hope of highlighting the nation’s manufacturing capabilities and encouraging local buyers to spend their money with local suppliers. The Telecommunication Authority also hopes that the 19 players' involvement will result in lower-cost phones for those in Pakistan.
Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue – the nation's tax office – has experienced a lengthy outage after a migration project went bad, perhaps as the result of a cyber-attack.
The Board (FBR) has acknowledged that an upgrade process encountered "unforeseen anomalies" that resulted in an outage to its public-facing services from the evening of August 13th.
A subsequent update said only some Customs-related services went down, but local media report the problem was not of the FBR's making, and that the Board was attacked and all its virtual machines rendered inoperable.
Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue has stated that a recent outage of its public-facing applications was not caused by pirated software, but admitted it's not always on top of licences and some of its code may be unsupported.
Local media fingered an attack on Microsoft's Hyper-V software as the source of the mid-August outage, which the Board (FBR) attributed to a migration going pear-shaped.
An FRB update refutes those reports and says it has licences for software it uses, including in the facilities that went down.
Pakistan shut down several social networks within its borders on Friday but lifted the ban after around four hours.
The nation’s Telecommunication Authority announced the ban, effective immediately, with the following explanation:
The government of Pakistan's Punjab region has a new weapon up its sleeve in the fight against vaccine hesitancy: blocking the mobile service of anyone who refuses to get jabbed.
As reported by local newspapers , and confirmed by the Punjab health authority, those who swerve the COVID-19 vaccine may find their mobile SIM "blocked" in response.
The move has come at a crucial juncture for Punjab's vaccine rollout, with shots now available to those over the age of 18.
Cisco’s Talos security unit says it has detected an increased rate of attacks on targets on the Indian subcontinent and named an advanced persistent threat actor named SideCopy as the source.
The outfit on Wednesday posted that it has tracked “an increase in SideCopy’s activities targeting government personnel in India using themes and tactics similar to APT36 (aka Mythic Leopard and Transparent Tribe)”. SideCopy’s infrastructure, Talos opined, “indicates a special interest in victims in Pakistan and India,” as the malware used only initiates actions if it detects infections in those two countries.
The name SideCopy appears to have first been used by security firm Seqrite in a September 2020 analysis of previous attacks on Indian military targets. Seqrite said it has seen SideCopy activity from 2019.
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