Digital Covid-19 certificates aimed at facilitating free movement in the European Union came into force across the bloc on Thursday, a long-awaited milestone for countries hoping to boost their ailing tourism industries. From a report: Free movement is a key pillar of European integration, and E.U. officials said last month that the certificates would "again enable citizens to enjoy this most tangible and cherished of E.U. rights." Through a Q.R. code issued by their country of residence, certificate holders will be able to show that they have been either fully vaccinated, tested negative or have immunity after a recent recovery. That will exempt them from most travel or quarantine restrictions.

Many European governments have already eased such rules, and each member nation can still revive protective measures if a country's health situation deteriorates. Germany, for instance, has imposed restrictions on travelers coming from Portugal, which has faced a surge of new cases driven by the spread of the Delta variant. While countries have agreed that national health authorities will issue the certificates -- most E.U. countries have already been doing so -- they are divided over who should check them, where and when.

Britain's proposed new internet law entails a government power grab with worrying implications for freedom of speech, according to civil liberties groups, academics and the tech industry. From a report: The groups are concerned the proposed Online Safety Bill would hand to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden disproportionate powers in the name of protecting users from "harmful" content. The Bill allow him to "modify" a code of practice -- the blueprint created by the regulator Ofcom for how tech companies should protect users -- to ensure it "reflects government policy." Critics say such powers, which were set out in a draft of the proposed law published in May and due for imminent scrutiny by MPs and peers, could undermine the regulator's independence and potentially politicize the regulation of the internet.

"The notion that a political appointee will have the unilateral power to alter the legal boundaries of free speech based on the political whims of the moment frankly makes the blood run cold," said Heather Burns, policy manager at the Open Rights Group. The draft bill -- which hasn't yet begun its formal passage through parliament -- is due to be checked line-by-line by legislators before being brought back to parliament later this year, where it will then pass through the stages it needs to end up on the statute books. The U.K. government and opposition parties are currently finalizing which lawmakers will sit on the pre-legislative committee.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities...

Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention."

Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country...

As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

The Record reports: The Wikimedia Foundation has banned the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views. This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a report published earlier this month... This included:

- Claiming that Hitler attacked Poland and started World War II after the Poles committed genocide against Germans.
- Redefining a World War II concentration camp as a labor camp...
- Pushing opinions that EU decision-making endangers Croatia's sovereignty.
- Claiming that the EU had used propaganda to trick Croatian citizens into joining the European Union...
Since 2013 the dubious edits had been spotted by users and the Croatian press, according to the article — but other Croatian Wikipedia editors failed, multiple times, to wrest away control of the site's moderation.

"The Wikimedia Foundation got involved last year after it was discovered that the administrator of Croatian Wikipedia had been using sockpuppet accounts to manipulate discussions and staff elections on the site..." The Wikimedia Foundation's report on the abuses of this team also points to possibly similar far-right-based editing on Wikipedia's Serbian version as well. This is the second major Wikipedia scandal in the past year. In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found and banned a public relations firm that had created and used a network of sockpuppet accounts to edit the site on behalf of some of its customers.

India's antitrust watchdog has ordered an investigation into allegations that Google has abused the dominant position of Android in the country's smart TV market. From a report: The news comes hours after the European Union opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abuses its leading role in the advertising-technology sector. In its initial review, the Competition Commission of India, which began looking into these allegations last year, said Google had breached certain anti-competitive laws.

Google was in the EU antitrust spotlight again on Tuesday as regulators opened an investigation into whether its digital advertising business gives the Alphabet unit an unfair advantage over rivals and advertisers. From a report: The European Union competition enforcer's move marks a new front against Google and follows more than 8 billion euros ($9.5 billion) in fines over the past decade for blocking rivals in online shopping, Android smartphones and online advertising. The European Commission said it would investigate whether Google distorts competition by restricting third party access to user data for advertising purposes on websites and apps, while reserving such data for its own use. "We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. Google generated $147 billion in revenue from online ads last year, more than any other company in the world, with ads including search, YouTube and Gmail accounting for the bulk of its overall sales and profits.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is better suited than private companies to protect user privacy for the eventual adoption of a digital euro, according to an executive board member. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times on June 14 and published Sunday, Fabio Panetta said his institution had no commercial interest in storing, managing or monetizing user data. The issue over privacy in the digital euro is a focal point for Europeans as are concerns of security, according to a recent survey by the ECB. "If the central bank gets involved in digital payments, privacy is going to be better protected," said Panetta. "We're not like private companies." The banker also said people felt safer when their information was handled by a public institution, adding the bank would do a better job. "There are many ways in which we can protect confidential data while allowing the checks foreseen by law to avoid illicit transactions, such as those linked to money laundering, the financing of terrorism or tax evasion," said Panetta.

