Despite criticism from Apple, EU lawmakers on Thursday voted overwhelmingly in favor for new rules to establish a common charger for all mobile device makers across Europe. From a report: Members of the European Parliament voted by 582-40 for a resolution urging the European Commission, which drafts EU laws, to ensure that EU consumers are no longer obliged to buy new chargers with each new device. The resolution said voluntary agreements in the industry had significantly reduced the number of charger types, but had not resulted in one common standard. The Commission should adopt new rules by July, the lawmakers' resolution said, calling for "an urgent need for EU regulatory action to reduce electronic waste, empower consumers to make sustainable choices, and allow them to fully participate in an efficient and well-functioning internal market." The proposed charging ports for portable devices include Micro-USB, USB-C, and the Lightning connector. Thursday's resolution didn't specify what the mobile charging standard should be, but non-Apple mobile devices and increasingly laptops and tablets are charged by USB-C, so the EU is highly unlikely to choose Apple's Lightning connector.

Apple on Thursday pushed back against EU lawmakers' call for a common charger, warning the move could hamper innovation, create a mountain of electronic waste and irk consumers. From a report: Apple's comments came a week after lawmakers at the European Parliament called for a common charger for all mobile phones and amended a draft law to say the ability to work with common chargers would be an essential requirement for radio equipment in the bloc. A move to a common charger would affect Apple more than any other company as its iPhones and most of its products are powered by its Lightning cable, whereas Android devices are powered by USB-C connectors. "We believe regulation that forces conformity across the type of connector built into all smartphones stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, and would harm consumers in Europe and the economy as a whole," Apple said in a statement.

A European court has sided with Nintendo's ongoing practice to not let users cancel digital preorders. The Verge reports: According to Norwegian gaming site PressFire, the consumer authorities of Norway and Germany sued Nintendo for not letting users cancel digital preorders purchased from the eShop. The case went to court at the end of last year. This week, the court ruled in favor of Nintendo, meaning it can continue the practice for now. PressFire reports that the German consumer authority has appealed the ruling.

When the Norwegian Consumer Council first formally criticized Nintendo's policy in 2018, it said that Nintendo's policy conflicts with the EU's Consumer Rights Directive, which requires that consumers must be able to cancel online purchases and receive refunds. Nintendo's no-refunds policy is also in place for the U.S. -- in fact, Nintendo states that all sales of digital purchases on the Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch are final -- and Nintendo is the only console maker that doesn't let customers cancel a digital preorder, which the Norwegian Consumer Council noted in its 2018 complaint.

"European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust," reports Gizmodo:
"Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel," explained Beth Lomax, a chemist from the University of Glasgow, in an European Space Agency (ESA) press release. Lomax, along with ESA research fellow Alexandre Meurisse, are currently plugging away at a prototype that could eventually lead to exactly that: oxygen production from lunar dust. They're currently testing their system at the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), which is based in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Their prototype is working, but adjustments will be required to make it suitable for use on the Moon, such as reducing its operating temperature....

Interestingly, ESTEC is not treating the metals as an unwanted byproduct. The team is currently looking into various ways of exploiting these metals in a lunar environment, such as transforming them into compounds for 3D printing.
The European Space Agency points out that samples returned from the lunar surface were made up of 40-45% percent oxygen by weight.

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses. From a report: The plan by the EU's executive -- set out in an 18-page white paper -- comes amid a global debate about the systems driven by artificial intelligence and widely used by law enforcement agencies. The EU Commission said new tough rules may have to be introduced to bolster existing regulations protecting Europeans' privacy and data rights. "Building on these existing provisions, the future regulatory framework could go further and include a time-limited ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces," the EU document said.

On Monday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) discussed the idea of introducing "binding measures" that would require chargers that fit all mobile phones and portable electronic devices. The company that would be impacted most by this legislation would be Apple and its iPhone, which uses a Lightning cable while most new Android phones use USB-C ports for charging. ZDNet reports: The EU introduced the voluntary Radio Equipment Directive in 2014, but MEPs believe the effort fell short of the objectives. "The voluntary agreements between different industry players have not yielded the desired results," MEPs said. The proposed more stringent measures are aimed at reducing electronic waste, which is estimated to amount to 51,000 tons per year in old chargers.

