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Censorship

Submission + - EU Officials Propose Internet Cops On Patrol, No Anonymity & No Obscure Lang (techdirt.com)

Submitted by king.purpuriu
king.purpuriu writes: The leaked document contradicts a letter sent from CleanIT Coordinator But Klaasen to Dutch NGO Bits of Freedom in April of this year, which explained that the project would first identify problems before making policy proposals. The promise to defend the rule of law has been abandoned. There appears never to have been a plan to identify a specific problem to be solved – instead the initiative has become little more than a protection racket (use filtering or be held liable for terrorist offences) for the online security industry.
The idea is that "virtual police officers" will be keeping an eye on you — for your own safety, you understand. Other ways in which users will be protected from themselves is through the use of filters.
And where there are laws, it must be OK for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to ignore them and have content taken down on demand: "It must be legal for LEAs to make Internet companies aware of terrorist content on their infrastructure ('flagging') that should be removed, without following the more labour intensive and formal procedures for 'notice and take action'"
Due process, who needs it? The plans also require some interesting new laws, like this one criminalizing merely posting certain hyperlinks: "Knowingly providing hyperlinks on websites to terrorist content must be defined by law as illegal just like the terrorist content itself"
Incredible though it might sound, that seems to suggest that less common foreign languages would be banned from the European Internet entirely in case anybody discusses naughty stuff without the authorities being able to spy on them (haven't they heard of Google Translate?) You could hardly hope for a better symbol of the paranoid and xenophobic thinking that lies behind this crazy scheme.
Google

Submission + - Google Publishes an Informal Web Threat Report (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: While most of the major security vendors produce their own threat reports on an ongoing basis, Google hasn’t always shared the numbers behind what its Safe Browsing platform sees and blocks on an ongoing basis. On Tuesday, however, the search giant shared some interesting Web threat statistics, and while the information was not published as an official “threat report”, the company has provided some great insight into the growth of malicious activity across the Web.

Through built-in protection for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, Google said it protects approximately 600 million Internet users and issues several million warnings each day to those users. Google said it discovers about 9,500 new malicious websites every day – These sites could be either innocent sites that have been compromised by cybercriminals, or purpose-built sites designed for malware distribution or phishing. Approximately 12-14 million Google Search queries per day show warnings in order to caution users from going to sites that may be compromised, and provides malware warnings for about 300,000 downloads per day through its Chrome download protection service.

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