September 2018 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

intermediati e Zipf
by attardi Sept. 17, 2018

Sept. 17, 2018

Ripropongo la questione dell'intermediazione (Quintarelli) e degli effetti della legge di Zipf (Attardi) nel mondo digitale, che mi pare meriti una più ampia discussione. Come fa notare Richard Bennett: Chris Anderson has been proved wrong. The Internet doesn’t increase sales of the long tail, it concentrates sales of blockbusters. Similarly, the Internet doesn't eliminate middlemen, it reduces their number and makes them more powerful; we’ve known this for ten years (https://hbr.org/2008/07/should-you-invest-in-the-long-tail) --

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Philosophy & Technology, Volume 31, Issue 3 - Springer
by Diego Giorio Sept. 16, 2018

Sept. 16, 2018

Numero dedicato alla Cyberwar, alla deterrenza nel mondo virtuale e simili. Personalmente ho appena iniziato a scaricare il contenuto gratuito e non ho iniziato a leggere, ma credo possa essere di interesse pera altri nexiani. Buona domenica a tutti D. https://link.springer.com/journal/13347/31/3

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Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach and It Only Took a Bunch of Public Pressure
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 16, 2018

Sept. 16, 2018

Se il "giudice" non sta nemmeno a Berlino, ma su Twitter... <https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it…> Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this situation, a combination of copyright bots and corporate intransigence led to a Kafkaesque attack on music. Musician James Rhodes put a video <https://www.facebook.com/jamesrhodespiano/videos/232063150806956/> of himself playing Bach on Facebook. Sony Music Entertainment claimed <https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1036929244654460928> that 47 seconds of that performance belonged to them. Facebook muted the video as a result. So far, this is stupid but not /unusually/ stupid in the world of takedowns. It’s what happened after Rhodes got Sony’s notice that earned it a place in the Hall of Shame. One argument in favor of this process is that there are supposed to be checks and balances. Takedown notices are supposed to only be sent by someone who owns the copyright in the material and actually believes that copyright’s been infringed. And if a takedown notice is wrong, a counter-notice can be sent by someone explaining that they own the work or that it’s not infringement. Counter-notices have a lot of problems, not the least of which is that the requirements are onerous for small-time creators, requiring a fair bit of personal information. There’s always the fear that, even for someone who knows they own the work, that the other side will sue them anyway, which they cannot afford. Rhodes did dispute the claim, explaining that “this is my own performance of Bach. Who died 300 years ago. I own all the rights.” Sony rejected this reasoning <https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1039172935112638466>. While we don’t know for sure what Sony’s process is, we can guess that a copyright bot, or a human acting just as mechanically, was at the center of this mess. A human doing actual analysis would have looked at a video of a man playing a piece of music older than American copyright law and determined that it was not something they owned. It almost feels like an automatic response also rejected Rhodes’ appeal, because we certainly hope a thoughtful person would have received his notice and accepted it. Rhodes took his story to Twitter, where it picked up some steam, and emailed the heads of Sony Classical and Sony’s public relations, eventually getting his audio restored. He tweeted <https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1039197601093103616> “What about the thousands of other musicians without that reach…?” He raises a good point. None of the supposed checks worked. Public pressure and the persistence of Rhodes was the only reason this complaint went away, despite how the rules are supposed to protect fair use and the public domain. How many <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/copyright-law-shouldnt-pick-winners> more <https://www.eff.org/takedowns/ten-hours-static-gets-five-copyright-notices> ways <https://www.eff.org/takedowns/topple-track-attacks-eff-and-others-outrageou…> do we need to say that copyright bots and filters don’t work? That mandating them, as the European Union is poised to do <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/how-eus-copyright-filters-will-make-i…>, is dangerous and shortsighted? We hear about these misfires roughly the same way they get resolved: because they generate enough noise. How many more lead to a creator’s work being taken down with no recourse?

