Familiar

"The centre proposed by the European Commission will focus on thwarting online banking fraud, attacks against smartphones, and large-scale coordinated assaults on public services and infrastructure. Other priorities will include protecting social network profiles, halting ID theft and combating the sexual exploitation of children online."

Mmmmm, smells like EU-wide "great firewall of China" to me.

Oh noes

So the next time I do a few 'security checks' on a small company website before thinking about giving them my credit card number for a purchase.....it could land me in jail for 2 to 5 years?

As with everything, it will start out as means to fight crime/terrorism/other evil and then will be used to curb freedom of speech and spy on us all.

And their definition of 'hacking' is what, precisely?

It's time for a new MkII internet.

Leave this one intact. There has to be somewhere for the myriads of government agencies and security experts to hang out and annoy the masses.

Now, when I surf this internet, I get an uneasy squeamish feeling my scrotum is covered with crabs all spying on me with evil intent.

It's time for a new crab-free on-line experience (like it was 15 years ago).

Won't change anything for normal people

I'll bet the local plod still won't let you report a crime if it was in any way electronic, you'll still get the usual BS "report it to your bank sir" even though it is your bank or credit card company who are most likely responsible for the feeble security that allowed the non-crime to happen and will spend months dicking you about before you get a single penny back from them.

Cybercrime laws are there to protect rich companies and governments, not the people they are elected to serve, I won't be holding my breath waiting for this one to be any different.

If there is the slightest sign of this law being halfway decent then the banks and other lobbyists will be all over it like a rash to derail it before they have to learn how to spell "security". Here's a suggestion to make the criminals running the banks and credit card companies pay attention, whatever is stolen from their customers every year due to their feeble security comes off the personal bonus pool for the board of directors. We can apply this to the extortion scam that is "credit reference agencies" too, the total national losses from identity fraud where a "credit reference agency" sold credit check data to support the fraud without the permission of the person whom the data refers to should be paid by the "credit reference agencies". That would get rid of the leeches fast enough.

It's just like Cyber Intelligence

But on crack!