"Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) purchased access to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware in 2019 after internal efforts to create similar iOS and Android surveillance tools failed," reports AppleInsider. The news comes less than a month after the Digital Agenda committee chairman of Germany's federal parliament, Manual Hoferlin, declared Apple to be on a "dangerous path" with plans to enact on-device child sexual assault material monitoring. He said the system undermines "secure and confidential communication" and represents the "biggest breach of the dam for the confidentiality of communication that we have seen since the invention of the Internet." From the report: The federal government revealed the agreement with NSO in a closed-door session with the German parliament's Interior Committee on Tuesday, reports Die Zeit. When the BKA began to use Pegasus is unclear. While Die Zeit says the tool was purchased in 2019 and is currently used in concert with a less effective state-developed Trojan, a separate report from Suddeutsche Zeitung, via DW.com, cites BKA Vice President Martina Link as confirming an acquisition in late 2020 followed by deployment against terrorism and organized crime suspects in March.

Officials made the decision to adopt Pegasus in spite of concerns regarding the legality of deploying software that can grant near-unfettered access to iPhone and Android handsets. As noted in the report, NSO's spyware exploits zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to smartphones, including the latest iPhones, to record conversations, gather location data, access chat transcripts and more. Germany's laws state that authorities can only infiltrate suspects' cellphone and computers under special circumstances, while surveillance operations are governed by similarly strict rules.

BKA officials stipulated that only certain functions of Pegasus be activated in an attempt to bring the powerful tool in line with the country's privacy laws, sources told Die Zeit. It is unclear how the restrictions are implemented and whether they have been effective. Also unknown is how often and against whom Pegasus was deployed. According to Die Zeit, Germany first approached NSO about a potential licensing arrangement in 2017, but the plan was nixed due to concerns about the software's capabilities. Talks were renewed after the BKA's attempts to create its own spyware fell short.

The Biden administration on Wednesday released a blueprint for producing almost half of the nation's electricity from the sun by 2050 -- something that would require the country to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years and then double it again by 2030. From a report: The expansion of solar energy is part of President Biden's effort to fight climate change, but there would be little historical precedent for increasing solar energy, which contributed less than 4 percent of the country's electricity last year, that quickly. Such a large increase, laid out in an Energy Department report, is in line with what most climate scientists say is needed to stave off the worst effects of global warming. It would require a vast transformation in technology, the energy industry and the way people live.

The Energy Department said its calculations showed that solar panels had fallen so much in cost that they could produce 40 percent of the country's electricity by 2035 -- enough to power all American homes -- and 45 percent by 2050. Getting there will mean trillions of dollars in investments by homeowners, businesses and the government. The electric grid -- built for hulking coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants -- would have to be almost completely remade with the addition of batteries, transmission lines and other technologies that can soak up electricity when the sun is shining and to send it from one corner of the country to another.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australia's High Court, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that Facebook users are responsible for the content of complete strangers who post defamatory comments on their posts. The ruling upholds a June 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, home to Australia's largest city of Sydney. And it runs counter to how virtually everyone thinks about liability on the internet.

The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In the latest quasi-throwback toward "do not track," the UK's data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set "lasting" cookie preferences -- suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web users digesting this development in an otherwise monotonously unchanging regulatory saga, should be forgiven -- not only for any sense of deja vu they may experience -- but also for wondering if they haven't been mocked/gaslit quite enough already where cookie consent is concerned.

Last month, UK digital minister Oliver Dowden took aim at what he dubbed an "endless" parade of cookie pop-ups -- suggesting the government is eyeing watering down consent requirements around web tracking as ministers consider how to diverge from European Union data protection standards, post-Brexit. (He's slated to present the full sweep of the government's data 'reform' plans later this month so watch this space.) Today the UK's outgoing information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, stepped into the fray to urge her counterparts in G7 countries to knock heads together and coalesce around the idea of letting web users express generic privacy preferences at the browser/app/device level, rather than having to do it through pop-ups every time they visit a website.

In a statement announcing "an idea" she will present this week during a virtual meeting of fellow G7 data protection and privacy authorities -- less pithily described in the press release as being "on how to improve the current cookie consent mechanism, making web browsing smoother and more business friendly while better protecting personal data" -- Denham said: "I often hear people say they are tired of having to engage with so many cookie pop-ups. That fatigue is leading to people giving more personal data than they would like. The cookie mechanism is also far from ideal for businesses and other organizations running websites, as it is costly and it can lead to poor user experience. While I expect businesses to comply with current laws, my office is encouraging international collaboration to bring practical solutions in this area. There are nearly two billion websites out there taking account of the world's privacy preferences. No single country can tackle this issue alone. That is why I am calling on my G7 colleagues to use our convening power. Together we can engage with technology firms and standards organizations to develop a coordinated approach to this challenge," she added.