Here's some news from CNN for the 30 million tourists visiting Venice, Italy each year: They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city. What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time.

And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world....

Before Covid-19 struck, tourists were arriving in often unmanageable numbers, choking the main streets and filling up the waterbuses... Enter the Venice Control Room. On the island of Tronchetto, next to the two-mile bridge separating Venice from the Italian mainland, the Control Room opened in September 2020. A former warehouse that had been abandoned since the 1960s, it's part of a new headquarters for the city's police and government — a self-described "control tower" for the city. The building has offices for the mayor, other dignitaries, and a large CCTV room, with cameras feeding in images from around the city, watched over by the police.

So far so normal. But then, across the corridor, there's the Smart Control Room — another bank of screens with images and information coming live from around the lagoon. They're not being monitored for crime, though; they're feeding information to the authorities that will create a profile of the hordes of people visiting Venice. The hope is that gathering the information will not only track footfall now, enabling the authorities to activate turnstiles and start charging for entrance on busy days. Eventually, they hope that the data will help create a more sustainable tourism plan for the future....

At 10am, the arrivals reached a peak of 2,411: most likely the daytrippers. The authorities can see where these new arrivals are from by analyzing their phone data (the information is all aggregated automatically, so no personal details can be gleaned).... The system took three years to build, at a cost of €3m ($3.5m). And although some might baulk at the privacy implications (although no personal data is recorded, you and your provenance is essentially being logged as you move around the city), the authorities are very proud.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today Google's senior VP of Hardware, Rick Osterloh, announced Google has closed its acquisition of Fitbit. The $2.1 billion deal was announced back in November 2019, which kicked off a regulatory review process from governments around the world concerned about Google's influence over the Internet and the data it can collect on users. Normally, Osterloh announcing "Google has completed its acquisition of Fitbit, and I want to personally welcome this talented team to Google" would mean Google has cleared its worldwide regulatory gauntlet. Google's announcement today is highly unusual since the DOJ has not yet cleared the deal. As the US Department of Justice told New York Times reporter Cecilia Kang, "The Antitrust Division's investigation of Google's acquisition of Fitbit remains ongoing." Australian regulators also haven't announced a final decision on the merger. It also seems particularly provocative for Google to do something like this while it is also dealing with a DOJ antitrust investigation.

Fitbit's CEO, president, and co-founder, James Park, also has a blog post today, saying "many of the things you know and love about Fitbit will remain the same. We'll stay committed to doing what's right, to putting your health and wellness at the center of everything we do, and to offering a no-one-size-fits-all approach with choices that work across both Android and iOS." [...] Google's side of the story is laid out in the blog post, with Osterloh saying "This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we've been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users' privacy... Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data." Google also says it won't do anything crazy with Android, like lock all Android phones exclusively to Fitbit wearables, which apparently was something the EU was worried about.

The European Commission says it wants its newly proposed satellite mega-constellation to be offering some sort of initial service in 2024. The BBC reports: The first priority is to fill in gaps in broadband coverage where ground infrastructure cannot reach, but later it will power services such as self-driving cars. The project will in some ways mirror America's Starlink and the UK-Indian OneWeb networks. Its scope has yet to be fully defined. A consortium of aerospace and telecoms companies is doing that right now.

But EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said he wanted to get going on the idea as soon as possible. "My objective is to go fast. And therefore it would be appropriate that the Commission puts forward this year a proposal to the European Parliament and the Council so we can move concretely," he told the 13th European Space Conference on Tuesday. "To be ready, we launched a few weeks ago a study on a secure space-based connectivity system. The selected consortium consisting of European satellite manufacturers, operators and service providers, telco operators and launch service providers will study the possible design and development of this project. This will provide insights on the technical dimension, but also the governance structure, the financing, the missions, the exact scope. I expect their first feedback in April this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: WhatsApp has published a new FAQ page to its website outlining its stances on user privacy in response to widespread backlash over an upcoming privacy policy update. The core issue relates to WhatsApp's data-sharing procedures with Facebook, with many users concerned an updated privacy policy going into effect on February 8th will mandate sharing of sensitive profile information with WhatsApp's parent company. That isn't true -- the update has nothing to do with consumer chats or profile data, and instead the change is designed to outline how businesses who use WhatsApp for customer service may store logs of its chats on Facebook servers. That's something the company feels it is required to disclose in its privacy policy, which it's now doing after previewing the upcoming changes to business chats back in October.

