The Buddha’s LaughForeign Desk · Letters to the Abbot from the Laughing BuddhaChips, platforms, AI rules and the machines that promise to save time. The monk is still waiting for his.
Sri Lanka’s digital identity system begins as an in-house pilot in December at the latest, “initially targeting government employees,” an official told Biometric Update, after bids exceeded India’s INR 3 billion grant. Some 17 million card holders follow. The first Sri Lankans to receive a working digital identity will be the officials who have been promising one.
Pakistan’s minister for IT and telecom said on Wednesday that social media bans for children could backfire and urged stronger age checks, Arab News reports. This month the telecom regulator told a court it lacks the legal power to impose mandatory age verification. The plan, then, is for everyone to prove their age to a regulator that has told the judges it may not ask.
Bihar’s chief minister, Samrat Choudhary, launched the UPYOG portal on 31 October for 264 urban local bodies, Elets eGov reports. Ten of its 19 planned modules are live, including trade licences, building plans and water connections; birth registration comes later. For now, Bihar’s online citizen can open a shop, build a house and connect the water, but cannot yet be born.
The European Union wants to be a “third force” in artificial intelligence between Washington and Beijing, Euronews reports, though it has no frontier AI model of its own. Its AI Omnibus has meanwhile delayed the AI Act’s rules for high-risk systems, after lobbying by European companies. Having no side in the match, the self-appointed referee has now postponed the whistle as well.
India ended September with 1,107.68 million broadband connections spread across 1,596 operators, MediaNama reports from TRAI data. Jio and Airtel between them held 83.96 percent, up from 83.95 percent in August. Gaining one hundredth of a point monthly, the pair leave the other 1,594 operators safe until roughly the year 2160.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority inspected 184 more mobile sites between 22 and 28 October, from Gilgit to South Karachi, taking its count past 900, Business Recorder reports. The deficiencies it lists begin with power supply and backup redundancy, then battery and generator faults. Nine hundred towers in, the regulator of the airwaves has become an inspector of batteries.
Meta announced Your Algorithm on 13 October, a feature that lets users tell its feeds what they want, but MediaNama found it unavailable in India on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Its questions on when it will arrive, how prompts are stored and whether they train Meta’s AI went unanswered. In India the feature so far takes prompts only from journalists, and ignores those too.
Indonesia’s civil registration directorate, Dukcapil, has tendered for 4 petabytes of storage to copy its population and biometric records in real time, Biometric Update reports, a contract the World Bank puts at $16.9 million. Half the capacity is primary storage and half is backup, two years after a ransomware attack on a separate government data centre where 98% of one site’s data reportedly had no copy. Two petabytes are for the data; the other two are for 2024.
India’s Grievance Appellate Committee, which hears appeals against platforms’ moderation decisions under the IT Rules, aims to decide each within 30 days. Its website counts 70,548 appeals received and 16,355 disposed of. SFLC.in puts the average wait at 90 to 100 days. The thirty-day target is being met, three times over, for every appeal.
Brazil’s electoral court gave Meta 24 hours to prove its tools treated runoff candidates Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro equally, with a daily fine of R$1 million if it failed. One complaint was that Meta AI refused images of Lula while accepting requests about Flávio. Meta told the court it now rejects prompts using either candidate’s first name. Equality has been restored, at zero pictures each.
The European Commission has accepted Temu’s action plan after fining the platform €200 million in May under its platform law, the DSA, for failing to identify the risks of illegal products sold to its 130 million EU users. Under the plan, Temu commits to carry out a risk analysis. Two hundred million euros has bought Europe the risk analysis the law already required for free.
South Korea’s revised AI Basic Act will require training data built in government-backed projects to be provided through the national AI Hub. One state project with a 15 billion won data budget required only half of its data disclosed. Operators may still ask to withhold trade secrets. From April, data the public paid for must be shared with the public, unless it is valuable.
A Pakistani Senate committee has given the authorities a month to review taxes on imported and used phones. A telecoms authority member urged the revenue board to cut the tax; the Cabinet Division secretary said taxation is outside the authority’s jurisdiction; the IT minister said relief is for the Tax Policy Office. The room agreed someone should lower the tax, and that the someone was elsewhere.
India’s broadcasting ministry is weighing a law for streaming content, NDTV reports, by amending the Cinematograph Act of 1952 or the IT Act of 2000, or writing a new one. No public draft exists. Its broadcasting bill was drafted in 2023, redrafted in 2024 and recalled. Five years in, the series has two drafts, one recall and a third season in development.
India’s Bihar state has told Ola, Uber, Rapido and Savari Mithila to comply with its directions by 30 October or lose their licences, saying earlier directions went unimplemented. The list includes a Hindi chatbot and in-app messages kept on screen for 10 seconds instead of 2. The state wants every message held for ten seconds, a courtesy its own directions have not yet been shown.
