Google has revealed some of its Asian customers – almost certainly Chinese e-tailers – are buying fewer ads. Speaking on Alphabet’s Q3 earnings call last week, chief business officer Philipp Schindler addressed the slowdown in ad sales growth with the following remark: “In retail, some of our APAC advertisers were impacted by the EU eliminating its de minimis exemption.” That’s a reference to the European Union’s changes to import duties, which saw the bloc introduce a temporary €3 customs duty for every consignment valued at under €150 imported from outside the EU. The EU previously operated the de minimis exemption that Schindler referred to, meaning it collected no import duty on almost 5. 9 billion low-value items shipped to the continent in 2025 alone. The new regime aims to protect European retailers from cheap imports. A great many of those items came from Chinese e-tail giants – the likes of Temu, Shein, and Alibaba – who are thought to account for perhaps ten percent of advertising revenue at Google and Meta. EU policy has therefore contributed to slower growth at Google. Huawei’s brake pedals reportedly break
Huawei’s automotive efforts appear to have driven it into a cul de sac of controversy. The Chinese tech giant works with a company called Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Co. (JAC) under the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance , which aims to produce intelligent cars. The flagship model produced by Huawei and JAC is a luxury EV called the Maextro V800, which when tested by Chinese automotive review site Dongchedi produced a rather terrifying fault: the brake pedal bracket broke when drivers exerted maximum force during tests to assess the car’s ability to decelerate suddenly at 100 km/h. The site’s drivers were still able to stop the car, but rather more slowly than is optimal. Within days of the review site posting its findings, reports of its work started to disappear from the internet, according to China Digital Times , a US-based outlet that says it publishes independent news on Chinese affairs. Even some opinion pieces that called for further assessment of the car’s safety disappeared, giving rise to theories that Beijing is displeased with negative coverage of its technology champions and automotive industry. North Korea named as Binance hacker
The USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Saturday named North Korea’s elite cybercrime crew “TraderTraitor” as the source of last week’s attack on cryptocurrency exchange Binance . Cyber-defense company TRM also reached the same conclusion. Its analysts last week declared they have “high confidence” that “on and off-chain intelligence” suggest TraderTraitor did the deed. “On the evening of October 29, billions of dollars in crypto began leaving wallets belonging to Binance,” TRM’s analysts wrote. “Within minutes, Binance wallets on the XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Solana and four other networks had sent their balances to addresses controlled by a single attacker. A second wave around 23:05 UTC reached Binance wallets on Avalanche and Polygon.” TRM thinks Trader Traitor started its raid 36 hours before the theft…