But a wave of misinformation on social media, not helped by Facebook's abysmal track record on privacy and its reputation for obfuscating changes to its various terms of service agreements, has resulted in a full-blown WhatsApp backlash that has users fleeing to competitors like Signal and Telegram. [...] WhatsApp executives, as well as Instagram chief Adam Mosseri and Facebook AR / VR head Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, are now trying to set the record straight, perhaps to little avail at this point.

"We want to be clear that the policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way. Instead, this update includes changes related to messaging a business on WhatsApp, which is optional, and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data," the company writes on the new FAQ page. It also stresses in the FAQ that neither Facebook nor WhatsApp read users' message logs or listen to their calls, and that WhatsApp doesn't store user location data or share contact information with Facebook. (It's also worth noting that data sharing with Facebook is extremely limited for European users due to stronger user privacy protections in the EU.) WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart also took to Twitter a few days ago to post a thread (later shared by Bosworth in the tweet above) trying to cut through the confusion and explain what's actually going on. "With end-to-end encryption, we cannot see your private chats or calls and neither can Facebook. We're committed to this technology and committed to defending it globally," Cathcart wrote. "It's important for us to be clear this update describes business communication and does not change WhatsApp's data sharing practices with Facebook. It does not impact how people communicate privately with friends or family wherever they are in the world."

"New data from EU satellites shows that 2020 is in a statistical dead heat with 2016 as the world's warmest year," reports the BBC (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): The Copernicus Climate Change Service says that last year was around 1.25C above the long-term average. The scientists say that unprecedented levels of heat in the Arctic and Siberia were key factors in driving up the overall temperature. The past 12 months also saw a new record for Europe, around 0.4C warmer than 2019... The Copernicus data comes from a constellation of Sentinel satellites that monitor the Earth from orbit, as well as measurements taken at ground level...

Globally, the 10-year period from 2011-2020 is the warmest decade, with the last six years being the six hottest on record.
The article points out that in some parts of Siberia and the Arctic, temperatures for the year were six degrees C above the long-term average.

"This exceptional warming led to a very active wildfire season. Fires in the Arctic Circle released a record amount of CO2, according to the study, up over a third from 2019."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Tens of thousands of website owners who are based in the UK might have started the year with an unpleasant surprise: Eurid, the registry manager of .eu domain names, has suspended .eu domain names registered by UK citizens as a result of the regulatory changes caused by Brexit. Suspended domain names can no longer support a website or service like email, and owners now have three months to prove their right to run a .eu domain. This means updating contact data to transfer the .eu domain to an EU-subsidiary outside the UK; or declaring citizenship or residence of an EU member state.

Domain names will be re-instated as soon as contact data is updated, said Eurid -- but only for the next few months. Those who, after 31st March 2021, still haven't demonstrated their eligibility will see their domain name withdrawn, and made available again for general registration from January 2022 if no action is taken by then. Eurid said 81,000 domains, from 50,000 users, have been suspended. Eurid's suspension of UK domains comes after a series of mixed signals from the European Commission, which decides on the rules that guide the registration of .eu domains. EU regulations currently stipulate that .eu websites can only be allocated to EU citizens -- regardless of their place of residence -- as well as non-EU citizens and organizations established in a member state. In other words, once Brexit happened, UK-based .eu domains owned by UK citizens suddenly became non-EU websites hosted in a non-EU country.

A new era has begun for the United Kingdom after it completed its formal separation from the European Union. From a report: The UK stopped following EU rules at 23:00 GMT, as replacement arrangements for travel, trade, immigration and security co-operation came into force. Boris Johnson said the UK had "freedom in our hands" and the ability to do things "differently and better" now the long Brexit process was over. But opponents of leaving the EU maintain the country will be worse off.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, whose ambition it is to take an independent Scotland back into the EU, tweeted: "Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on." BBC Europe editor Katya Adler said there was a sense of relief in Brussels that the Brexit process was over, "but there is regret still at Brexit itself". The first lorries arriving at the borders entered the UK and EU without delay. On Friday evening, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted that border traffic had been "low due to [the] bank holiday" but there had been no disruption in Kent as "hundreds" of lorries crossed the Channel with a "small" number turned back.

As 2020 came to a close, the city of Helsinki, Finland tried offering "City as a Service" to attract new workers to its growing technology hub.

