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Taiwan has suspended sales of three Huawei smartphone models that listed it as "Taiwan, China" for timezones and contacts -- a designation the self-ruled, democratic island bristles at. Starting Thursday, sales of Huawei's P30, P30 Pro and Nova 5T models will be banned until the Chinese tech giant tweaks their operating system, Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC) said. How Taiwan is described is a hugely sensitive political issue. Beijing considers Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, even though the two sides have been governed separately for the last seven decades. "The labeling in these phones does not reflect the facts and has even hurt the dignity of our country," the NCC said in a statement, adding that the commission had "taken strict measures to maintain national dignity". It also threatened to permanently ban the sales of the three phones if Huawei refuses to change the wording. Local distributor Xunwei Technologies said it was communicating with Huawei over the issue. Beijing has been ramping up diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in 2016 because her party refuses to recognize that the island is part of "one China". The pressure is building as Taiwan heads towards elections in January, with Tsai seeking to defeat an opponent who favors much warmer ties with China. Huawei, the world's number two smartphone producer, has previously come under fire in mainland China for the opposite offense -- not labeling the cities of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Macau as part of China in some Chinese-language settings. International brands have routinely found themselves bowing to Beijing's stance on Taiwan, a much smaller market compared to the lucrative mainland. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

Despite the Chinese tech giant being put on a US entity list, barring it from doing business with American companies, Huawei’s business continues to thrive. The firm's third-quarter revenues increased by 24.4 percent compared to 2018 and phone sales jumped too. Kevin Ho, president of Huawei’s smartphone division has said that the technology needed to run the company’s mobile operating system Harmony is ready, but it lacks an ecosystem, Technode reported. Speaking at TechCrunch Shenzhen 2019, Ho allegedly said that the company is working with software developers as it needs to perfect its OS by building applications for it. Harmony, which was unveiled this August, is expected to become an alternative to Google’s Android system, which Huawei used before it was placed on a US trade blacklist prohibiting the world’s second largest cellphone producer from using services and working with US companies. In an interview with business insider, Huawei’s Senior VP Vincent Pang said the company would decide in the next seven to nine months whether it will move forward with bringing Harmony OS to its phones. In October, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed Huawei officials, that it could take years before the company develops alternatives to Google’s services.

Tech censorship is nothing new, but a recent spate of permanent bans from the WhatsApp messaging service has users the world over spooked. Here’s your guide to keeping your nose clean and avoiding a ban.
In February, WhatsApp announced how it intended to fight spam and abuse without the need to invade users' privacy. One of its methods involved scanning unencrypted group content and metadata (group date creation, group subject, group description, etc..) as well as the rate of messaging to identify potential scammers and other assorted bad actors.
What’s at stake. Some 1.5 billion people use WhatsApp around the world. The company removes over two million spam accounts per month, 75 percent of which are automatically removed by the app's machine learning algorithm. A whopping 20 percent of these fake accounts are caught at registration. The company prides itself on protecting users’ privacy, though with varying degrees of success, as recent scandals have shown.

  

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