Apple last year argued that regulations to standardize chargers for phones would "freeze innovation rather than encourage it" and it claimed the proposal was "bad for the environment and unnecessarily disruptive for customers." Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reckons Apple has a different idea in store: getting rid of the Lightning port and not replacing it with USB-C, which is a standard that Apple doesn't have complete control over. According to the analyst, Apple plans to remove the Lightning connector on a flagship iPhone to be released in 2021. Instead it would rely on wireless charging.

Google announced last week the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place. From a report: EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box. A dedicated app for that provider will also be installed on their device.

"The wildfires raging along Australia's eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," reports MIT's Technology Review, "further fueling the climate change that's already intensifying the nation's fires."

That's more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries, and nine times the amount produced during California's record-setting 2018 fire season. It also adds up to about three-quarters of Australia's otherwise flattening greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019.

And yet, 400 million tons isn't an unprecedented amount nationwide at this point of the year in Australia, where summer bush fires are common, the fire season has been growing longer, and the number of days of "very high fire danger" is increasing. Wildfires emissions topped 600 million tons from September through early January during the brutal fire seasons of 2011 and 2012, according to the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

But emissions are way beyond typical levels in New South Wales, where this year's fires are concentrated. More than 5.2 million hectares (12.8 million acres) have burned across the southeastern state since July 1, according to a statement from the NSW Rural Fire Service... The situation grew more dangerous in recent days, as hot and windy conditions returned. Two giant fires merged into a "megafire" straddling New South Wales and Victoria, and covering some 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres).
The article also argues that wildfires are releasing carbon stored in the vegetation dried by warming temperatures.

"That creates a vicious feedback loop, as the very impacts of climate change further exacerbate it, complicating our ability to get ahead of the problem."

Peter Kirstein, a British computer scientist who was widely recognized as the father of the European internet, died on Wednesday at the age of 86. According to his daughter Sara Lynn Black, the cause was a brain tumor. The New York Times reports: Professor Kirstein fashioned his pivotal role in computer networking the old-fashioned way: through human connections. In 1982, his collegial ties to American scientists working in the nascent field of computer networks led him to adopt their standards in his own London research lab. Those standards were called Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, which enable different computer networks to share information. Professor Kirstein embraced TCP/IP despite competing protocols being put forward at the time by international standards groups.

"Peter was the internet's great champion in Europe," said Vinton G. Cerf, an American internet pioneer who was a developer of TCP/IP and a colleague and friend of Professor Kirstein's. "With skill and finesse, he resisted enormous pressure to adopt alternatives." Professor Kirstein was so avid a fan of computer networking that he gave Queen Elizabeth II her own email address, HME2. In 1976, while christening a telecommunications research center in Malvern, England, the queen became one of the first heads of state to send an email.

Finland's new Prime Minister has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule that would involve a four-day week and six-hour days. From a report: Sanna Marin, the youngest female head of government in the world , has announced the intention to trial the initiative, which she claims could be "the next step" in working life. The 34-year-old leads a five party centre-left coalition - all led by women. The Social Democratic Party leader told NewEurope: "I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture. This could be the next step for us in working life." UPDATE: After being reported by the Evening Standard, Guardian, Independent, and many other outlets on Tuesday, we have learned that this news is not true. "Not only are these proposals not included in the Finnish government's policy program, multiple government sources told News Now Finland on Monday evening that it's not even on the horizon," reports News Now Finland. The Helsinki-based media project explains the origins of the story in their report.

Mike Masnick, writing for TechDirt: We've written a bunch about why AI generated artwork should not (and need not) have any copyright at all. The law says that copyright only applies to human creators. But what about patents? There has been a big debate about this in the patent space over the last year, mainly lead by AI developers who want to be able to secure patents on AI generated ideas. The patent offices in the EU and the US have been exploring the issue, and asking for feedback, while they plot out a strategy, but some AI folks decided to force the matter sooner. Over the summer they announced that they had filed for two patents in the EU for inventions that they claim were "invented" by an AI named DABUS without the assistance of a human inventor. And now, the EU Patent Office has rejected both patents, since they don't have a human inventor.

McGruber quotes the Associated Press: The rector of Notre Dame Cathedral says the Paris landmark is still so fragile that there's a "50% chance" the structure might not be saved, because scaffolding installed before this year's fire is threatening the vaults of the Gothic monument... "Today it is not out of danger," he told The Associated Press on the sidelines of Christmas Eve midnight Mass in a nearby church. "It will be out of danger when we take out the remaining scaffolding... Today we can say that there is maybe a 50% chance that it will be saved. There is also 50% chance of scaffolding falling onto the three vaults, so as you can see the building is still very fragile," he said...