"We will provide selected applicants with a free 90-day relocation package for the entire family," explained the web site for the program (which is now no longer accepting applications). "We'll arrange your housing, daycare, schooling, everything you need — the real deal, just like a Finn." They'd pick you up at the airport, and then offer orientation services, "relocation consultation," and regular get-togethers, even offering in-person introductions to Helsinki-area technology hubs and business networks. (And of course, they'd arrange all the necessary documentation for a 90-day stay and permanent residency applications.) "Are you a 90 Day Finn...?" asked the site. "This is your call for a 90-day audition in Helsinki, featuring an unseen level of work-life balance!"

So what happened? The program "received 5,300 applications from across the world in just a month," reports the India Times, citing an article in the Guardian: The report adds that about 30 per cent of the applications came from the US and Canada. The remaining applications, 'evenly spread,' included 50 Britons and one application from Vanuatu. Johanna Huurre from Helsinki Business Hub, an agency that came up with the campaign, told The Guardian, "800 were entrepreneurs seeking to launch startups, 60 were investors, and the remainder were job hunting."

"It's been a great campaign to showcase Finland," said Joonas Halla, of Business Finland. "What's good is the practical approach. The tech sector here is really thriving — by one estimate it should create 50,000 new jobs in 2021. We need the talent."

With their savvy interfaces, smart features and oodles of VC money, digital banks have become the poster-child for fintech. There are now almost 300 so-called "neobanks" live worldwide, with nearly half concentrated in Europe. From a report: Meanwhile, new players are continuing to join the ranks, particularly in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. This boom is being fuelled by ongoing investor enthusiasm for the sector, with neobanks raising over $2bn in venture capital globally this year alone. Customers are also riding the neobank wave. PitchBook estimates that by 2024, 145m of us will be using these apps across North America and Europe alone. To help keep track of the global neobank landscape, we have broken down the key data and trends. For clarity, 'neobank' is defined here as an app that i) offers its own retail banking services (i.e. prepaid, debit, credit cards), ii) launched after 2010, and iii) is mobile-centric. This definition does not distinguish between regulatory status, but it's worth noting that only a handful have official bank licences.

Here is the story of the world's neobanks, as told in numbers. The neobank boom: At its peak? The number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing from 100 to nearly 300 worldwide. That means, over the last three years, a neobank launched every five days somewhere in the world (!), according to Exton, a consultancy firm which manages a global database of consumer banking apps. In 2019 alone, more than 70 neobanks went live globally. But Cristoph Stegmeier, a partner at Exton, says we may finally have reached a peak, with 2020 seeing a slowdown. "I expect we will see less from now," he told Sifted. He explained this year's launch decline went beyond simply the 'Covid effect' and stems from the growing saturation of neobanks. Indeed, 30 neobanks have been wound down since 2015, according to Stegmeier. Still, the neobank boom hasn't totally stalled. Over 30 neobanks launched in the face of the pandemic, including Zelf, Daylight (a US bank for LGBT+ members) and Tenpo in Chile. Meanwhile, dozens of new players are still planning to go live in 2021 -- including Greece's Woli and France's Vybe.

Pfizer and BioNTech SE's Covid-19 vaccine won the backing of a key European review panel, clearing the way for inoculations to start before the end of the year as the continent struggles with rising death rates and tighter lockdowns. From a report: The endorsement was announced in a news briefing by the European Medicines Agency on Monday. The final step in approval is a sign-off from the European Commission. European Union leaders pushed the regulator to speed up its review amid complaints that residents across the continent were still waiting to get a vaccine -- pioneered in Germany -- that is already being used in the U.K. and U.S. The goal is to start a European immunization campaign on Dec. 27, commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week. Monday's recommendation puts the EU in position to meet that timeline. The commission last week signaled it would give the official go-ahead for distribution to start no later than two days after the agency's sign-off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from IBM Trusteer say they've uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days. The scale of the operation was unlike anything the researchers have seen before. In one case, crooks used about 20 emulators to mimic more than 16,000 phones belonging to customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised. In a separate case, a single emulator was able to spoof more than 8,100 devices.