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NYT: "Mozilla Co-Founder's Brave Files Adtech Complaint Against Google"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 15, 2018

Sept. 15, 2018

*Mozilla Co-Founder's Brave Files Adtech Complaint Against Google** * By Reuters Sept. 12, 2018 COLOGNE, Germany — Brave, a privacy-focused web browser set up by Silicon Valley engineering guru Brendan Eich, filed privacy complaints in Britain and Ireland that could become a test case against search company Google and other digital advertising firms. The petitioners say they want to trigger an article in the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requiring an EU-wide investigation, making it a test case for a new European Data Protection Board created to give the privacy regime more teeth. The GDPR seeks to ensure that individuals have greater control over the data that companies hold about them. Brave and the co-plaintiffs say Google and others are playing fast and loose with people's data. "There is a massive and systematic data breach at the heart of the behavioral advertising industry. Despite the two-year lead-in period before the GDPR, adtech companies have failed to comply," Brave's chief policy officer Johnny Ryan told Reuters. [....] Continua qui: https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/09/12/technology/12reuters-europe-priv…

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Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free
by Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino Sept. 14, 2018

Sept. 14, 2018

Condivido un articolo che mette con chiarezza sul tavolo la questione fondamentale della libertà nella produzione scientifica. Un saluto, Vincenzo Giorgino Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing…

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Caso Snowden, la decisione della Corte Europea dei Diritti dell'Uomo
by Guido Noto La Diega Sept. 13, 2018

Sept. 13, 2018

In allegato la decisione della ECtHR nel caso Snowden o Big Brother Watch v UK. A sorpresa, si fa per dire, il Regno Unito ha violato il diritto alla privacy nelle sue attività di spionaggio

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How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 12, 2018

Sept. 12, 2018

Bella sintesi, esempi chiarissimi. <https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-…> I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus /optimistically/ on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite. /Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses/? I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for /blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and/ /limits/ of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it. Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices Western Culture is built around ideals of individual choice and freedom. Millions of us fiercely defend our right to make “free” choices, while we ignore how those choices are manipulated upstream by menus we didn’t choose in the first place. This is exactly what magicians do. They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose. I can’t emphasize enough how deep this insight is. When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask: * “what’s not on the menu?” * “why am I being given /these options/ and not others?” * “do I know the menu provider’s goals?” * “is this menu /empowering/ for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes) For example, imagine you’re out with friends on a Tuesday night and want to keep the conversation going. You open Yelp to find nearby recommendations and see a list of bars. The group turns into a huddle of faces staring down at their phones /comparing bars. /They scrutinize the photos of each, comparing cocktail drinks. Is this menu still relevant to the original desire of the group? It’s not that bars aren’t a good choice, it’s that Yelp substituted the group’s original question (“where can we go to keep talking?”) with a different question (“what’s a bar with good photos of cocktails?”) all by shaping the menu. Moreover, the group falls for the illusion that Yelp’s menu represents a /complete set of choices/ for where to go. While looking down at their phones, they don’t see the park across the street with a band playing live music. They miss the pop-up gallery on the other side of the street serving crepes and coffee. Neither of those show up on Yelp’s menu. [...]

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Press protections might safeguard Google’s algorithms, even from Trump
by gianlucaquaglia＠gmail.com Sept. 11, 2018

Sept. 11, 2018

Press protections might safeguard Google’s algorithms, even from Trump By Jared Schroeder SEPTEMBER 6, 2018 PRESIDENT TRUMP INDICATED LAST WEEK that the White House is looking into regulating Google, Facebook, and Twitter because they are, he alleges, privileging voices that criticize him while suppressing his supporters’ ideas. He wrote, in a series of early morning tweets on August 28, that “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation – will be addressed!” Trump’s suggestion that these companies are privileging certain information while suppressing other content followed similar accusations made by Infowars founder Alex Jones and other right-wing figures of bias against conservatives. How, exactly, would this blanket suggestion to regulate these companies work? When we’re talking about regulating the information that comes up in Google searches or appears in people’s timelines on Facebook or Twitter, we’re really talking about governing algorithms and the decisions they make about which information should be provided and prioritized. Regulating algorithms might seem like entirely new legal territory, since Google and its cousins are only two decades old. But a newspaper case from 1974 has quite a bit to say about whether the government can control, under the First Amendment, companies’ algorithms and how they produce and organize information. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo, the Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that gave political candidates the “right of reply” to criticisms they faced in newspapers. The law required the newspaper to publish a response from the candidate, and to place it, free of charge, in a conspicuous place. [...] il seguito https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/press-protections-might-safeguard-google…

