The EU’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is now blocking access to historical Holocaust archives, reports the Jerusalem Post…

Researchers across the continent – especially in Sweden, France and Germany – have claimed that archivists have begun restricting access to data, citing the GDPR as their rationale for not complying with requests for documents. Because the legislation does not stipulate how long after a person’s death his or her private information can be revealed, or when access to such information can be granted, some archivists “have begun reading into what they understand the law will be,” and are “barring access to materials, including materials [related to] the history of the Holocaust,” Dr. Robert Williams said.”

Ooops. Not content with having its Acrobat PDF reader be an ongoing and huge security risk, it seems Adobe now actively spies on its ebook readers: “Adobe sends your reading logs back to Adobe — in plain text”…

Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader — an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries — actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic … to follow along over readers’ shoulders.

Why having the data can sometimes be handy: the Financial Times has fisked the Piketty data on Europe…

“The FT [Financial Times] found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. … For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.” – Financial Times.