The thieves then entered usernames and passwords into banking apps running on the emulators and initiated fraudulent money orders that siphoned funds out of the compromised accounts. Emulators are used by legitimate developers and researchers to test how apps run on a variety of different mobile devices. To bypass protections banks use to block such attacks, the crooks used device identifiers corresponding to each compromised account holder and spoofed GPS locations the device was known to use. The device IDs were likely obtained from the holders' hacked devices, although in some cases, the fraudsters gave the appearance they were customers who were accessing their accounts from new phones. The attackers were also able to bypass multi-factor authentication by accessing SMS messages.

Google won European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of health tracker Fitbit, days after regulators proposed tougher rules to curb powerful technology firms' push into new services. From a report: The European Commission said Google's pledge to maintain access for rival health and fitness apps and device makers for 10 years removed its concerns about the U.S. tech giant's move into health data and devices. Smaller rivals previously complained that the company's promises might not go far enough to stop Google shutting off access in future to rival products or services.

"The commitments will determine how Google can use the data collected for ad purposes, how interoperability between competing wearables and Android will be safeguarded and how users can continue to share health and fitness data, if they choose to," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's antitrust chief, said in a statement Thursday. Approval comes in a harsh climate when Google and others are facing mounting scrutiny of acquisitions that help them push into new areas. Google announced its plans to buy Fitbit in November 2019, describing the bid for the smartwatch maker as a boost to its lagging hardware business.

Facebook will shift all its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California, moving them out of their current relationship with Facebook's Irish unit and out of reach of Europe's privacy laws. From a report: The change takes effect next year and follows a similar move announced in February by Google here. Those companies and others have European head offices in Dublin, and the UK's exit from the EU will change its legal relationship with Ireland, which remains in the Union. Initially, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters about the move. Facebook later confirmed it. "Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook. There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK," the company's UK arm said.

The European Union Tuesday unveiled sweeping new proposals to control tech industry giants as "gatekeepers" who could be fined up to 10% of their revenue for breaking EU rules on competition. From a report: In the EU, "proposals," once introduced, are likely to become law in some form, even if details change dramatically through a slow feedback process. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) would set standards for treating large online platforms as "gatekeepers," based chiefly on how many users they have. Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals -- think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance -- or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.

Gatekeepers that break the rules could be subject to fines as high as 10% of annual global revenue. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is aimed at making big platforms more accountable for user posts that break EU member nations' laws around illicit materials, such as Germany's prohibition on speech that glorifies Nazism. Large platforms that don't remove illegal posts following a government order could face fines of up to 6% of annual revenue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: [O]ver the past decade, much of Europe's night train network has been cut. 2013 and 2014 saw the culling of lines from Paris to Madrid, Rome and Barcelona; Amsterdam to Prague and Warsaw; and Berlin to Paris and Kiev. For many, it seemed the end of the line was nigh. But recently there has been a resurgence of night trains across Europe. And on December 8, four national rail providers teamed up to announce new routes between 13 European cities. Spearheaded by Austria's OBB, in conjunction with Germany's Deutsche Bahn, France's SNCF and Swiss Federal Railways, the collaboration will see four new "Nightjet" routes over the next four years. By December 2021, Vienna-Munich-Paris and Zurich-Cologne-Amsterdam will be up and running. Two years later, a Vienna/Berlin to Brussels/Paris will launch. And in December 2024, sleeper trains will start running between Zurich and Barcelona.

While countries like Germany and France quietly phased out their routes, OBB saw a future, and swept in to pick up many of the abandoned Deutsche Bahn routes, including Munich to Rome, and Berlin to Hamburg. Both [Nicolas Forien, part of Back On Track, a European network arguing for cross-border sleeper trains] and [Mark Smith of train website The Man in Seat 61] put the resurgence of the services down to the Austrian rail network. "There are high costs, but a lot is down to attitude, willingness and management focus," says Smith, who praises OBB CEO Andreas Mattha, who took over in 2016, for "making night trains wash their faces commercially." On Austrian railways, "Nightjet" sleeper trains now make up almost 20% of long-distance rail traffic, he says -- a far cry from the 5% in Germany, before Deutsche Bahn let them slide. "Finding passengers isn't a problem -- and it's becoming easier as people become fed up with the airline experience, and want to cut their carbon footprint," he says.