Alphabet unit Google could face its biggest regulatory threat, with EU antitrust regulators set to open a formal investigation into its lucrative digital advertising business before the end of the year, said people familiar with the matter. From a report: It would mark a new front by the EU competition enforcer against Google. It has in the last decade fined the company more than 8 billion euros ($9.8 billion) for blocking rivals in online shopping, Android smartphones and online advertising. An EU probe would focus on Google's position vis-a-vis advertisers, publishers, intermediaries and rivals, one of the people said, indicating deeper scrutiny than the French antitrust agency's case concluded last week. Google made $147 billion in revenue from online ads last year, more than any other company in the world. Ads on its properties, including search, YouTube and Gmail, accounted for the bulk of sales and profits. About 16% of revenue came from its display or network business, in which other media companies use Google technology to sell ads on their website and apps.

The U.S. and European Union plan to cooperate more on technology regulation, industrial development and bilateral trade following President Biden's visit, in a bid to help Western allies better compete with China and Russia on developing and protecting critical and emerging technologies. From a report: Central to the increased coordination will be a new high-level Trade and Technology Council the two sides unveiled Tuesday. The aim of the TTC is to boost innovation and investment within and between the two allied economies, strengthen supply chains and avert unnecessary obstacles to trade, among other tasks. "You see the possibility for alignment," said European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager in an interview.

In a sign of both sides' aspirations for the council, it will be co-chaired on the U.S. side by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The EU side will be co-chaired the Ms. Vestager, the bloc's top competition and digital-policy official, and fellow Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, who handles trade. As the EU's top antitrust enforcer, Ms. Vestager has gained prominence for her cases against U.S. tech giants including Apple, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook. Former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both said her policies unfairly targeted American companies. Ms. Vestager has said her work doesn't single out any nationality. The TTC, which is slated to hold its first meeting in the fall and oversee many working groups, will allow the EU and U.S. to focus on cooperation, she said. Both sides stressed they would maintain regulatory autonomy within their respective legal systems.

The US has warned the EU against pursuing "protectionist" technology policies that exclusively target American companies, ahead of Joe Biden's first presidential visit to Brussels. From a report: The National Security Council, an arm of the White House, wrote last week to complain about the tone of recent comments about the EU's flagship tech regulation, as debates are about to begin in the European parliament. "We are particularly concerned about recent comments by the European Parliament rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act, Andreas Schwab, who suggested the DMA should unquestionably target only the five biggest US firms," said the email, seen by the Financial Times and dated June 9. It added: "Comments and approaches such as this make regulatory co-operation between the US and Europe extremely difficult and send a message that the [European] Commission is not interested in engaging with the United States in good faith to address these common challenges in a way that serves our shared interests. Protectionist measures could disadvantage European citizens and hold back innovation in member-state economies. Such policies will also hinder our ability to work together to harmonize our regulatory systems," it said. The note was sent by the NSC to staff at the EU's delegation in the US capital, according to several people familiar with it, as part of routine communications between Washington and Brussels. It comes at a time when both the US and EU are keen to rebuild a relationship that was marred by acrimony during Donald Trump's presidency. On Tuesday Biden will attend an EU-US summit in Brussels to discuss trade, tech, and China.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Google will jettison an auction system that forces other providers to bid for the right to be featured as a default search engine option on Android. Following a $5 billion fine and antitrust enforcement action in 2018, people in Europe have been able to choose which core apps and services they use on Android by default, instead of having to use Google products at first. Users in the region see an Android choice screen while setting up a device or after performing a factory reset. They can select their default search engine from a number of options. However, the three providers that are presented alongside Google Search have been determined by a sealed bidding process.

The revamped choice screen will feature up to 12 search engine options. The one you pick is the default for searches on the home screen and Chrome, if you use that as your browser. Your device will also install that provider's search app. Only general search engines are eligible, and they need to have a free search app on the Play store. Vertical search engines (i.e. specialist or subject-specific ones) will be locked out. Providers that syndicate search results and ads from Google won't be featured on the list either. The changes will come into effect for new Android devices sold in the UK and European Economic Area by September 1st. "Following further feedback from the Commission, we are now making some final changes to the Choice Screen including making participation free for eligible search providers," Oliver Bethell, Google's head of competition for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, wrote in a blog post. "We will also be increasing the number of search providers shown on the screen. These changes will come into effect from September this year on Android devices."

