AI Weekly Malaysia

Tom's Hardware reviews the Asus ZenScreen OLED (MQ16FC), a 15.6/16-inch portable monitor with an OLED panel, awarding it Editor's Choice. It retails around $279-$280 at ASUS, Amazon, and Newegg, praised for vibrant color performance and attractive design.

Ars Technica reviews Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop, comparing it to a "funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo." The article text provided is almost entirely cookie consent boilerplate, so substantive review details (specs, performance, build quality) are not available.

AI vendors are increasingly turning to alternate silicon like Cerebras and Marvell for inference workloads, moving beyond exclusive reliance on Nvidia GPUs in the datacenter. Waymo is designing custom chips for its robotaxis instead of using off-the-shelf Intel silicon. Meanwhile, Microsoft is belatedly adding long-requested Windows 11 features: movable taskbar after five years, better context menu controls, and NPU activity visibility in Task Manager.

Honor Malaysia launched the Pad 20 series nationwide, with the Wi-Fi base model at RM1,999 (6GB+256GB), a 5G variant at RM2,299, and the Pro at RM2,499. All feature 12.1-inch 3K 120Hz displays and 10,100mAh batteries; university students get 15% off (vs the usual 10%), bringing the cheapest model to RM1,699.15 via .edu email verification.

Valve celebrates its 30th anniversary, marking three decades since its founding and its transformation of PC gaming through Half-Life and the Steam platform. The article is a retrospective on Valve's history and impact.

Ray Hoe, a 41-year-old Singaporean with no hospitality experience or Japanese language skills, spent a seven-figure sum renovating a 77-year-old ryokan in Toyama, Japan, funded by stock market gains made during COVID-19. Hooray Toyama, a boutique modern ryokan, opens in September 2026 after four years of work.

Kyoto University demonstrated a silicon carbide (SiC) transistor that operates at 600°C, using standard ion implantation and a bottom-gate design to address leakage and voltage drift problems. The fabrication approach is compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing processes, avoiding the need for specialized equipment.

Kuala Lumpur-based StoreHub disclosed for the first time that it operates across 20,000+ merchant locations in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan, processing over 200 million transactions annually worth approximately US$3.5 billion. It received an undisclosed strategic investment from ShardLab—a Singapore venture studio backed by South Korean blockchain firm Hashed and Thailand's SCBX—to form a joint venture exploring new consumer payment and rewards products. StoreHub CEO Wai Hong Fong also said the company is rebuilding its product around AI, aiming to let a three-person restaurant operate with the capability of a thirty-person one.

Australia Post is selling paper password books for AU$4.90 (US$3.51), and infosec professionals on social media are increasingly endorsing them as a legitimate alternative to digital password managers. The argument is that a physical book kept at home avoids infostealer malware, which has become a major attack vector against browser-based and software password vaults.

Tom's Hardware reports a $2,200 discount on the HP Omen Max 45L pre-built PC, bringing it to $4,799 with an RTX 5090, 64GB DDR5, and a 2TB SSD — reportedly cheaper than buying the RTX 5090 GPU alone at retail.

Flashforge is running a promotion during the AliExpress 828 mega-sale, offering discounts on 3D printers including the Adventurer 5M, AD5X, and Adventurer 5M Pro, as well as HS PLA filaments. The article is sponsored content with no specific pricing details or independent evaluation.

Nintendo issued DMCA takedowns against over 400 GitHub repositories hosting Switch emulators, citing piracy concerns tied to illegal cryptographic keys. The mass takedown is one of the largest single-wave GitHub removal actions tied to a gaming platform.

AirAsia issued a Merdeka 2026 travel advisory warning of temporary airspace closures around Putrajaya affecting KLIA flights on 26-28 August (11:00 AM-12:00 PM) and 29 & 31 August (8:45-9:45 AM). The advisory pushes passengers to use the AirAsia MOVE app for digital check-in, self-baggage drop via QR codes, Auto Visa Check for international travellers, and MyNIISe facial-recognition lanes for Malaysian passport holders at KLIA Terminal 2.

Canonical is co-funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol to investigate whether LLMs can decompose large C codebases (hundreds of thousands of lines) into smaller components and rewrite them in safe, behaviourally correct, maintainable Rust. VP Jon Seager, who drove Ubuntu 25.10's adoption of Rust-based sudo and uutils coreutils, acknowledges existing source-to-source translators produce Rust that compiles but relies heavily on unsafe operations and retains awkward C idioms.

