Three men accused of selling and exporting over $10 million worth of fake Cisco networking equipment into the U.S. have been arrested by U.K. police.The men are believed to have imported and exported counterfeit Cisco equipment through a company website and telesales. The arrests, made last week by the U.K. Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), were announced Thursday.“Last week’s action saw PIPCU dismantle a criminal gang suspected of cheating the computer industry out of millions of pounds,” said PIPCU Detective Inspector Mick Dodge, in a statement. Using counterfeit products could also seriously harm businesses that use them, since company network integrity could be compromised and significant network outages could occur, Dodge said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Europe’s e-commerce market will be subject to a full-fledged antitrust probe, as part of the European Commission’s push to tear down walls between the European Union’s 28 national digital markets.The competition inquiry will look for barriers to online cross-border trade of electronics, digital content, clothing and shoes, the Commission said Wednesday. The probe was proposed by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in March and is one of 16 initiatives announced Wednesday that the Commission hopes will make the EU a single market for digital goods and services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla is planning to gradually favor HTTPS (HTTP Secure) connections over non-secure HTTP connections by making some new features on its browser available only to secured sites.The browser developer decided after a discussion on its community mailing list that it will set a date after which all new features will be available only to secure websites, wrote Firefox security lead Richard Barnes in a blog post. Mozilla also plans to gradually phase out access to browser features for non-secure websites, particularly features that could present risks to users’ security and privacy, he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber will require drivers of its Dutch UberPop ride-hailing service to have a taxi license. That will not, however, be enough to mitigate its legal troubles in the country.UberPop connects passengers with drivers who use their own cars and typically don’t have a taxi license, allowing them to offer rides for a much lower fare then regular taxis.A Dutch court last year declared the service illegal, banning it because it unfairly competes with strictly regulated taxi services. Even though fines totaled €100,000, several UberPop drivers landed in court and Dutch authorities raided company offices, Uber kept on flouting the ban, operating UberPop with unlicensed drivers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook has warned that overlapping national probes into its privacy policy could severely endanger the European Union’s economy if such a fragmented strategy is continued and applied to other businesses.The social networking company also warned that the high cost of compliance with multiple national laws, rather than with an overarching EU regime, could cause it to introduce new features more slowly or not at all.Data protection authorities from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in February formed a task force to deal with Facebook’s new privacy policy, introduced late January. They suspect that the new policy violates EU privacy laws. French, Spanish and Italian authorities later joined the group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will give €150 million (US$163 million) to European publishers and digital journalism startups in the next three years as part of a wider package that aims to support the news sector.The Internet giant has had a difficult relationship with publishers in many countries in Europe over using snippets for its news indexing, but having eight top publishers joining its initiative may soften up other publishers to also do a deal.The move also comes just weeks after the European Commission charged Google with abusing its dominant position in Internet search services in Europe and started an antitrust probe into Android over app bundling practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will give €150 million (US$163 million) to European publishers and digital journalism startups in the next three years as part of a wider package that aims to support the news sector.The Internet giant has had a difficult relationship with publishers in many countries in Europe over using snippets for its news indexing, but having eight top publishers joining its initiative may soften up other publishers to also do a deal.The move also comes just weeks after the European Commission charged Google with abusing its dominant position in Internet search services in Europe and started an antitrust probe into Android over app bundling practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Europe is still lacking real tech giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon, but it looks like things are slowly changing. However, if European companies want to start competing with Silicon Valley, they have to start thinking internationally from the beginning, says BlaBlaCar COO Nicolas Brusson.BlaBlaCar is a French ride-sharing startup. It has about 20 million users and is active in 18 countries, where its users can offer empty seats in their cars on a trip for a fee, allowing them to save costs while others can arrange a relatively cheap trip.Brusson, who spent years in Silicon Valley and worked as a venture capitalist before co-founding BlaBlaCar, is responsible for the international growth of the company. At The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on Thursday he gave fellow European entrepreneurs some tips on how to become a big company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twitter revised its privacy policy over the weekend, changing where it handles the account information of users outside the U.S. and clarifying some points.As of Saturday, account information for Twitter users outside the U.S. is handled by Twitter International in Dublin, Ireland. This means that all account information will be subject to Irish privacy and data protection law, which is based on the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, Twitter said on its site.The accounts of U.S. users will still be handled by Twitter’s head office in San Francisco under U.S. law.Dublin is popular with U.S. tech companies, which often base their international and EU operations there. The country’s favorable corporation tax regime is often seen as a reason for IT companies to settle there—as is the small staff of its privacy regulator, which has a staff of just 29 to tackle domestic and international companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Increasingly, computers are deciding what news stories we read, and may even end up teaching our children to speak. But whether we should allow them to is becoming the subject of a heated debate related to the use of algorithms.Algorithms are pieces of code that, much like a recipe, provide a set of instructions to complete a task. They are used by companies like Google and Facebook to determine what search results are relevant and what posts are shown in someone’s timeline. They are used to mediate social, political, personal and commercial interactions for billions of people and can act as powerful gatekeepers that are increasingly used to make decisions for us or about us.