by Ian Brown and Douwe Korff
I continue to be amazed by Spanish accountants and lawyers who apparently couldn’t care less about the security risks of asking their clients to hand over their government-signed eID private keys to electronically file forms.
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This Note is an immediate response to the recent EDPB guidance relating to the processing of certain special categories of personal data that enjoy special protection under the GDPR, commonly referred to as “sensitive data”. The Note explains why the EDPB’s guidance is not clear enough.
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Tools to bridge and otherwise help Mastodon and Bluesky work together are slowly reducing some of the obstacles to replacing X/Twitter.
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The NYT headline (Did Apple just kill social apps?) is over-the-top, but a reminder of the impact Big Tech firms can have on entire market sectors with their product decisions — and why the EU was right to legislate rules for fairness and contestability in the Digital Markets Act. Indeed, further interventions might be necessary, like mandating privacy-protective friend-connecting services.
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Congratulations to Alexandra Geese, Francesca Bria and Cristina Caffarra for organising a timely and interesting conference at the European Parliament on the idea of a “Euro-stack” (building on existing “stacks”/digital public infrastructure created by India and Brazil). You can watch the whole 5-hour event; I made a few notes (below) as I watched the middle half.
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Part A of Mario Draghi’s report for the EU on “competitiveness” reform was published this morning. In one sentence, he concludes: “Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies.”
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Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes’ sweeping order last night blocking access to X/Twitter is a foretaste of action by other courts and governments around the world. They will no doubt be watching closely.
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This analysis explains why the EU bans on Russian media outlets, and the Court of Justice judgment in RT France v. Council relating to them, are wrong. The bans limit the right of individuals in the EU to receive such information and ideas, while EU rules on sanction violations can easily lead to the use of the criminal law against individuals in the EU for non-violent political speech.
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More excitement as the world cleans up after Friday’s global IT chaos, caused directly by poor CrowdStrike testing processes and marking its software as essential to Windows booting — but indirectly by Microsoft allowing inadequately tested/sandboxed code to run in “kernel” mode on PCs, where it can/did cause a system crash on around 8.5m Windows PCs globally and billions of dollars of insured damage.
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You have to admire Microsoft’s PR people for their cynicism… they are not-so-subtly letting the media know that the REAL baddie in Friday’s global IT outage was not CrowdStrike, nor poor security design of Windows, but… the European Commission’s DG Competition!
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