Bank of Canada says won't use blockchain for interbank payment system By Reuters

Bank of Canada says won't use blockchain for interbank payment system By Reuters: ""The bottom line is that a stand-alone DLT wholesale system is unlikely to match the efficiency and net benefits of a centralized system," wrote Carolyn Wilkins, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, and Gerry Gaetz, Payments Canada president.
"At its heart, there exists a fundamental inconsistency or tension between a centralized wholesale interbank payment system, as we have now, and the decentralization inherent in DLT."" 'via Blog this'

Audiovisual Media Services Directive reform: Document pool - EDRi

Audiovisual Media Services Directive reform: Document pool - EDRi: "On 25 May 2016, the European Commission proposed to reform the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (the “AVMS Directive” or “AVMSD”). The current AVMS Directive (2010) is the European Union (EU) legal framework that regulates traditional TV broadcasters and on-demand services in the EU Member States.

The AVMSD contains rules on audiovisual advertising; jurisdiction over providers; promotion of European works; and on providers’ obligations with regards to commercial communications, protection of minors from potentially harmful content, fight against “incitement to hatred”, among other measures. The new proposal broadens the scope of the Directive to cover the regulation of video-sharing platforms and potentially even other social media companies." 'via Blog this'

Cyberleagle: Time to speak up for Article 15

Cyberleagle: Time to speak up for Article 15: "The peculiar vice of compelled general monitoring, however, is that we never get to that point. If the filtered and blocked speech doesn’t see the light of day it never gets to be debated, prosecuted, tested, criticised or defended. To some, that may be a virtue not a vice" 'via Blog this'

SCL: Res Robotica! Liability and Driverless Vehicles

SCL: Res Robotica! Liability and Driverless Vehicles: "English lawyer Andrew Katz[17] suggests that robotic technology could be given an authenticated identity through the use of a trust scheme, one that is not mandatory, but failure to be party to it would render the owner of the technology strictly liable for its actions or omissions. As with Pagallo, Katz suggests that the peculium should be backed by an insurance policy.

Introducing the idea of a peculium linked to insurance could provide the legal flexibility required to accommodate the evolving technology[18] and tackling the problem of apportioning blame to a traditional legal person." 'via Blog this'

Open Rights Group - NHS ransom shows GCHQ putting us at risk

Open Rights Group - NHS ransom shows GCHQ putting us at risk: "GCHQ are normally responsible for ‘offensive’ operations, or hacking and breaking into other networks. They also have a ‘defensive’ role, at the National Cyber Security Centre, which is meant to help organisations like the NHS keep their systems safe from these kinds of breakdown.

GCHQ are therefore forced to trade off their use of secret hacking exploits against the risks these exploits pose to organisations like the NHS.

They have a tremendous conflict of interest, which in ORG’s view, ought to be resolved by moving the UK defensive role out of GCHQ’s hands.

Government also needs to have a robust means of assessing the risks that GCHQ’s use of vulnerabilities might pose to the rest of us. At the moment, ministers can only turn to GCHQ to ask about the risks, and we assume the same is true in practice of oversight bodies and future Surveillance Commissioners. The obvious way to improve this and get more independent advice is to split National Cyber Security Centre from GCHQ." 'via Blog this'

SCL: Smart and Connected Cities: Surmounting the Challenges

SCL: Smart and Connected Cities: Surmounting the Challenges: "The European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy recently published its final report on the study on ‘Smart Cities and Communities’, which looked at the opportunities and challenges faced when attempting to connect a city's infrastructure with the internet through the Internet of Things. The Report found that city-wide integration was rare in the majority of the sample cases it looked at. Instead, what was found were examples of ‘smart’ districts and specific sectors. 

While the Report suggested that there were not many examples of city-wide ‘smart’ initiatives, there are places where this is being attempted." 'via Blog this'

Copyright: blocking order against live streaming - FA Premier League Ltd v BT [2017] EWHC 480 (Ch)

Copyright: blocking order against live streaming - Lexology: "This is the first time that a blocking order has been ordered in respect of streaming servers. Therefore, while the decision involved the application of well-established principles since Football Association, the modification of the factors to be taken into account to address the different context is interesting. The order contained additional safeguards over and above those previously adopted in the context of website-blocking, notably the short duration of the order.

