November 2018 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.
by Giacomo Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: > we object to technologies that aid the powerful > in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. > The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in > its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and > to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly > in China would establish a dangerous precedent > at a volatile political moment, one that would > make it harder for Google to deny other countries > similar concessions. https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google…

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The Monopolization of America
by Luigi Scorca Nov. 27, 2018

Nov. 27, 2018

In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show. A must read, in my view. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/opinion/monopolies-in-the-us.html

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From Airbnb to city bikes, the ‘sharing economy’ has been bought up by big money | Evgeny Morozov | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 27, 2018

Nov. 27, 2018

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/airbnb-city-bikes-sha…> Of all the ideologies spawned by Silicon Valley, that of techno-populism – the making of empty promises on the basis of seismic digital disruption – is the strangest. Promising a world of immediate and painless personal empowerment, techno-populism is ambiguous enough to unite big tech firms, startups, cryptocurrency aficionados and even some political parties. The history is murky, but we do know the date when it went mainstream. It can be traced to Time magazine’s selection, in 2006, of “You” – the millions of ordinary people behind the user-generated web of the 2000s – as its Person of the Year. That choice ingrained techno-populist themes deep into our collective unconscious. While actual contributors to sites such as Wikipedia or Flickr were relatively few, the celebration of them delayed and deflected questions about corporate power and the durability of the emerging digital utopia. Just a few years later, that utopia was no more: highly centralised and dominated by a handful of platforms, the web was a shadow of its former eccentric self. When Uber and Airbnb were young, it was easy to believe a global revolution would liberate informal economic activity In 2018, the omnipotent creative user of 2006 has become a zombie-like content junkie, lethally addicted to scrolling and liking, forever trapped in the invisible cages of data brokers. A noble effort to make everyone an honorary member of the Bloomsbury group has instead condemned all of us to the eternal rosters of Cambridge Analytica. [...]

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Designing Proof of Human-work Puzzles, for Cryptocurrency and Beyond
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 26, 2018

Nov. 26, 2018

Ero sicuro che qualcuno avrebbe pensato a combinare digital labor e bitcoin mining (bastava cercare "human proof of work"). Chiaramente saranno solo attività "fun, educational and beneficial to society". L'immagine di un capannone pieno di diseredati che cliccano captcha evidentemente non sfiora gli autori... <https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/145.pdf> [...] At its core, Bitcoin’s distributed consensus protocol is based on moderately hard Proofs of Work (PoW) [24]. In Bitcoin the Hashcash [3] PoW puzzles are used to extend the blockchain, a cryptographic data-structure in which the public ledger is recorded. A PoW puzzle should be moderately hard for a computer to solve, but the PoW solution should be easy for a computer to verify. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin require that this hardness parameter of PoW puzzles be tunable. An adversary would need to control 51% of the computational power in the Bitcoin network to be able to alter the blockchain and prevent users from reaching the correct consensus 1 . While Bitcoin cleverly avoids the Sybil attack by using PoW puzzles, there are still many undesirable features of this distributed consensus protocol. For example, construcing the proofs of work is energy intensive making the mining process in this distributed consensus protocol environmentally unfriendly. Furthermore, the mining process is dominated by a smaller number of professional miners with customized hardware making it unprofitable for others to join — this raises the natural concern that a few professional miners might collude to alter the public ledger [47]. Indeed, the mining pool GHash.io 2 recently exceeded 50% of the computational power in Bitcoin. While other techniques like Proofs of Space [48, 26] or Proofs of Stake [8] have been proposed to build the blockchain in a distributed consensus protocol each of these techniques has its own drawbacks. It is clearly desirable to find new techniques for reaching a stable distributed consensus. In this paper we ask the following question: Is it possible to design proof of human-work puzzles that are suitable for a decentralized cryptocurrency? We believe that a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Human-work might offer many advantages over other approaches. First, the mining process would be eco-friendly. Second, instead of wasting ‘human cycles,’ it might be possible to base the proofs of human work on activities that are fun [35], educational [34] or even beneficial to society [57, 36]. Third, proofs of human work are fair by nature in the sense that two individuals will generally perform a comparable amount of work to produce a proof of human work. Thus, professional or rich miners would not have an significant advantage over regular users. [...]

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Le Fake News sulle Fake News -
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 26, 2018

Nov. 26, 2018

http://www.datamediahub.it/2018/11/26/le-fake-news-sulle-fake-news/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Droni. Artefatti e oggetti intelligenti | 26 novembre, Torino
by Francesco Ruggiero Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

Gentilissimi, vi segnalo un incontro in programma il *26 novembre, ore 18-20*, al Circolo dei Lettori di Torino, in via Bogino 9. Tema: *“Droni. Artefatti e oggetti intelligenti”.* L’incontro sarà introdotto da *Maurizio Ferraris* (Università di Torino). Interverranno *Antonio Vetrò *(Nexa Center for Internet & Society), *Filippo Santoni De Sio* (Delft University), *Marzia Soavi* (Università di Padova) ed *Enrico Terrone *(Università di Torino) in qualità di moderatore. Maggiori informazioni sono disponibili all’indirizzo: https://www.circololettori.it/scienza-nuova-3-2/ Cordiali saluti, Francesco -- Francesco Ruggiero Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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"Joseph Stiglitz: education effort on post-war scale needed for AI"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

*Joseph Stiglitz: education effort on post-war scale needed for AI** */Nobel laureate warns of greater inequality and ‘new era of fascism’ if AI impact on work not ‘managed’// / September 14, 2018 By John Morgan Major public investment in higher and other levels of education akin to the US’ investment after the Second World War is essential to help “manage” the rise of AI, which could otherwise bring a “new era of fascism”, according to economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The Columbia University professor delivered a lecture as part of the Royal Society’s ‘You and AI’ series, in which he said a key issue was AI’s potential to bring a further rise in inequality by making some jobs obsolete. [...] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/joseph-stiglitz-education-effort-…

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Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin
by Giacomo Tesio Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

> The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not – forgive the hair-splitting – a cryptocurrency. > > The Taler project’s maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a “post-blockchain” world. https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-b… Per maggiori info sul progetto: https://taler.net/en/ Giacomo

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Polli e blockchain
by Ugo Pagallo Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

[image: immagine.png]

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The New Radicalization of the Internet
by gianlucaquaglia＠gmail.com Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

The New Radicalization of the Internet continua qui https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/facebook-twitter-terroris…

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