Marketing and sale of model prohibited after tech giant fails to meet rule 40% of phones be made from local parts Indonesia has prohibited the marketing and sale of the iPhone 16 model over Apple’s failure to meet local investment regulations, according to its industry ministry. South-east Asia’s biggest economy has a young, tech-savvy population with more than 100 million people under the age of 30, but Apple still does not have an official store in the country, forcing those who want its products to buy from resale platforms. Continue reading...

No wonder some members of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting had that sinking feeling * See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Konami, cute RPGs, weird but wonderful indie games – everything I saw at Japan’s biggest gaming convention • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Tokyo Game Show takes place at the Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo city centre, and given its late September slot in the calendar, it is always either horribly hot or pouring with rain. Either way, it’s humid as heck, and there are many thousands of people crammed in, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. Nonetheless, I’ve always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended my first one in 2008, and so the experience of playing games in packed halls while understanding very little about what is happening has become powerfully nostalgic. And I surely wasn’t the only person feeling nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the halls were filled with series and characters from 15 years ago. Silent Hill 2 was back on the Konami stand, along with Solid Snake’s grizzled face for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater remake. Capcom had two huge areas given over to Monster Hunter, a series that was unbelievably popular in Japan throughout the 00s and finally broke through to the world with Monster Hunter World in 2018. Sony was also back at the show in a big way for the first time in five years, showing off the PlayStation 5 Pro, and its especially gorgeous-looking PlayStation 30th Anniversary special edition. The Japanese-made Astro Bot was also everywhere at the show – I hope its sales have reflected how brilliant it is. Continue reading...

Museum features consoles from 1983’s Famicom to 2017’s Switch, as well as honouring Nintendo’s pre-video-game era Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards. Continue reading...

From playing Super Mario on a giant control to spotting Pikmin hiding in corners, my visit to this delightful museum in Kyoto offered up experience over education • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant was a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display. Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967). Continue reading...

National police agency says it is investigating 513 cases of deepfake pornography as a new scandal grips the country The anger was palpable. For the second time in just a few years, South Korean women took to the streets of Seoul to demand an end to sexual abuse. When the country spearheaded Asia’s #MeToo movement, the culprit was molka – spy cams used to record women without their knowledge. Now their fury was directed at an epidemic of deepfake pornography. For Juhee Jin, 26, a Seoul resident who advocates for women’s rights, the emergence of this new menace, in which women and girls are again the targets, was depressingly predictable. “This should have been addressed a long time ago,” says Jin, a translator. “I hope that authorities take precautions and provide proper education so that people can prevent these crimes from happening.” Continue reading...

In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance Late last year, Duan*, a university student in China, used a virtual private network to jump over China’s great firewall of internet censorship and download social media platform Discord. Overnight he entered a community in which thousands of members with diverse views debated political ideas and staged mock elections. People could join the chat to discuss ideas such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all, it’s hard for us to do politics in reality, so we have to do it in a group chat,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a video on YouTube. Continue reading...

Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling. German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review. Continue reading...

The country has long been the world’s biggest market – but the government’s interest is more geopolitical than environmental When Kenzi, an advertising worker in Shanghai, bought an electric vehicle in November she wasn’t even thinking about the environmental benefits. She had read Elon Musk’s biography and thought the Tesla 3 looked good. She also knew that if she bought an EV she could bypass the long wait and cost of getting licence plates, which are rationed by the government. “It’s not easy to get a licence plate in Shanghai, but you get a licence for free when you buy an EV,” she said. Continue reading...

Trump has accused Taiwan of ‘taking’ the US chip sector, but Taipei has been at the forefront of the industry for decades, and its future could depend on it The Hsinchu Science Park, on Taiwan’s west coast, is lush and green, with streets neatly planned and clearly signposted. The buildings are modern and well maintained – from the outside most visitors wouldn’t even know that they are among the world’s most important factories. Hsinchu used to be famous for its fishball street snacks, but now it’s referred to as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, a tech-focused microcosm pipelining workers from school to university and into the world-leading semiconductor industry that is crucial to global supply chains. Continue reading...