Case: Football Association Premier League Ltd v British Telecommunications Plc and others [2017] EWHC 480 (Ch)." 'via Blog this'

BBC iPlayer - Panorama - What Facebook Knows About You

BBC iPlayer - Panorama - What Facebook Knows About You: "Facebook is thought to know more about us than any other business in history, but what does the social network that Mark Zuckerberg built do with all of our personal information?
Reporter Darragh MacIntyre investigates how Facebook's powerful algorithms allow advertisers and politicians to target us more directly than ever before, and he questions whether the company's size and complexity now makes it impossible to regulate" 'via Blog this'

First comprehensive map of the ‘dark web’ reveals a remarkably antisocial corner of the internet | Science | AAAS

First comprehensive map of the ‘dark web’ reveals a remarkably antisocial corner of the internet | Science | AAAS: Beyond the “surface web”—the parts accessible to search engines—there is a “deep web” containing (by one estimate) 500 times the content, secured in databases and hidden behind login screens. And within this deep web is a tiny corner known as the “dark web,” which requires special, anonymizing software such as the Tor Browser to access and contains everything from black markets selling drugs and counterfeit IDs to whistleblowing forums.

 Researchers have just conducted a comprehensive mapping of the dark web and found that it’s not much of a web at all. They started with a few central hubs in the “.onion” domain (sort of like .com on the surface web) and used an algorithm to crawl along links from site to site, finding only 7178 sites, connected to each other through 25,104 links. (Sites with no inbound links couldn’t be counted.)

Their key finding is that 87% of these dark web sites don’t link to any other sites. The dark web is more of a set of “dark silos,” they write in a preliminary paper posted on arXiv yesterday. Dark websites linked to surface websites and to other dark websites at the same rate, ruling out dark sites’ ephemerality as an explanation for their scant interconnections." 'via Blog this'

European Union Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment | Europol

European Union Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment | Europol: "Serious and organised crime in the EU features a great variety of criminal activities, which are increasing in complexity and scale. 

Criminals quickly adopt and integrate new technologies into their modi operandi or build brand-new business models around them. The use of new technologies by organised crime groups (OCGs) has an impact on criminal activities across the spectrum of serious and organised crime.

This includes developments online, such as the expansion of online trade and widespread availability of encrypted communication channels." 'via Blog this'

European Commission Mergers: Commission approves acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft, subject to conditions

European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Mergers: Commission approves acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft, subject to conditions: "The Commission analysed potential data concentration as a result of the merger with regard to its potential impact on competition in the Single Market. Privacy related concerns as such do not fall within the scope of EU competition law but can be taken into account in the competition assessment to the extent that consumers see it as a significant factor of quality, and the merging parties compete with each other on this factor. In this instance, the Commission concluded that data privacy was an important parameter of competition between professional social networks on the market, which could have been negatively affected by the transaction.
 

The proposed commitments

To address the competition concerns identified by the Commission in the professional social network services market, Microsoft offered a series of commitments. These commitments include:

• ensuring that PC manufacturers and distributors would be free not to install LinkedIn on Windows and allowing users to remove LinkedIn from Windows should PC manufacturers and distributors decide to preinstall it. 
• allowing competing professional social network service providers to maintain current levels of interoperability with Microsoft's Office suite of products through the so-called Office add-in program and Office application programming interfaces. 
• granting competing professional social network service providers access to "Microsoft Graph", a gateway for software developers. 

It is used to build applications and services that can, subject to user consent, access data stored in the Microsoft cloud, such as contact information, calendar information, emails, etc. Software developers can potentially use this data to drive subscribers and usage to their professional social networks.

The commitments will apply in the EEA for a period of five years and will be monitored by a trustee." 'via Blog this'

The Internet of Things | Digital Single Market

The Internet of Things | Digital Single Market: "The recently proposed "European data economy" initiative (January 2017) also contributes to the creation of a European single market for IoT. This initiative proposes policy and legal solutions concerning the free flow of data across national borders in the EU, and liability issues in complex environments such as the IoT one. Especially, liability is decisive to enhance legal certainty around the IoT products and services." 'via Blog this'