The EU is facing a backlash over new AI rules that allow for limited use of facial recognition by authorities -- with opponents warning the carveouts could usher in a new age of biometric surveillance. From a report: A coalition of digital rights and consumer protection groups across the globe, including Latin America, Africa and Asia are calling for a global ban on biometric recognition technologies that enable mass and discriminatory surveillance by both governments and corporations. In an open letter, 170 signatories in 55 countries argue that the use of technologies like facial recognition in public places goes against human rights and civil liberties. "It shows that organizations, groups, people, activists, technologists around the world who are concerned with human rights, agree to this call," said Daniel Leufer of U.S. digital rights group Access Now, which co-authored the letter. The use of facial recognition technology is becoming widespread. But along with everyday applications like unlocking phones, it's increasingly being used by governments and companies to surveil people, whether by law enforcement to scan public places for criminals or by grocery stores claiming to use it to catch thieves. The letter is in part a response to the EU's AI bill that restricts the practice, but does not prohibit it outright.

Google will scrap a fee and add more mobile search apps for users to choose from on new Android phones, bowing to pressure from the European Union and smaller rivals. From a report: The U.S. tech giant will make the changes from September "following further feedback" from the European Commission, it said in a Tuesday blog post. The EU authority said the tweaks were "positive" and addressed a number of complaints by other search companies.

The move may help Google avoid growing criticism over its compliance with the European Commission's 2018 order to offer more choice to rivals. Google had a stable 97% market share for mobile search in Europe last month, a figure that's barely budged despite rolling out a "choice screen" to prompt downloads of search alternatives for new phones. DuckDuckGo and others have complained that the choice screen solution isn't working and an auction model to pick only three apps is "fundamentally flawed." App providers bid against each other for the slot and pay only if users downloaded a search app.

Type "vaccines" into Amazon's search bar, and its auto-complete suggests "are dangerous" for your search. But that's just part of a larger problem, points out Fast Company (in an article shared by Slashdot reader tedlistens).

For example, Amazon's search results are touting as "best sellers!" many books with some very bad science: Offered by small publishers or self-published through Amazon's platform, the books rehearse the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that fuel vaccine opposition, steepening the impact of the pandemic and slowing a global recovery. They also illustrate how the world's biggest store has become a megaphone for anti-vaccine activists, medical misinformers, and conspiracy theorists, pushing dangerous falsehoods in a medium that carries more apparent legitimacy than just a tweet.

"Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation, and the world leader in pushing fake anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy books," says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. For years, journalists and researchers have warned of the ways fraudsters, extremists, and conspiracy theorists use Amazon to earn cash and attention. To Hotez, who has devoted much of his career to educating the public about vaccines, the real-world consequences aren't academic. In the U.S. and elsewhere, he says, vaccination efforts are now up against a growing ecosystem of activist groups, foreign manipulators, and digital influencers who "peddle fake books on Amazon...."

Gradually, Amazon has taken a tougher approach to content moderation, and to a seemingly ceaseless onslaught of counterfeits, fraud, defective products, and toxic speech... Despite its sweeps, however, Amazon is still flooded with misinformation, and helping amplify it too: A series of recent studies and a review by Fast Company show the bookstore is boosting misinformation around health-related terms like "autism" or "covid," and nudging customers toward a universe of other conspiracy theory books.

In one audit first published in January, researchers at the University of Washington surveyed Amazon's search results for four dozen terms related to vaccines. Among 38,000 search results and over 16,000 recommendations, they counted nearly 5,000 unique products containing misinformation, or 10.47% of the total. For books, they found that titles deemed misinformative appeared higher in search results than books that debunked their theories. "Overall, our audits suggest that Amazon has a severe vaccine/health misinformation problem exacerbated by its search and recommendation algorithms," write Prerna Juneja and Tanushee Mitra in their paper, presented last month at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. "Just a single click on an anti-vaccine book could fill your homepage with several other similar anti-vaccine books..." Like any products on Amazon, or any content across social media platforms, anti-vaccine titles also benefit from an algorithmically-powered ranking system. And despite the company's aggressive efforts to battle fraud, it's a system that's still easily manipulated through false reviews...

Much of the uproar about misinformation has focused on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but Amazon's role deserves more attention, says Marc Tuters, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Amsterdam, who helped lead the Infodemic.eu study. The retailer sells half of all the books in the U.S. and its brand is highly trusted by consumers.