"We need to remove completely the scaffolding in order to make the building safe, so in 2021 we will probably start the restoration of the cathedral," Chauvet said. "Once the scaffolding is removed we need to assess the state of the cathedral, the quantity of stones to be removed and replaced."

Chauvet estimated it would take another three years after that to make it safe enough for people to re-enter the cathedral, but that the full restoration will take longer.

Italy soon will join France in applying a new tax on large tech companies, a move that could deepen trans-Atlantic trade tensions and snarl up already-faltering negotiations over how best to tax companies such as Facebook and Google parent Alphabet. From a report: The new tax, passed this week by Italy's parliament, will take effect Jan. 1. Similar to the tax implemented this year in France, Italy's imposes a 3% levy on some digital revenue for companies with more than $835 million in global revenue, including least $6.1 million in Italy. The Italian announcement, combined with the French tax, complicates a broader effort among more than 100 countries to overhaul corporate taxation for the digital age. Many countries say U.S. tech companies pay too little income tax in the territories where they have users. Until now, most have held off on imposing their own national taxes. That reluctance may be fading, however, with others such as the U.K. or Canada potentially ready to follow suit.

Matt Burgess, writing for Wired UK: Last year London's 8,000 or so buses traveled 279 million miles and completed 2.23 billion journeys -- more than half of all bus trips completed in England. But they're not green enough. Yet. According to mayor Sadiq Khan, London has Europe's biggest electric bus fleet with more than 200 currently in use. It's a small fraction of the total number of buses but there are already two fully electric bus routes: 43 (running between Muswell Hill and London Bridge) and 134 (North Finchley to Warren Street). Now the capital's electric buses are set to get a new soundtrack. The purpose? To help protect people around them. As electric vehicles are almost silent at lower speeds, they're potentially dangerous to the pedestrians, who may not be paying attention or live with visual impairments.

(Research from the US Department of Transportation has even suggested people are 40 per cent more likely to be hit by an electric or hybrid car than one with a noisy combustion engine). From July this year, EU regulations stipulate that all new electric need to include an Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS). This system must play a sound to alert people to the vehicle when it's moving. Cars moving at speeds of less than 20kph must have a minimum sound level of 56dB and older electric cars have to be retrofitted with a sound system by 2021. The EU regulations also apply to London's buses. In order to create a consistent sound across the city's buses, Transport for London (TfL), the transport regulator, has commissioned a sound to be used by all electric buses in the capital.

For decades France has had one of the most well-organized anti-advertising movements in the world, ranging from guerrilla protests with spray-cans to high-profile court cases. But now the boom in what is artfully called "digital-out-of-home advertising" -- eye-catching video screens dotted across urban areas, from train platforms to shopping centres -- has sparked a new spate of French protests, civil disobedience and petitions. From a report: High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and -- increasingly -- broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable -- impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains.

The trend to squeeze every bit of city downtime into an opportunity to place people in front of screen has become a political battle on the left. Francois Ruffin of the French left party, La France Insoumise, recently tabled a French parliamentary amendment to ban video ads above urinals and toilets. It was dubbed the "Pee in Peace" motion. Ruffin said he was horrified when standing at a Paris cafe urinal to be visually "assaulted" by a video advertising Uber, a bank, and the book and tech store Fnac. "Who doesn't enjoy that rare moment of calm: having a piss?" he wrote in the amendment, warning that since 2015, over 2,000 of the screens had "colonised" 1,200 urinals in 25 French towns.

A fake press release posted at vinci.group (mimicking vinci.com) led to a multi-million dollar fine -- for the news outlet that fell for it.

AFP reports: France's financial markets watchdog on Monday (December 16) hit Bloomberg with a five million euro (S$7.6 million) fine for a report based on a fake news release that triggered a plunge in the shares of French construction giant Vinci and wiped billions off its market value... The financial markets watchdog AMF said Bloomberg distributed "information that it should have known was false". The AMF said Bloomberg did not respect journalistic ethics "as no verification of the information was undertaken before publication...."

Bloomberg News said it was disappointed with the AMF's decision and that it plans to appeal. "Bloomberg News was one of the victims of a sophisticated hoax... We regret that the AMF did not find and punish the perpetrator of the hoax, and chose instead to penalise a media outlet that was doing its very best to report on what appeared to be newsworthy information," said a spokesman.