India’s Central Board of Film Certification says “no trace has been found” of certification files for more than 500 titles that The Hindu reports were posted on the Internet Archive, censor-cut summaries among them. The law requires those summaries to be public; the board kept them behind an “under maintenance” message. Officially, the leaked summaries are now as hard to find as the published ones.
India’s telecom regulator, TRAI, has recommended that apps streaming TV channels over the internet, such as Samsung TV Plus and YuppTV, need a 20-year government licence. Television makers would need no licence, but should allow only apps listed in a ministry-kept “Master ALTD app repository”. The set itself stays unlicensed; it will simply be told which channels it has heard of.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority says its zonal offices inspected 166 mobile sites from 15 to 22 October and told operators to fix the faults they found. Its own report on second-quarter data put 5G availability at 3.95 percent of users’ connected time; the government expects nationwide coverage in about two years. A phone left online all day gets about 57 minutes of the future.
Reddit blocked 26 posts in India after a takedown order dated 21 October, most of them about the India-China border. Its public notice lists the sender as redacted, leaves the law field blank and gives the subject as “Unknown”. Several posts were five or six years old. Three had already been deleted by their authors, who were never told which law they were obeying either.
Pakistan’s IT minister, Shaza Fatima Khawaja, announced Buraq, a government-backed Urdu AI model, at a World Bank summit in Seoul, citing Urdu’s 0.03% share of the web text collected by Common Crawl. She called AI “the last layer, not the first” of digital development. Buraq has no website, demo, release date or parameter count yet. So far it is exactly the layer she promised.
India’s two largest payment apps, PhonePe and Google Pay, handled 77.8% of UPI transactions in September, down from 78.3% in August, according to NPCI data compiled by MediaNama. Each is still above the 30% market share cap, whose deadline for existing providers is 31 December 2026. At half a point a month, the two reach the cap in about three years. The deadline is in ten weeks.
Over five years, Pakistan’s telecoms authority has imposed Rs 4.27 billion in penalties on mobile operators and recovered Rs 551.35 million, or 12.9 percent. Another Rs 537.75 million has been pledged, and 58 cases remain before the courts. At this pace the operators finish paying in about thirty-four more years, provided nobody is fined again.
India’s telecom sandbox rules, in force since 21 October, let companies test new services for up to 24 months, extendable twelve months at a time with no limit. Applicants must request each extension at least 30 days before expiry, while the government has no deadline for deciding on a proposal. A trial may now run forever, provided it asks a month early every year.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has proposed processing licence applications for radio-based services “within 15 working days”, provided the application is complete. Comments on the draft must arrive on a prescribed proforma naming each provision, each proposed change and the reason for it. The fast lane opens with a form about the form.
India’s Trade Marks Registry has published draft guidelines requiring submissions to state “whether or not the submission has been prepared with the assistance of an AI”, and treating silence as “a misrepresentation to the Registry”. Its own officers are asked to keep AI “strictly ancillary”, but penalties apply only to the parties. The office that registers marks has left its own AI use unmarked.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs has told a parliamentary committee that “there is no single, stand-alone policy document” for its digital, AI, cyber and space diplomacy. The committee called the approach “fragmentary, piecemeal and ad hoc.” India has signed agreements with 23 countries to replicate its Digital Public Infrastructure. The strategy for exporting it has not yet been copied into one document.
India’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry has advised TV news channels that “the use of AI tools may be limited to assistive capacity.” It does not define assistive or say whether it covers AI anchors, one of which has already interviewed Narendra Modi. Someone will now have to tell a presenter who has interviewed the Prime Minister that it was only assisting.
Norway’s planned social media age limit will now cover games and messaging apps, naming TikTok, Roblox and Snapchat. Platforms pick their own age checks, and enforcement rests on a national Digital Services Act not yet in force. Children may join on 1 January of the year they turn sixteen, which is more than anyone can yet say of the law that will check them.
India’s Karnataka state promised in its 2026-27 budget that social media use “will be banned for children under the age of 16.” No bill followed. Now officials say a ban “comes under the Centre’s domain,” and the state will regulate computers in its schools and colleges. The ban has been posted to New Delhi, and the part that stayed behind fits in a computer lab.
Kenya’s data protection commissioner has issued guidance on sending personal data abroad. Data may leave under four lawful bases, with standard contracts and documentation, and controllers must notify her office of transfers. Data on elections and public finances must stay home. The rest may see the world, provided it tells the commissioner each time it leaves the house.
US Senator Bernie Moreno says Congress is “too divided” to pass three chip export bills, including the Chip Security Act, requiring location verification for export-controlled advanced chips. A House committee approved all three by large margins; the full House has not voted. Congress wants every exported chip to report its location; its own bills have not yet left the building.