Tech giants deemed to be gatekeepers could face fines as high as 10% of annual revenue if they don't comply with new European Union rules on data usage to be unveiled Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing a draft. From the report: Companies that could include Google, Amazon, and Apple will be banned from using any data from business users to compete with them or from treating their own services more favorably in rankings, among other obligations. Nasdaq futures pared gains. A company that "systemically infringes" the obligations could face orders by the European Commission to make behavioral and structural changes, such as divesting businesses. Companies will be considered to be in systematic non-compliance if the EU has issued at least three fines within a period of five years. The new Digital Markets Act will target "gatekeeper" firms, defined by the European Commission by a number of criteria, including the number of users in the millions and overall revenue in the billions of dollars, as well as their significant impact on the single market, the document said. The designations will be updated by the commission every two years, according to the document.

Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update about the long-standing Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a "Unified Patent Court" by Germany: The FFII is crowdfunding a constitutional complaint in Germany against the third attempt to impose software patents in Europe, calling on all software companies, independent software developers and FLOSS authors to donate.

The Unitary Patent and its Court will promote patent trolls, without any appeal possible to the European Court of Justice, which won't be able to rule on patent law, and software patents in particular. The FFII also says that the proposed court system will be more expensive for small companies then the current national court system.
The stakes are high — so the FFII writes that they're anticipating some tricky counter-maneuvering: Stopping the UPC in Germany will be enough to kill the UPC for the whole Europe... German government believe that they can ratify before the end of the year, as they consider the UK still a member of the EU till 31st December. The agenda of next votes have been designed on purpose to ratify the UPC before the end of the year. FFII expects dirty agenda and political hacks to declare the treaty "into force", dismiss "constitutional complaints", while the presence of UK is still problematic.

Big tech firms such as Google and Facebook will face fines of up to 6% of turnover if they do not do more to tackle illegal content and reveal more about advertising on their platforms under draft European Union rules. Reuters reports: The EU's tough line, which is due to be announced next week, comes amid growing regulatory scrutiny worldwide of tech giants and their control of data and access to their platforms. EU digital chief Thierry Breton, who has stressed that large companies should bear more responsibility, will present the draft rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) on Dec. 15.

The Commission document on the DSA seen by Reuters defines very large online platforms as those with more than 45 million users, equivalent to 10% of the EU population. Additional obligations imposed on very large platforms are necessary to address public policy concerns and the systemic risks posed by their services, the document said. The tech giants will have to do more to tackle illegal content such as hate speech and child sexual abuse material, misuse of their platforms that impinges on fundamental rights and intentional manipulation of platforms, such as using bots to influence elections and public health. The companies will be required to publish details of their online advertisers and show the parameters used by their algorithms to suggest and rank information. Independent auditors will monitor compliance, with EU countries enforcing the rules.

EU member states have agreed to strengthen their target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, in line with their long-term goal of net zero carbon by 2050. From a report: The EU made a commitment on Friday to cut carbon by 55% in the EU by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, after member states wrangled into the early morning as Poland held out for concessions. "Today's agreement puts us on a clear path to climate neutrality in 2050," said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission. While member states rejected the stiffer carbon cuts of 60% that the EU parliament had called for, the plan puts the EU ahead of most of the world's major economies on tackling the climate crisis. Campaigners said the EU could have gone further. Sebastian Mang, Greenpeace's EU policy adviser, said: "Governments will no doubt call it historic, but the evidence shows this deal is only a small improvement on the emissions cuts the EU is already expected to achieve. It shows that political convenience takes precedence over climate science, and that most politicians are still afraid to take on big polluters."

Britain's medicine regulator warned people with significant allergies not to get Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine after two people suffered adverse reactions, but was set to give more detailed guidance on Wednesday based on reviews of those cases. Reuters reports: Starting with the elderly and frontline workers, Britain began mass vaccinating its population on Tuesday, part of a global drive that poses one of the biggest logistical challenges in peacetime history. National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis said the advice had been changed as a precaution after two NHS workers reported anaphylactoid reactions from the vaccine. "Two people with a history of significant allergic reactions responded adversely yesterday," Powis said. "Both are recovering well."

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) initially advised anyone with "a history of a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food" to avoid taking the vaccine. However, by the end of Wednesday that guidance was set to be refined after discussions with experts on the nature of the reactions. "We're tweaking advice to make it very clear that if you've got a food allergy, you're not more at risk," Imperial College London's Paul Turner, an expert in allergy and immunology who has been advising the MHRA on their revised guidance, told Reuters. Pfizer and BioNTech said they were supporting the MHRA's investigation. In other vaccine-related news, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyberattack.