The very short version: It has now become clear that European governments can no longer rely on American clouds, and that we lack good and comprehensive alternatives. Market forces have failed to deliver a truly European cloud, and businesses won’t naturally buy as yet unproven cloud services, even when adorned with a beautiful European 🇪🇺 flag, so for now nothing will happen.

So our 2016 Subaru Outback has been having horrible battery drain issues for a couple years now. We got the attached service bulletin recently that explained the issue.

It turns out that the Data Communications Module that powers Subaru's Starlink service (emergency assistance/safety/etc. service) now causes a battery drain because it is trying to talk to a 3G network that is no longer there, and it just tries its little heart out.

Innenkommissarin Ylva Johansson will es Internetplattformen wie Facebook, Instagram oder Snapchat für bis zu zwei weitere Jahre erlauben, private Botschaften oder Posts auf anstößige Inhalte zu durchforsten. Die Verlängerung soll ab dem 4. August des kommenden Jahres greifen.

Im Kampf gegen bildliche Darstellungen von missbrauchten Kindern im Internet haben die EU-Länder und das Europaparlament gesetzliche Eingriffe in verschlüsselte Privatchats verhindert. Nun will die EU-Kommission die umstrittene Chatkontrolle vorerst auf freiwilliger Basis weiter ermöglichen, wie sie heute in Brüssel bekanntgab. Von Datenschützern kommt scharfe Kritik.

The presidency suggests accepting the bans on untargeted scraping of facial images, emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions, biometric categorisation to infer sensitive data like sexual orientation and religious beliefs, and predictive policing for individuals.

Moreover, ‘in the spirit of compromise’, the presidency proposes putting the EU Parliament’s prohibitions that were not accepted in the list of high-risk use cases, namely all other biometric categorisation and emotion recognition applications.

Regarding remote biometric identification, the parliamentarians agreed to drop the total ban on real-time use in exchange for limiting its exceptional usage and including more safeguards.

The presidency also wants law enforcement to be able to use emotion recognition and biometric categorisation software without informing the subjects.

Fünf Monate nach Abschluss des Untersuchungsausschusses zum größten Spähskandal der EU drängt das EU-Parlament die EU-Kommission zu Konsequenzen. Mit 425 Ja-Stimmen, 108 Nein-Stimmen und 23 Enthaltungen äußerten sich die Abgeordneten besorgt darüber, dass die im Juni 2023 vom Parlament geforderten Gesetzesänderungen zur Eindämmung von Spyware-Missbrauch nicht auf den Weg gebracht werden. Das Parlament selbst darf keine Gesetze vorschlagen und hatte daher die Kommission darum gebeten.

"Wir haben im Cyberraum permanent Angriffe auf unsere Netze", sagte der für den Aufbau des CIDCC zuständige Vizeadmiral Dr. Thomas Daum der Deutschen Presse-Agentur.

Zur Abwehr von Bedrohungen aus dem Cyber- und Informationsraum hat in Brüssel eine von Deutschland initiierte Koordinierungsstelle die Arbeit aufgenommen. Im Cyber Information Domain Coordination Centre (CIDCC) fließen künftig sicherheitsrelevante Informationen aus EU-Staaten zusammen, um gemeinsame Einsätze zu schützen sowie militärische Planungs- und Führungsprozesse zu verbessern.

EU take a knee to the USA:

A crucial aspect of the sovereignty requirements has been to what extent the European subsidiary of a cloud provider can be considered under the parent company’s or group’s control.

The requirement that the cloud service providers would have to be operated only by EU-based companies with no non-European entity exerting effective control has been slightly softened for the level of assurance high+.

In particular, the new text adds the possibility to demonstrate that they have put in place effective technical, organisational and legal measures that prevent non-EU companies linked with the cloud provider from exerting a decisive influence in decisions related to investigation requests.

Pirates Mikulas Peksa and Patrick Breyer worked until the last minute to try and fix at least some of the numerous risks of the EU digital identity scheme. In a major victory, Member States will not be obliged to assign a single unique ID number to every citizen. Signing up for the eID app will be voluntary, and it will remain possible to access public and private services by other existing identification and authentication means. The app client will be open source.