Japan

There's a 7-11 app here in the United States that's released a Beta version for product testing. This app was recently given a big update with Mobile Checkout and what's called "7NOW delivery" - but the interesting bit is the call out to the public issued by the Product Owner for 7-Eleven's apps just this week on Reddit. There he suggested that beta testers would get "reward points" for signing up, and that he'd be looking to get some "exclusive rewards and benefits" for testers as they "scale the beta group up" later this year.

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It would seem that the developers of the Japan-based 7-Eleven wallet app (7 Pay) had not heard of phone fraud. If they had, they'd have built a more secure method of changing user passwords in said app. As a result of their relative lack of finesse when it came to developing this one bit of the app, 900 customers lost a grand total of approximately 55-million Yen (which converts to roughly $506k).

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Today we're going to run down the effective Huawei ban list, the basics in China-based spy fears, and the fallout. This has a little to do with ZTE, a lot to do with China's government, and what might be the worst bout of luck a company ever had (with regard to their native country's timing for a trade war with the United States). But most importantly, we're going to list all the places Huawei's been banned, rejected, or removed in the recent past. SEE: Updates at the end of this text.

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In a little over a year, Japan will be hosting one of the biggest sporting events in the world. But more than just the technical preparations for the Olympic Games 2020, there's also the promotion of the event. Samsung is part of the latter, having been chosen as one of the partners of the event, and what better way for it to drum up the hype than by selling a very limited edition Galaxy S10+ with the 2020 Olympics logo etched on its back.

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Today we've compiled photos, videos, and data from the Japanese asteroid mission on Asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Most exciting is the BOMB the group dropped on the asteroid - and the explosive results. But we've also gathered images to make video of the group's lander bouncing off the space body's surface! It's not every day you see video captured by a craft bouncing off the surface of an asteroid careening through space!

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This week a set of scientists discovered a meteor explosion that occurred in early December, 2018. The event was detected by other instruments soon after taking place, but now we've got our first visual evidence in fire red and orange. This explosive image comes from the Japanese Himawari-8 weather satellite, and was first reported globally on the 15th of March by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

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Scientists have discovered 83 supermassive black holes nearly as old as the known universe. These black holes in this study were identified by their luminosity - the red dots of light in the image at the head of this article. Each of these dots is a super bright, super luminous active nucleus of energy, forming a supermassive black hole. Gas accretes onto the center, light blasts out.

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Japan has nearly hit its goal for collecting e-waste that will be used to create the 2020 Tokyo Olympics medals, officials have announced. The nation announced plans to make the medals primarily from metal harvested from old smartphones and other gadgets back in early 2017. In its most recent update, officials said that nearly 100% of the needed metals have been collected.

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It would seem that Sony just patented a game emulator for their next major console, tentatively named PS5. The patent actually suggests that a new gaming console would be able to "interpret" the inner workings of previously-released consoles. The patent goes by the name "Impersonating CPUID for backward compatibility" and was registered first in the official Japan Patent Office as of January 31st, 2019.

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Japan seems to have a reputation for being a technologically advanced country more than most. It might surprise, even shock, some, however, how behind it is in some aspects. That, unfortunately, may have come to light in recent weeks as Japan prepares to host the Olympics next year. And one of its steps to ensure the security of the event is to try and hack into local IoT devices to weed out those with insecure software.

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Toshiba has built a new robot designed to probe the damaged, radioactive reactors in Fukushima, the company has revealed. The robot features a variety of tools to assess the damaged Unit 2 reactor, building upon the data gathered by previous probes to help determine what equipment will be necessary to remove the melted fuel debris. This removal is a key part of the overall decommissioning process.

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The dust of CES 2019 may have long settled and most of the mobile industry is gearing up for MWC 2019 next month, but over in the East, another tech storm is brewing. In a few days, Japan IT Week 2019, one of the country's and the region's biggest tech events will be taking place in the popular tourist spot of Osaka. And while you might rightly presume it's focused on the tech industry in Japan, the exhibits and conferences in this year's trade show both reflect and confirm the trends in the international scene as well.

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