The internet today isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee pictured when he invented the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to …
A new report out this week shows that China is by far the most effective censor of the internet, and far from retreating, is exporting its model around the world. Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. China’s …
Brussels has warned Facebook it will face sanctions unless it changes what the European commission calls its “misleading” terms and conditions. The EU commissioner in charge of consumer protection, Věra Jourová, said she had run out of patience with the social network after nearly two years of discussions aimed at giving Facebook’s European users more …
The European Parliament has approved a controversial copyright law that threatens to ‘destroy the internet as we know it’, according to digital rights groups. Yesterday, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the …
India’s controversial biometric database, Aadhaar, has been once again compromised, according to a three-month investigation launched by HuffPost India. In a report published Tuesday, HuffPost revealed the existence of a malicious patch said to disable critical security features, making it easier not only to create unauthorized Aadhaar numbers but to fool the system’s biometric recognition …
The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace …
The European Parliament has voted against a controversial set of copyright rules known as the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The vote follows weeks of intensifying protests, with internet companies such as Mozilla and pioneers like Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaking out against the EU’s copyright proposals and Wikipedia taking its …
Uganda’s parliament has passed a law to impose a controversial tax on people using social media platforms. The new Excise Duty (Amendment) Bill will also impose various other taxes, including a 1% levy on the total value of mobile money transactions – which civil society groups complain will affect poorer Ugandans who rarely use banking …
Threats to cyber security are increasingly organised and transnational with no respect for geographical borders. Over the last year, we have seen a significant increase in the scale and severity of malicious cyber activity globally. In the UK, we have seen the impact of major cyber security incidents, such as the WannaCry attack that affected …
Kaspersky seems to be getting into more trouble in the US with its services being either banned or grounded. Months after the US Government ordered its federal agencies to stop using any internet security software provided by Kaspersky Lab. Kaspersky indicated it had appealed to a US federal court on the grounds the ban it …