UK and EU regulators are investigating Facebook over whether it is abusing its dominance in digital advertising. From a report: It marks the first time the regulators have coordinated on a major inquiry since Brexit, and strikes at the core of Facebook's revenues, which rely heavily on selling advertising on its platform. The investigation will consider whether the social media giant has unfairly used its vast trove of data to compete with individuals and businesses that post adverts on Facebook Marketplace -- where people buy and sell goods daily -- or the Facebook Dating platform, which launched in Europe last year.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it would work "closely" with the European commission to determine whether Facebook might be stifling competition by "abusing a dominant position in the social media or digital advertising markets." Facebook, which could be fined by regulators depending on their findings, has said that the investigations were launched "without merit."

The European Commission will on Thursday propose the introduction of so-called digital wallets that will offer access to a range of services across the EU for the bloc's 450 million citizens, in a further step toward closer integration in the aftermath of the pandemic. From a report: "Under the new rules, European Digital Identity Wallets will be available to everyone," according to a draft of the proposals seen by Bloomberg. The wallets will allow European Union citizens to digitally identify themselves, and store identity data and official documents such as driving licenses, medical prescriptions or education qualifications. Several member states already provide digital forms of identity, so the proposed new app would interact with existing systems while providing EU citizens with the right to a service that is recognized across the bloc. The wallet wouldn't be obligatory.

The European Union (EU) is set to unveil plans for a bloc-wide digital wallet on Wednesday, following requests from member states to find a safe way for citizens to access public and private services online, the Financial Times reported. Reuters reports: The app will allow citizens across the EU to securely access a range of private and public services with a single online ID, according to the FT report on Tuesday. The digital wallet will securely store payment details and passwords and allow citizens from all 27 countries to log onto local government websites or pay utility bills using a single recognized identity, the newspaper said, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.

The EU-wide app can be accessed via fingerprint or retina scanning among other methods, and will also serve as a vault where users can store official documents like the driver's license, the newspaper reported. EU officials will enforce a structural separation to prevent companies that access user data from using the wallet for any other commercial activity such as marketing new products.

The United States must pass new legislation to limit how its national security agencies access Europeans' data if Washington and Brussels are to hammer out a new deal on transferring people's digital information across the Atlantic, according to European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova. From a report: Speaking at POLITICO's AI summit on Monday, the Czech politician said the U.S. needed to create legally binding laws to provide European Union citizens' the ability to challenge bulk data collection by federal authorities in U.S. courts. The goal, she said, would be "to have legally binding rules, or rule, on the U.S. side guaranteeing this. It's of course the best and the strongest way to do that," said Jourova when asked if the Commission would accept a presidential executive order or would require new U.S. legislation to provide EU citizens with the power to sue over how U.S. national security agencies collected and used their data.

In the latest SolarWinds mass-phishing attack, "The highest percentage of emails went to the United States, but [incident response firm] Volexity also saw a significant number of victims in Europe..." according to Security Week.

In an article shared by Slashdot reader wiredmikey, they note that the attackers apparently compromised the Constant Contact account of USAID, an independent agency of the United States federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance — and then impersonated it in emails "to roughly 3,000 accounts across over 150 organizations in 24 countries."

So what happens next?

The Associated Press reports: The White House says it believes U.S. government agencies largely fended off the latest cyberespionage onslaught blamed on Russian intelligence operatives, saying the spear-phishing campaign should not further damage relations with Moscow ahead of next month's planned presidential summit. Officials downplayed the cyber assault as "basic phishing" in which hackers used malware-laden emails to target the computer systems of U.S. and foreign government agencies, think tanks and humanitarian groups.

Microsoft, which disclosed the effort late Thursday, said it believed most of the emails were blocked by automated systems that marked them as spam. As of Friday afternoon, the company said it was "not seeing evidence of any significant number of compromised organizations at this time."

Even so, the revelation of a new spy campaign so close to the June 16 summit between President Joe Biden and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin adds to the urgency of White House efforts to confront the Kremlin over aggressive cyber activity that criminal indictments and diplomatic sanctions have done little to deter. "I don't think it'll create a new point of tension because the point of tension is already so big," said James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This clearly has to be on the summit agenda. The president has to lay down some markers" to make clear "that the days when you people could do whatever you want are over."
There's a famous story about Vladimir Putin meeting Joe Biden back in 2011. A decade earlier former U.S. president George W. Bush had said when he'd looked Putin in the eye, "I was able to get a sense of his soul." But as Biden tells it, when he'd met Putin (who was then Russia Prime Minister), "I said, 'Mr. Prime Minister, I'm looking into your eyes, and I don't think you have a soul.'"

"He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, 'We understand one another.'"