Greek parliamentary committees on Monday approved a bill barring under-15s from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. Every adult user must link their account to a government age token through the KidsWallet app, proving only that they are over 15, and verify again every six months. Twice a year, the adult population of Greece will prove it has not turned fourteen.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, replying to a court petition about harmful social media content, has set out when it may reject complaints about unlawful material online. The grounds include anonymous complaints, complaints from people not directly affected, matters already under investigation and cases requiring a detailed examination of documents and oral evidence. The ideal complaint has therefore never been investigated and never needs to be.
Intel has asked the US Federal Communications Commission for a waiver from its ban on foreign-made robots, which may cover the robot carts that move wafers around its chip plants. The carts need constant software updates, and Intel says finding a local supplier would take years. America can now make its chips at home; it needs a permission slip to carry them across the room.
The European Commission fined Google €890 million in July under the Digital Markets Act: €460 million for favouring its own search results and €430 million for stopping app developers from steering customers elsewhere. On 14 October a Commission spokesman said talks on Google’s changes were continuing. The Commission has set no date for its final assessment, a deadline Google has so far met.
The Australian Signals Directorate is replacing its Essential Eight cyber security framework, which rated organisations from Maturity Level Zero to Three, with ASD Essentials, which gives no single score. Reaching one of its implementation phases, the agency says, “describes implementation scope, not how secure the organisation is.” Agencies can now complete every phase without the risk of being called secure.
India’s IT ministry has asked Meta to ensure its recommendation systems do not expose users to “a single or limited set of narratives,” and to “endeavour to provide appropriate diversity of relevant and credible information.” The advisory, dated 10 October, was sent only to Meta and has not been published. A call for wider exposure has so far reached an audience of one.
Nepal’s Advertisement Board handed its annual report to the communications minister on Wednesday, promising to regulate digital and social media platforms and to watch online channels for illegal betting, crypto promotion and AI-generated deepfakes. It lists “foreign digital advertising regulation as a major ongoing challenge.” Among its plans is an advertisement academy, which will at least give the deepfakes somewhere to study.
India’s Uttar Pradesh has cleared an Artificial Intelligence Mission, UP-AIM, which aims to support at least 100 AI startups and train 500,000 AI-skilled youth, CSIS reports in its weekly digest of Indian state policy. That is 5,000 trained people for every startup. Each founder will need an AI just to read the applications.
Pakistan’s telecom regulator, the PTA, has proposed that travel SIM and eSIM providers register with it before operating in the country. Registered firms would report on SIMs activated, identity checks and usage, possibly through a near-real-time portal. The concern, ProPakistani reports, is that “foreign travel eSIMs can be activated in Pakistan without local identity verification.” Visitors already need a visa. Their phones are next.
India’s food regulator, FSSAI, plans to make platforms such as Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart answer for manufacturers’ misleading claims and show manufacturing and expiry dates on every listing. The platforms argue they only host third-party sellers. Blinkit, MediaNama has reported, is the legal seller of record for nearly 90% of its orders. A marketplace, then, in which nine stalls in ten belong to the landlord.
A Karachi developer has built “Ask Pakistan,” a chatbot that answers questions from 52 government websites in English, Urdu or Roman Urdu, and says the basic app took “a couple of hours.” “There is no unified platform which can give you information about all of them,” he told Dawn. The IT ministry took an interest and invited a presentation in Islamabad. The state’s single window has been fitted from outside.
India’s technology minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told a Bloomberg forum in New Delhi that the country has a 20 to 25 year roadmap to cut its dependence on critical technology: “we in India are thinking at least 20 years ahead.” He also said: “Things change, politics change, geopolitics play a big role, so we have to constantly calibrate our approach.” A plan for 2050, revisable by Thursday.
In Washington, almost two dozen House Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office on 13 October to audit the FAA’s AI-enabled air traffic tools, bought in June under a 12-year, $875 million contract. One of them, SMART, has been working over the capital’s airspace since 21 September. The transportation secretary calls it “a tool that’s used to better manage traffic.” The audit was requested after takeoff, which in aviation is usually called a prayer.
Pakistan stopped accepting applications for machine-readable passports on 14 October. From the 15th, at home and at missions abroad, only e-passports with a chip can be applied for; existing passports stay valid until they expire. The machine-readable passport retires because the machines now want something better to read.
Japan will fund $21 billion for two new GlobalFoundries chip plants in Malta, New York, as part of its $550 billion investment pledge to the United States, President Trump announced on 14 October. The plants would make 1.8 million wafers a year, and the US government gets a 4 percent stake. Japan pays for the factory and America keeps the shares, an arrangement known elsewhere as a landlord.
India’s Department of Telecommunications has told Airtel, Jio, Vodafone Idea and BSNL to display callers’ names from 1 November, on by default for 4G and above, using the name in each operator’s subscriber records. Businesses may show a preferred name only if it is a registered trademark or GST trade name. The name must not be stored after the call. India will know who is calling, and forget it on hanging up.
A survey of 2,919 small Indian firms found 65.8 percent using AI tools and only 21 percent using business software. The robot has arrived before the ledger.
This site uses Google Analytics to count visits. No ads, no tracking across sites.