European Commission accused of ‘massive rollback’ of digital protections

The European Commission has initiated a Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into US hyperscalers, focusing on their market power in the cloud infrastructure sector. This move is part of the EU's strategy to secure a competitive digital landscape in Europe and ensure fair practices among major tech players.

The Netherlands has temporarily halted its efforts to seize control of the Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia, a move seen as a gesture of goodwill aimed at easing tensions in the ongoing EU-China dispute. This decision comes amid concerns over the impact on global car supply chains, which have been affected by semiconductor shortages.

The European Union has proposed updates to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which include simplifying cookie permission pop-ups. Additionally, there are plans to dilute the AI Act in response to pressure from the United States and major technology companies. This shift marks a significant change in the EU's regulatory stance towards tech giants, raising concerns about the protection of user data and the integrity of AI governance.

MajinBook is an open catalogue aimed at enhancing the use of shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Z-Library for computational social science and cultural analytics. It combines metadata from these extensive archives with structured bibliographic data from Goodreads, resulting in a high-precision corpus of over 539,000 references to English-language books from the past three centuries. The project emphasizes machine-readable quality through native EPUB files and addresses biases found in traditional datasets, while also including secondary datasets for French, German, and Spanish literatur…

The article discusses the safety approval process for driverless trains in the EU, highlighting the simplified approach for computer vision systems that mimic human driver functions. It notes that while only certain cognitive functions are replaced, measuring performance in critical areas like obstacle detection remains challenging due to a lack of data. To address this, the article introduces a new dataset containing 711 performance measurements from controlled experiments, which vary by speed, obstacle size, and other factors.

The Dutch government's actions against Nexperia, a semiconductor company, highlight potential vulnerabilities in Europe's automotive chip supply chain. This situation raises concerns about the European Union's strategy to achieve chip sovereignty, as reliance on external suppliers could jeopardize the region's technological independence and security.