Europe's highest court on Thursday ruled that the exhaustion of copyright does not apply to e-books. "The court says that offering 'second-hand' e-books for sale qualifies as an unauthorized 'communication to the public' under the 2001 InfoSec Directive," reports World IP Review. Not only could this ruling have implications for the book industry, but for the digital film, gaming and music sectors too. From a report: The case involves a Dutch startup called Tom Kabinet, which has since 2014 been trying to make second-hand ebooks a thing. At first, it simply tried to run a second-hand ebook market, but publishers took it to court and won a ruling saying Tom Kabinet had to make sure it wasn't selling pirated copies of ebooks. So the firm rethought its strategy and morphed into a kind of book club. Now even that model has been ruled illegal.

Tom Kabinet's users "donate" the download links for the ebooks they have bought from standard retailers like Kobo and ebooks.com, in exchange for credits that can be used to buy other ebooks from Tom Kabinet. (Obviously this doesn't work with ebooks from Amazon, which does not use download links in its system.) The idea is that using the original links ensures the ebooks have been legitimately bought in the first place, and that the same copy isn't being placed on the platform multiple times. The Dutch publishing industry was still not impressed, and asked a district court in The Hague for an injunction against Tom Kabinet's activities. The district court asked the Court of Justice of the European Union for its opinion, which arrived Thursday. The EU court essentially said Tom Kabinet was breaking European copyright law.

Tom Kabinet's defense was that the so-called "rule of exhaustion" should apply when it comes to second-hand ebooks, as it does with paper books -- in other words, after the ebook has been sold the first time, the publisher no longer has a right to control how it is traded. (This is known as the "first sale doctrine" in the U.S.) The exhaustion principle is part of European copyright law, but the Court of Justice said the lawmakers had only intended it to apply to physical books. The court said the rule would be unfair in the ebook world, because "digital copies of ebooks do not deteriorate with use and are, therefore, perfect substitutes for new copies on any second-hand market."

Last year, Finland launched a free online crash course in artificial intelligence with the aim of educating its citizens about the new technology. Now, as a Christmas present to the world, the European nation is making the six week program available for anyone to take. The Verge reports: Strictly speaking, it's a present for the European Union. Finland is relinquishing the EU's rotating presidency at the end of the year, and decided to translate its course into every EU language as a gift to citizens. But there aren't any geographical restrictions as to who can take the course, so really it's to the world's benefit. The course certainly proved itself in Finland, with more than 1 percent of the Nordic nation's 5.5 million citizens signing up. The course, named Elements of AI, is currently available in English, Swedish, Estonian, Finnish, and German.

Airbnb will be breathing a sigh of relief today: Europe's top court has judged it to be an online platform which merely connects people looking for short term accommodation, rather than a full-blown estate agent. From a report: The ruling may make it harder for the 'home sharing' platform to be forced to comply with local property regulations -- at least under current regional rules governing ecommerce platforms. The judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) today follows a complaint made by a French tourism association, AHTOP, which had argued Airbnb should hold a professional estate agent licence. And, that by not having one, the platform giant was in breach of a piece of French legislation known as the 'Hoguet Law.' However the court disagreed -- siding with Airbnb's argument that its business must be classified as an 'information society service' under EU Directive 2000/31 on electronic commerce.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU's legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt. The particle pollution analyzed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the "silent public health emergency" of dirty air.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, used strict quality criteria to select and pool research data from 16 countries published up to 2017. This revealed a strong statistical link between toxic air and depression and suicide. [...] The data analyzed in the new research linked depression with air pollution particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (equivalent to 0.0025 millimeters and known as PM2.5). People exposed to an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m^3) in the level of PM2.5 for a year or more had a 10% higher risk of getting depression. Levels of PM2.5 in cities range from as high as 114ug/m^3 in Delhi, India, to just 6ug/m^3 in Ottawa, Canada. In UK cities in 2017, the average PM2.5 level was 13ug/m^3. The researchers estimated that lowering this to the WHO recommended limit of 10ug/m^3 could reduce depression in city dwellers by about 2.5%. The available data on suicide risk was for particles ranging up to 10 micrometers (PM10). The researchers found a short-term effect, with a 10ug/m^3 increase over three days raising the risk of suicide by 2%. "The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm," the report notes.

"The studies analyzed took account of many factors that might affect mental health, including home location, income, education, smoking, employment and obesity. But they were not able to separate the potential impact of noise, which often occurs alongside air pollution and is known to have psychological effects."