Merkel and Hollande to talk about avoiding US servers

In an unrelated photo, French President Francois Hollande speaks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she arrives at the Elysee Palace in Paris December 18, 2013.

Image credit: REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande will discuss this week how Europe can keep email traffic away from U.S. servers.
Merkel is planning to discuss this issue when she meets her French colleague on Wednesday, she said in a weekly podcast.
"We will talk with France about how we can maintain a high level of data protection. Above all, we will discuss which European providers we have who offer security to citizens. So that you don't have to cross the Atlantic with emails and other things, but also can build up communication networks within Europe," Merkel said Saturday.
The talks come in the wake of the revelations about the surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The agency allegedly monitored phone calls and emails from millions of people including German citizens, while it also allegedly spied on Merkel's phone.
Meanwhile, the German federal prosecutor is considering starting a formal investigation into Germany's part in the NSA affair. The German government, including Merkel, are targeted in a criminal complaint filed by human rights groups in Germany for allegedly aiding the NSA in its spying efforts.
During the podcast, Merkel also discussed data protection issues with Google that have been going on for years in Europe.
In the latest development, the company published commitments to settle an E.U. antitrust case that was started in 2010 on Friday.
Over the last couple of years there have also been privacy and data protection issues with other big tech companies, like Facebook for instance, in several E.U. countries, including Germany.
"We need to do more for data protection in Europe, that is indisputable," Merkel said when asked if she thought that a German/French or European data protection network could mitigate privacy troubles with big tech companies.
At the moment there are negotiations for a uniform data protection standard in Europe, Merkel said. However, such a standard is not easy to negotiate because some countries have less stringent data protection than Germany, she added.
"And we don't want our data protection weakened," Merkel said. On the other hand, if there won't be an E.U. wide data protection regime, companies like Google and Facebook can settle where the data protection level is lowest, she said.

Chip Shop Awards gets hacked by entrant in 'Best use of hacking for self-promotion' category

It is one of the novelties of the Chip Shop Awards that entrants can invent their own categories. But when one agency submitted an ad named ‘Hacker’ into the category of ‘Best use of hacking for self-promotion’, the organisers probably should have sensed danger.
Fast forward 24 hours and the agency in question had breached the Chip Shop Awards’ defences, hacked into the voting system and racked up more than 30,000 votes for their entry to be Ad of the Month. A brilliant – if extremely dicey – demonstration of how to marry medium with message.

The hack was the brainchild of Sheffield agency The Black Eye Project, whose partner Jim Lobley has been kept busy this morning dealing with the Twitter storm from other entrants unimpressed by their illicit tactics.
He told The Drum: “It was just a bit of fun really. We’ve wound some snotty nosed kids up.
“By putting the code on the ad we tried to make sure that it was fair to everybody. We gave them the means to do it themselves but no one picked up on that.
“It was one of our coders who saw a hole in the code and decided to exploit it.
“It’s just a different format. We always try not to do knob gags. We haven’t created any Mugabe vote rigging of epic proportions. The majority of people have enjoyed it.
“It was poignant that we’ve done it in the Chip Shops.”
Having since closed the loophole, a Chip Shop Awards spokesperson explained that The Black Eye Project’s illegitimate votes would not count in the final tally.
They said: "In any other industry awards the organisers would be thoroughly hacked off and the culprits would get an instant DQ. But the Chip Shops isn't like any other awards scheme.
"While we wouldn't want to encourage other hackers, we preach creativity without limits so we have to take our hats off to The Black Eye Project for their sheer audacity.
"To reassure entrants, the vote count on the website is only a visual representation of a vote. In the interests of fairness, only genuine social media shares are counted by the CSA voting system and invalid votes are disregarded overnight, so the real total hasn’t been rigged.”
The Chip Shop Awards is open for entries until Friday 14 March.