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During the EDPB’s plenary of 26 April 2023, the EDPB members running to become the new EDPB Chair presented their candidacy to the Board.

In accordance with the GDPR, the Board elects one Chair and two Deputy Chairs amongst its members, by simple majority for a term of office of five years, which is renewable once. The Chair is the official representative of the Board.

The terms of office of Chair Andrea Jelinek and Deputy Chair Ventsislav Karadjov, will be ending on 25 May 2023. Candidates for both positions were given a chance to present themselves to the other members of the Board a month ahead of the election. The position of Deputy Chair Aleid Wolfsen is not open for re-election, as he was elected on 15 May 2019 and his term will therefore end on 15 May 2024.

The following Heads of national data protection authorities (DPAs) expressed their interest to become the next EDPB Chair:

• Ventsislav Karadjov (Bulgarian DPA)
• Anu Talus (Finnish DPA)
• Aleid Wolfsen (Dutch DPA)

The following Heads of DPAs expressed their interest to become Deputy Chair:

• Irene Loizidou Nikolaidou (Cypriot DPA)
• Jekaterina Macuka (Latvian DPA)
• Zdravko Vukić (Croatian DPA)

The elections will take place during the EDPB plenary meeting on 25 May 2023, through secret ballot.

For more information on the election procedure, please consult the EDPB Rules of Procedure.

The EDPB has launched a Data Protection Guide to help small business owners on their way to become more data protection compliant. The Guide aims to raise awareness about the GDPR and to provide practical information to SMEs about GDPR compliance in an accessible and easily understandable format.

Andrea Jelinek said, “In this guide, SMEs will find various tools and practical tips to help them comply with the GDPR. It includes concrete examples gathered during our 5 years of experience with the GDPR.”

The Guide covers various aspects of the GDPR, from data protection basics, to data subject rights, data breaches, and more. It contains videos, infographics, interactive flowcharts, and other practical materials to help SMEs put data protection into practice. In addition, the Guide contains an overview of handy materials developed for SMEs by the national Data Protection Authorities.

The Guide is currently available in English and will be made available in other EU languages over time.

The Guide is one of the EDPB’s awareness raising actions for 2023 and was included as a key initiative in the EDPB’s 2021-2023 Strategy.

EDPS contribution in the context of the European Commission's initiative to further specify procedural rules relating to the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation.

Today, the Commission adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act (DSA), designating 17 Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and 2 Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) that reach at least 45 million monthly active users. These are:

Very Large Online Platforms:

Alibaba AliExpress Amazon Store Apple AppStore Booking.com Facebook Google Play Google Maps Google Shopping Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest Snapchat TikTok Twitter Wikipedia YouTube Zalando Very Large Online Search Engines:

Bing Google Search The platforms have been designated based on the user data that they had to publish by 17 February 2023.

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A financially-motivated North Korean threat actor is suspected to be behind a new Apple macOS malware strain called RustBucket.

"[RustBucket] communicates with command and control (C2) servers to download and execute various payloads," Jamf Threat Labs researchers Ferdous Saljooki and Jaron Bradley said in a technical report published last week.

The Apple device management company attributed it to a threat actor known as BlueNoroff, a subgroup within the infamous Lazarus cluster that's also tracked under the monikers APT28, Nickel Gladstone, Sapphire Sleet, Stardust Chollima, and TA444.

The connections stem from tactical and infrastructure overlaps with a prior campaign exposed by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky in late December 2022 likely aimed at Japanese financial entities using fake domains impersonating venture capital firms.

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Abstract: This report provides an overview of the robotics industry in Europe, as well as a description of the definitions, typologies and main differences between industrial and service robots. The aim is to build up a stronger and updated knowledge of research questions, approaches and data that scholars and policy makers could use to study robotics around the world, and more specifically in Europe. It also identifies the necessary actions to merge heterogeneous data into a meaningful and consistent dataset to estimate the EU shares of robotics from the demand and supply perspectives, and for both industrial and service robots. Complementing these data with other sources to enhance the value and significance of the overall estimation exercise of the EU robotics market shares, provides a comprehensive overview of the production and adoption sides for both industrial and service robots. The three main objectives of the report are: to build a dataset including the market shares of robots in the EU; to describe the main trends that can be extracted from data; and, to sketch a conceptual framework to contextualise the results from the first two objectives.

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Il gruppo di hacktivisti filorussi di NoName057(16) ha sferrato un nuovo attacco contro un nuovo obiettivo italiano attraverso un Distributed Denial of a Service (DDoS). Questa volta a farne le spese è il sito della ATM.

L’Azienda Trasporti Milanesi, di proprietà del Comune di Milano, gestisce il trasporto pubblico del capoluogo lombardo e in 51 Comuni della Provincia, al servizio di un territorio con una popolazione complessiva di oltre 2,4 milioni di cittadini.

NoName057(16) è un gruppo di hacker che si è dichiarato a marzo del 2022 a supporto della Federazione Russa dopo l’inizio della guerra tra Ucraina e Russia.

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Parliament endorsed the first EU rules to trace crypto-asset transfers, prevent money laundering, as well as common rules on supervision and customer protection.

On Thursday, MEPs approved with 529 votes in favour to 29 against and 14 abstentions, the first piece of EU legislation for tracing transfers of crypto-assets like bitcoins and electronic money tokens. The text –which was provisionally agreed by Parliament and Council negotiators in June 2022- aims to ensure that crypto transfers, as is the case with any other financial operation, can always be traced and suspicious transactions blocked. The so-called “travel rule”, already used in traditional finance, will in future cover transfers of crypto assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to “travel” with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.

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The European Parliament is set to propose stricter rules for foundation models like ChatGPT and distinguish them from general purpose AI, according to an advanced compromise text seen by EURACTIV.

The AI Act is a landmark EU legislation to regulate Artificial Intelligence based on its capacity to cause harm. As AI solutions designed to handle a wide variety of tasks were not covered in the original proposal, the meteoric rise of ChatGPT has brutally disrupted the debate, leading to delays.

Although the file is close to finalisation, on Wednesday (19 April), the political meeting meant to certify an agreement was turned into a technical discussion on this part of the file, leading to the postponement of the key committee vote originally scheduled for 26 April.

Meanwhile, a revised text circulated Thursday indicates that MEPs are close to finalising their approach to ChatGPT and similar applications.

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Il gruppo di hacktivisti filorussi di NoName057(16) ha sferrato un nuovo attacco contro un nuovo obiettivo italiano attraverso un Distributed Denial of a Service (DDoS). Questa volta a farne le spese è il sito del Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura.

NoName057(16) è un gruppo di hacker che si è dichiarato a marzo del 2022 a supporto della Federazione Russa dopo l’inizio della guerra tra Ucraina e Russia.

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THE STUNNING CAPABILITIES of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAI’s CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future advances will come from.

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The light and dark sides of AI have been in the public spotlight for many years. Think facial recognition, algorithms making loan and sentencing recommendations, and medical image analysis. But the impressive—and sometimes scary—capabilities of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other conversational and image-conjuring artificial intelligence programs feel like a turning point.

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