UK decides not to enforce the bit in its Online Safety Bill that'll break end-to-end encryption

The UK has given up on trying to break end-to-end encryption in their Online Safety Bill - kinda. From what I can gather, the text of the bill still gives the government the option to force tech companies to scan all messages, but regulator Ofcom, will only enforce that part of the bill once it is "technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content". Arguably, it may never be technically feasible and the accuracy of such a system may never reach a minimum standard. Either way, WhatsApp, Signal and Apple threatening to pull out of the UK market worked and digital rights got another win after a long run of kicks in the gut. Stay frosty everyone.

EU details the tech megacorps to be regulated under the Digital Markets Act

The European Union has finalised who and what will be regulated under their revolutionary Digital Markets Act. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung are designated as "gatekeepers", with many of their products (aka "core services") requiring significant changes to meet the EU's laws. They have six months to comply or face severe fines of "up to 10% of the company's total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement" and "obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of additional services related to the systemic non-compliance". Apple and Microsoft however have complained, saying that Bing, Edge and iMessage don't qualify to be regulated. Something about not having a big enough market share in the EU to justify it.

Microsoft explains series of errors that let Storm-0558 get Exchange & Azure AD signing keys

Back in July we learned about Storm-0558 and how they got access to some Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Exchange accounts belonging to sensitive groups, including the US Department of State and Department of Commerce. We didn't really know how Storm-0558 got their hands on a "signing key" in order to do that, until today. Microsoft said in a blog post that the signing key was included in a snapshot of a crashed process from a customer due to a race condition that's since been fixed. That snapshot was moved from an isolated production network onto an internet connected network, which Storm-0558 got access to after compromising a Microsoft engineer's corporate account. They aren't sure how the snapshot was exfiltrated, but this is their best guess.

Stories on the emotional toll of not having your data backed up

I'm preaching the choir here, but this article from March 2023 on The Guardian has some quite sad stories of how data loss had personal impacts on people. Not data loss like a bank losing all the transactions its customers made or an airline accidentally deleting all the passenger records, but people changing their region on the App Store and losing all their iTunes playlists, not backing up their phone because they didn't know it was possible losing all the photos on it when it gets stolen and particularly raw for me right now, losing the chat history of a dead friend because the app doesn't allow exports. If it's important to you, back it up!!!