BEST OF THE BEST MOTHERBOARD: A hacker who hacked a hacking firm has gotten away with it, according to a Motherboard feature. Back in July 2015, Italian spyware company Hacking Team – which specializes in selling intrusion and surveillance tools to governments, law enforcement and corporations – suffered a breach that saw a 400-gigabyte torrent file containing a huge number of sensitive internal files, including spyware source code, made public. A “vigilante hacker” called Phineas Fisher claimed responsibility for the attack, even posting a description of exactly how the hack was carried out, says the piece. But this summer, an Italian judge ruled that the investigation into the identity of the hacker should be ended as the trail has led nowhere. With Hacking Team even having tried to finger employees for the attack, Phineas Fisher told Motherboard, afterwards “I'm glad to hear they've stopped their pointless investigation that was mostly just being used as a tool by [the firm’s founder and CEO] to harass ex-employees that he didn't like.” THE REST THE NEXT WEB: Public blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum could have a big “ privacy poisoning” problem in the coming years, says a piece from The Next Web. The issue comes down to what happens when personal data is added to a public blockchain, potentially bringing the network into conflict with privacy laws. One of the key regulations of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations or GDPR is the so-called “right to be forgotten” – that is, you can by law demand to have your public online data deleted. But, as public blockchains can’t be amended after data has been written to them, they could potentially end up contravening the GDPR. However, the EU isn’t very clear on how GDPR should apply to blockchains, and their decentralized nature begs the question, who should be held responsible for any infractions, and how? Further, the piece argues, the lack of clarity opens the system up to “potential abuse.” BLOOMBERG: Customers of the Swift banking network are fleeing to blockchain payments startup Ripple, the firm’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse says in a Bloomberg piece. Technologies used by banks today, that were developed by Swift “decades ago,” have fallen behind the times, Garlinghouse argued in an interview with Bloomberg TV. Pointing out that Swift has previously said it doesn’t regard blockchain as a good solution to correspondent banking, he added, “We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree.” However, while Ripple now claims to have over 100 banks and payment providers on its RippleNet network, Swift has more than 11,000 customers around the world, the article states. And while there have been rumors of a possible tie-up between the two entities, Garlinghouse also said that was not the case. | 