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Joseph Stiglitz on artificial intelligence: 'We’re going towards a more divided society'
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 11, 2018

Sept. 11, 2018

The technology could vastly improve lives, the economist says – but only if the tech titans that control it are properly regulated. ‘What we have now is totally inadequate’ <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/joseph-stiglitz-on-artif…> “Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.” On 11 September, the Columbia University professor will be in London to deliver the latest lecture in the Royal Society’s You and AI series. Stiglitz will talk about the future of work, an area where predictions have been frequent, contradictory and unnerving. Last month, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, warned that “large swathes” of Britain’s workforce face unemployment as AI and other technologies automate more jobs. He had less to say about the new positions AI may create. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers in July argued that AI may create as many jobs as it destroys – perhaps even more. As with the Industrial Revolution, the misery would come not from a lack of work, but the difficulty in switching from one job to another. [...] “These new tech giants are raising very deep issues about privacy and the ability to exploit ordinary people that were never present in earlier eras of monopoly power,” says Stiglitz. “Beforehand, you could raise the price. Now you can target particular individuals by exploiting their information.” It is the potential for datasets to be combined that most worries Stiglitz. For example, retailers can now track customers via their smartphones as they move around stores and can gather data on what catches their eye and which displays they walk straight past. “In your interactions with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, they gather an awful lot of data about you. If that data is combined with other data, then companies have a great deal of information about you as an individual – more information than you have on yourself,” he says. “They know, for example, that people who search this way are willing to pay more. They know every store you’ve visited. That means that life is going to be increasingly unpleasant, because your decision to shop in a certain store may result in you paying more money. To the extent that people are aware of this game, it distorts their behaviour. What is clear is that it introduces a level of anxiety in everything we do and it increases inequality even more.” Stiglitz poses a question that he suspects tech firms have faced internally. “Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit somebody.” [...]

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IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 9, 2018

Sept. 9, 2018

Anche se non sono ufficialmente usate, le tecologie per la discriminazione razziale vengono comunque sviluppate. Sorprende che IBM non sia più prudente, dopo le Hollerith machines nella Germania nazista [1] e accuse di aver sviluppato tecnologie per l'apartheid in Sud Africa [2] <https://theintercept.com/2018/09/06/nypd-surveillance-camera-skin-tone-sear…> In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a single command center. Two years later, the NYPD announced that the command center, known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, had integrated cutting-edge video analytics software into select cameras across the city. The video analytics software captured stills of individuals caught on closed-circuit TV footage and automatically labeled the images with physical tags, such as clothing color, allowing police to quickly search through hours of video for images of individuals matching a description of interest. At the time, the software was also starting to generate alerts for unattended packages, cars speeding up a street in the wrong direction, or people entering restricted areas. Over the years, the NYPD has shared only occasional, small updates on the program’s progress. In a 2011 interview with Scientific American, for example, Inspector Salvatore DiPace, then commanding officer of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, said the police department was testing whether the software could box out images of people’s faces as they passed by subway cameras and subsequently cull through the images for various unspecified “facial features.” While facial recognition technology, which measures individual faces at over 16,000 points for fine-grained comparisons with other facial images, has attracted significant legal scrutiny and media attention, this object identification software has largely evaded attention. How exactly this technology came to be developed and which particular features the software was built to catalog have never been revealed publicly by the NYPD. Now, thanks to confidential corporate documents and interviews with many of the technologists involved in developing the software, The Intercept and the Investigative Fund have learned that IBM began developing this object identification technology using secret access to NYPD camera footage. With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone. [...] [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust> [2] <http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/areas-of-focus/previous-areas-of-focus/in-re-sou…>

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