Rupert Goodwins reviews 'Software Should Work 2026,' a 13-video streamed conference on software reliability covering formal methods, complexity management, tooling, and team culture. He highlights Richard Feldman's comparison of web stacks across 1996, 2006, and 2026—plus eight contemporary language/runtime sites (TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Rust, Zig, Go, Roc)—and Richard Hipp's talk on how SQLite's codebase evolved alongside its testing methods.

Alibaba is issuing 710 million new shares at HK$112.70 each to raise US$10.2 billion, with all proceeds earmarked for AI infrastructure and full-stack AI capabilities. The placement follows a 75% profit drop in the June quarter as capex surged 75% to 67.7 billion yuan, and Alibaba had previously pledged at least 380 billion yuan over three years for AI and cloud.

CelcomDigi has rolled out a network-embedded Voice Firewall that detected 355 million suspicious call attempts (including 217 million robocalls) during its pilot phase, with nationwide deployment completed in July 2026. Incoming calls flagged as risky now trigger a 'Suspected Scam' alert on screens of its 20 million subscribers, complementing its existing SMS firewall.

Cisco Talos disclosed a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that integrates AI tools (PentestGPT, DeepAudit) across the attack lifecycle—reconnaissance, exploit refinement, payload generation, validation, and persistence—targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across education, media, tech, and gaming sectors. The group compiled a target list of ~170,000 URLs split into 17 files of ~10,000 each, exploiting publicly known vulnerabilities for RCE and deploying web shells, BadIIS backdoors, and the EfsPotato privilege escalation tool.

Omoda Jaecoo Malaysia will launch the Jaecoo J5 EV on 2 September as the brand's first fully electric vehicle in Malaysia, locally assembled (CKD) with an estimated price of RM125,000. The 4.38m SUV offers a 58.9 kWh CATL LFP battery, 402 km WLTP range, 130kW DC fast charging (30-80% in ~28 minutes), 11kW 3-phase AC charging, V2L functionality, and Level 2+ ADAS.

China's Manned Space Agency cancelled the Chang'e 7 lunar South Pole mission one day before its planned Monday launch, citing unspecified unmet 'launch requirements.' The mission—carrying a lander, wheeled rover, and a hopper designed to jump crater rims to locate ice—won't fly until next year at earliest, as South Pole launch windows only open once or twice annually.

Model Republic surveys 18 of Andreessen Horowitz's most controversial investments — including bot farms, AI cheating tools, deepfake platforms (96% targeting identifiable women), gambling platforms, and fintech companies implicated in fraud — arguing the firm profits from regulatory gaps while spending tens of millions to shape US AI policy in its favor. a16z helped launch a $100M super PAC and pushed an executive order to undermine state AI laws.

China's Ministry of State Security has ordered state-affiliated entities to uninstall Windows 10 China Government Edition months ahead of its original February 2027 end-of-life, pulling the timeline into 2026. The bespoke OS was built by C&M Information Technologies, a 2016 joint venture between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, and replacements will be domestic Linux distributions. Microsoft says it is unaware of any security incidents and the product still receives regular updates; consumer Windows versions in China are unaffected.

A reader's batch script for weekly Exchange Information Store defrag used `DEL *.*` without specifying a directory, and because it ran from System32, it wiped most of that folder and lobotomized a Windows NT 4 server hosting ~600 mailboxes. The server needed a full rebuild and restore over the weekend.

Samsung Malaysia and Hoka are running a 22-day step challenge from 26 August to 16 September 2026 via the Samsung Health app. Participants who hit 150,000 cumulative steps and answer a prompt can claim an RM200 Samsung e-store voucher for select wearables, capped at 150 units online.

Malaysia and the Netherlands launched the second edition of the Netherlands–Southeast Asia Semiconductor Talent Programme (3–14 Aug) at ASEM in Cyberjaya, training 60 students from 5 ASEAN countries across 17+ universities with lectures from Dutch universities (Twente, Groningen, Delft) and industry visits. Deputy Finance Minister Liew Chin Tong framed semiconductors as enabling AI, autos, medical devices, and defence, not just phones.