Group items tagged

"Many hope to reach the economically stable countries in northern Europe, and use WhatsApp's messaging system as a virtual road map to help them navigate their journey. They stick to groups of their countrymen, connecting through friends of friends. Unlike some other ways of communicating, WhatsApp is free, and only requires that the user have access to the internet."

"Victims of a major ransomware cyberattack that has spread through the US and Europe can no longer unlock their computers even if they pay the ransom. The "Petya" ransomware has caused serious disruption at large firms including the advertising giant WPP, French construction materials company Saint-Gobain and Russian steel and oil firms Evraz and Rosneft. Infected computers display a message demanding a Bitcoin ransom worth $300. Those who pay are asked to send confirmation of payment to an email address. However, that email address has been shut down by the email provider. "

""In the event that [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users' data to the US," Yvonne Cunnane argued, "it is not clear … how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU." Facebook denied the filing was a threat, arguing in a statement that it was a simple reflection of reality. "Facebook is not threatening to withdraw from Europe," a spokesperson said."

""To my knowledge, this is the first instance in which a European DPA has imposed a ban on a contact-tracing app already in use in light of national developments regarding contagion levels," he told us. "It is thus possible that other European DPAs will impose similar bans in the future and demand that contact-tracing apps be changed as soon as contagion levels substantially decrease also in other parts of Europe. Norway has currently one of the lowest contagion levels in Europe.""

"For many, the surge in social media use in recent years has been an awful contradiction - rather than making people more friendly, it has tended to cut them off, cause division and fuel anger and resentment, not sociability. But as Europe adjusts to the reality of self-isolation, there are signs social media can bring out the best in people, not just the boastful or argumentative bits many decry."

""AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content. You don't need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised," he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery. Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: "Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.""

"Why has Bitcoin become so popular? One possible explanation is that exploding interest in Bitcoin over the past several days is being driven by economic uncertainty in Europe. Fearful of an earlier proposed European Union plan to partially fund a Cypriot bailout by imposing new taxes on Cypriots' bank deposits, goes the theory, some Cypriots (and Spaniards, for similar reasons) flocked to Bitcoin to attempt an escape from the clutches of potential taxes."

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

""A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google's perspective that's a balance," said Schmidt. "Google believes, having looked at the decision which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong.""

"Poland has become the first country in Europe to introduce a network of "finger vein ID" cash machines, with 2,000 of the new ATMs opening in bank branches and supermarkets across the country this year, backed by a marketing campaign that promises "cash within your finger"."

Millions of Internet Explorer users in Europe will get the chance to change their web browser from 1 March.

"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten". The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."

"The BBC complained that a 2007 article about the ousting of Merrill Lynch's CEO had been pulled from certain Google searches in Europe. The Guardian revealed that six articles had been pulled from search results, including three from as far back as 2010 about a Scottish referee who was forced to resign after lying about a penalty and one from 2011 about French workers making Post-it art."

"The vast majority of emails flooding inboxes across Europe from companies asking for consent to keep recipients on their mailing list are unnecessary and some may be illegal, privacy experts have said, as new rules over data privacy come into force at the end of this week."

"A study last year of 3.1 million workers in North America, Europe and the Middle East found "significant and durable increases" in both the average number of emails sent internally, and the number of recipients. By measuring the time between the first and last emails sent (or meetings attended) in a 24-hour period, the researchers concluded that, since the pandemic, the average workday had extended by 48.5 minutes."

"In total, the group reported more than 500 suspect groups and Facebook pages operating across France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Poland and Spain. Most were either spreading fake news or using false pages and profiles to artificially boost the content of parties or sites they supported, in violation of Facebook's rules."

"It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned. But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake. Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law."

"TikTok moderators have struggled to assess content related to the Israel-Gaza conflict because the platform removed an internal tool for flagging videos in a foreign language, the Guardian has been told. The change has meant moderators in Europe cannot flag that they do not understand foreign-language videos, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew, which are understood to be appearing more frequently in video queues. The Guardian was told that moderators hired to work in English previously had access to a button to state that a video or post was not in their language. Internal documents seen by the Guardian show the button was called "not my language", or "foreign language"."