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Victims of the CoinVault ransomware might be able to decrypt their files with a free tool released by Kaspersky Lab together with the Dutch police.The tool can be found at https://noransom.kaspersky.com. The application uses decryption keys found by the Dutch police as part of an investigation.Ransomware like CoinVault encrypts data on a disk or blocks access to a computer system. It is usually installed by exploiting a vulnerability on victims’ computers via phishing emails or links to malicious websites.Unlike other ransomware, CoinVault lets victims see a list of the files it encrypted and decrypt one for free to try to get people to pay up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China is deploying a tool that can be used to launch huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to enforce censorship. Researchers have dubbed it “the Great Cannon.”The first time the tool was seen in action was during the massive DDoS attacks that hit software development platform GitHub last month. The attack sent large amounts of traffic to the site, targeting Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted there. It was the largest attack the site has endured in its history.That attack was first thought to have been orchestrated using China’s “Great Firewall,” a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software used by the government to exert strict control over Internet access in the country. The firewall is used to block sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as several media outlets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hacked French-language TV network TV5Monde might have made it easier for hackers to compromise its systems and social media accounts. One of its employees was interviewed about the hack on TV—in front of a wall of posters that appeared to contain usernames and passwords for the channel’s social media accounts.TV5Monde was hit by a crippling cyberattack on Wednesday when Islamist hackers managed to disrupt broadcasting across its channels and hijacked the station’s website and social media accounts.In the wake of the attack the offices of TV5Monde were visited by reporters of another French TV station, which broadcast an interview with one of TV5Monde’s reporters, David Delos. Behind Delos in the shot however, several printouts stuck to a wall appear to reveal the usernames and passwords for social media accounts including Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.K. government’s mass surveillance practices will be challenged at the European Court of Human Rights.Human rights and civil liberties organizations Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International have filed a joint application with the court, they announced on Friday.The groups assert that U.K domestic law governing the U.K. intelligence agencies’ interception of communications and its intelligence sharing with the U.S., are in breach of fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of expression and non-discrimination guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights. The challenge is based on documents disclosed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealing mass surveillance practices by intelligence agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the first time, a country in Western Europe has reported that malware attacks were used by hackers to steal €1.23 million (US$1.32 million) from ATMs. One major problem is the continued use of Windows XP in ATMs, making them more vulnerable to attacks, a report on ATM fraud said.The report does not specify which country reported the malware attacks, said Lachlan Gunn, executive director the European ATM Security Team (EAST), an organization that aims to provide an oversight of trends in ATM fraud.However, it is the first time these attacks were reported in Western Europe. Malware attacks on ATMs have been used for some time in other parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, the Asia Pacific region and Latin America, Gunn said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A German data protection authority has ordered Google to change how it handles users’ private data in the country by the end of the year.The administrative order was issued on Wednesday by the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Johannes Caspar, in order to force Google to comply with German data protection law and give users more control over their data.Google started combining existing policies for various services when it changed its privacy policy in 2012, despite the concerns of European Union data protection authorities. At least six authorities then started formal investigations into the new policy; Hamburg was one of those six.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook tracks everyone who visits its site, including people who don’t have an account, and even continues to track users and non-users who have opted out of targeted ads, researchers at two Belgian universities have found.Researchers at the University of Leuven in cooperation with researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel have published an update to a February analysis of Facebook’s new policies and terms. The report, commissioned by the Belgian Privacy Commission, already found in preliminary conclusions in February that Facebook, with its 2015 privacy policy update, likely acts in violation of European law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.K. Court of Appeal won’t block a privacy lawsuit that alleges Google tracked Safari users without authorization, so the three plaintiffs can continue their legal fight against the search company.“These claims raise serious issues which merit a trial. They concern what is alleged to have been the secret and blanket tracking and collation of information, often of an extremely private nature, as specified in the confidential schedules, about and associated with the claimants’ internet use, and the subsequent use of that information for about nine months,” reads the decision, released Friday. “The case relates to the anxiety and distress this intrusion upon autonomy has caused.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber keeps crashing into laws and regulations in Europe, but it’s keeping the foot on the accelerator.Following raids in Belgium and France, Dutch authorities raided Uber’s Amsterdam office on Thursday as part of an investigation into the ride-hailing service UberPop, which a court ruled illegal in the Netherlands.The raid’s main goal is to obtain records that show the size of the UberPop operation, a spokeswoman for the DutchHuman Environment and Transport Inspectorate said, adding that the authority, for instance, wants to find out the number of UberPop drivers. The raid is still ongoing and is being conducted by the inspectorate in cooperation with the police.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dutch telecom providers have to delete data that had been retained under the now-scrapped data retention law, unless it is needed for business purposes.The Dutch data retention law that required ISPs and telecommunications operators to store customer metadata for police investigations was scrapped by the District Court of the Hague earlier this month for violating fundamental privacy rights.While most providers were quick to stop collecting the data, uncertainty remained about what should happen with the data that was already collected and stored when the law was in force.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Loek Essers