Category: IT Security

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Apple to move its calves into another barn

A “new” i.e. “incompatible” feature on your brand new Macs: no more physical ESC key on the keyboard, to prevent your perfectly running software to do so. ?Adieu! ?VI!

A “new” i.e. “incompatible” power socket for your MacBook Pro, to force you to discharge your old charger.

A “new” i.e. “incompatible” file system on your Macs (APFS), to make your system interacting haphazardly with your files. 1

A “new” i.e. “incompatible” operating system (High Sierra) to not work properly with your currently running software (from Office, to Indesign and Illustrator.)

A “new” – guess what? yes, “incompatible” – HTML 5 API to allow DRMs enforced at user-agent level 2

There are now enough calves in the valley, and the time is right to move them to another barn, where they can stay calm and dumb, with nobody but the rancheros from Cupertino telling them what, how and when to do.

They finally got it.

 

 

  1. First hand experience, after having upgraded the laptop ↩
  2. Apple, together with Microsoft and IBM chairs the HTML W3C Working Group that is going to standardize this “feature”. ↩
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The Italian Data Protection Authority to Challenge the European Court of Justice?

According the online newspaper Repubblica.it, the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA) stated verbatim that the 72 ? months retention periodo imposed by the upcoming legislation is much too long.
By doing this, the DPA implied that the only problem with data-retention is its duration, and didn’t mention the main issue raised by the EUCJ decision: carpet data-retention is not possible under the EU legislation. Continue reading “The Italian Data Protection Authority to Challenge the European Court of Justice?”

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No More Mandatory Data Retention in Italy? – Update

As a consequence of the Parliament/Govern inactivity, the huge quantity of traffic data that survived the June, 30 midnight – and that some ISP might still have in its own hand, maybe hoping for a last-minute, never passed, prorogation – is currently being deleted.

Right now, traffic-Database deleting schedules should have been re-set to the old standard: one year retention period as set forth by sec. 132 of the Italian Data Protection Act.

And the Data Protection Authority still hasn’t hissed a word.

 

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No More Data Retention in Italy?

Yesterday the Internet Traffic Mandatory Data Retention regulation expired without being re-enacted by the Parliament. This means that at the midnight of June, 30, all the Italian Telcos and ISPs just (or should have) deleted last year Internet usage information from their databases.

Maybe the Parliament and the Data Protection Authority just had a strike of consciousness and decided so, after having “forgotten” for years to stress test the national data retention legislation to check if it could still stands against the EU Court of justice 2014 decision that bashed the data-retention directive.

Or, maybe, the powers-that-be just forgot about the data-retention.

We’ll never know for sure, but fact is that current high profile criminal investigations are now deprived of an important information gathering tool.