Slashdot Mirror

" Oh...and Ironically, the world's first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal."

'Like an op-ed written by a self-righteous ninth grader.'

Indeed. Luxembourg has the first solar electric ferry and it is used to transport gas-guzzling cars on the other side of a river.

https://www.wort.lu/en/luxembo...

"I have no doubt that the NSA (etc) have been monitoring your top level communications the same as they have for the rest of Europe (etc)."

Not according to Wikileaks.

Absence of confirmation is not confirmation.

"Luxembourg demands clarification on NSA allegations"
http://www.wort.lu/en/politics...

"NSA spying | Luxembourg threatens military action against America"
http://worldnewsdailyreport.co...

Also didn't your PM have to quit over a spying scandal just a short two years ago?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

I live in Luxembourg, Europe and last month we jailed a guy for 9 months for a Facebook rant.

http://www.wort.lu/en/luxembou... ---

(CS/mth) Two Luxembourg nationals on Thursday were found guilty of sending death threats to immigrant rights activists Serge Kollwelter and Laura Zuccoli, with one of the men sentenced to nine months in prison.

Well ranting and threatening to kill somebody are two different things. The former is not normally illegal. The latter is illegal pretty much everywhere, regardless of whether you do it on the Internet or not.

I live in Luxembourg, Europe and last month we jailed a guy for 9 months for a Facebook rant.

http://www.wort.lu/en/luxembou...
---
(CS/mth) Two Luxembourg nationals on Thursday were found guilty of sending death threats to immigrant rights activists Serge Kollwelter and Laura Zuccoli, with one of the men sentenced to nine months in prison.

The pair were found guilty by a Luxembourg City court of publishing xenophobic comments and threats in a discussion feed on Facebook on March 31 last year.

A 54-year-old defendant was sentenced to nine months in prison, while his 45-year-old co-defendant was served a nine-month suspended sentence, under the condition that he will not be caught for a similar offence over the next five years. ...

I'm so glad I live in a country that can't afford a massive surveillance program like this.

Are you sure? Even a small country such as Luxembourg can afford to have a (small) intelligence agency, still capable of creating a big mess!

No country is too small to spy, no person is too insignificant to be spied upon!

No it can't just be ignored. If these laws pass, every EU country will be forced to implement them. The European Commission has very sharp teeth indeed on stuff like this, and does not take kindly to companies trying to ignore its rules.

How serious are they about data protection, if even the EU governments themselves are even ignoring the most basic principles of secure database deployment.

Case in point, recently the database of the Luxembourgish service medico-sportif was breached. No, not by an evil-genius uberhacker, but by a sportsman who saw a password on a note stuck to a medico-sportif doctor's screen ...

It turned out, that the service ignored the most elementary security precautions:

• the database was accessible worldwide, directly from the internet, literally from across the world... No intranet-only access, no requirement for VPN, no nothing!
• every user (doctor, civil servant, ...) had access to the entire database, rather than just the part he needed for his job (no access levels, compartments, etc.)
• users (doctors) were stupid (or uneducated) enough to leave their user name and passwords (and the URL of the web interface to the DB) in a place where the public could find them... no, a post-it stuck to your screen in your office is not safe, if you routinely entertain members of the public in there, especially if you then leave them alone for a while!
• the database contained data irrelevant to its purpose, such as a flag whether the sports(wo)men where of African origin or not (oddly enough, only Africa was singled out, no other ethnicity)

===> these data protection laws are only there to placate the public, so that they allow more and more data gathering, in the mistaken belief that such data will be safe with the government or whomever. But there is no real will to follow through with application of even the most basic security measures.

The submitter, who works for itworld, sent a link to slashdot with an itworld article that has no source material nor citations of where the story was sourced. The only actual journalism that anyone has done on this appears to come from:

http://www.wort.lu/wort/web/en/luxembourg/articles/2011/05/149560/index.php

This is the link that should have been posted. Seriously, it took me less than a minute to vet this.

... or Luxembourg's Wort...