October 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining - ScienceDirect

by J.C. DE MARTIN

Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining Author links open overlay panelAndrew L.GoodkindRobert P.Berrens https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629619302701 (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

Oct. 5, 2019

Facebook is being asked to give access to encrypted messages. It’s a bad idea. - MIT Technology Review

by J.C. DE MARTIN

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614474/politicians-are-asking-facebook-t… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

Oct. 5, 2019

Why digital can’t replace cash – Consumer Corner

by J.C. DE MARTIN

Why digital can’t replace cash Farid Aliyev on June 16, 2016 We live in a digital era where smartphones rule. These intelligent devices offer consumers instant and convenient access to information, services, shopping, banking and payments. So a logical question is to ask whether banknotes and coins still have a role to play in society and what the future holds for cash. As paradoxical as it may seem, increasing digitalisation means the role of cash becomes more prominent. For more than a decade, various experts and analysts have been forecasting the imminent end of cash and its replacement by debit and credit cards, online and mobile payments. Recently a high level banker predicted that cash will be gone in a decade. https://www.beuc.eu/blog/why-digital-cant-replace-cash/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

Oct. 5, 2019

This is how you kick facial recognition out of your town

by J.C. DE MARTIN

This is how you kick facial recognition out of your town Bans on the technology have mostly focused on law enforcement, but there’s a growing movement to get it out of school, parks, and private businesses too. by Angela Chen October 4, 2019 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614477/facial-recognition-law-enforcemen… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

Oct. 5, 2019

La quarta era dell'informatica sociale

by Philippe Aigrain

Per i francofoni, il testo del mio intervento alla Conferenza inaugurale del Centro Internet e società del CNRS è online qui: http://www.cis.cnrs.fr/#news Philippe

Oct. 5, 2019

Per la Corte di giustizia Ue Facebook deve rendere inaccessibili i contenuti illeciti in tutto il mondo

by don Luca Peyron

Quando essere europei, ancora una volta, è titolo di vanto... Buona lettura dl https://www.corriere.it/economia/consumi/19_ottobre_03/facebook-la-corte-gi… https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-10/cp190128it… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

Oct. 5, 2019

Re: [nexa] IMA - Internet, Mon Amour

by Alberto Cammozzo

Caro karlessi, grazie. Sono uno di quelli a cui interessa quello che fate e non vi conoscevo. Mi piace il background teorico, Illic specialmente. E' qualche anno che mi interrogo su se e come l'informatica possa essere conviviale. Vi è un intreccio inestricabile di industriale e artigianale che rende la questione spinosa. Mi piacerebbe sapere se avete riflettuto in merito e se vi sono tracce di questa riflessione. Ciao, Alberto On 04/10/2019 14:28, karlessi wrote: > Ciao, > > sono un po' in imbarazzo, con il senso di colpa ignorante soprattutto ;) > > alekos.net è una faccenda di artigiani, delle tecnologie digitali in > particolare. perciò poca automazione e molto "tailoring", dicono gli > anglofili, ovvero attenzione alle situazioni e alle interazioni > specifiche. in termini sistemistici, per esempio, non c'è devops, dico > kubernetes, rancher, docker, ecc. ma nemmeno ansible che tenga se ogni > intervento è differente. ogni arnese può essere utile, certo, ma spesso > è superfluo. > > non è per ideologia, ma per esperienza: la scalabilità a ogni costo non > fa per noi. controproduttività, diceva Ivan Illich. perché poi, nei > progetti europei come in tante altre occasioni di lavoro in rete, ti > trovi a fare "integrazione di cloud" e deliri sui sistemi di > autenticazione e app e framework menate. Quando forse sarebbe tanto più > semplice un bel rasoio occamista e, non dico risolverla a FTP, ma una > banale istanza nextcloud o simili (pure per le PA, invece di continuare > a chiedere privacy ai big dell'IT) e tanta formazione. > > cmq viene da http://alekos.org/ > > al momento stiamo lavorando su un calculator della carbon footprint. > abbiamo la base, drupal (nonostante le debolezze intrinseche del > sistema, è meno peggio di altri) webform con calcoli, da esporre in > qualche modo anche mobile. un calcolatore che permetta di fissare > obiettivi, a differenza di quelli che ci sono in giro, per aiutare le > persone a percepire cambiamenti reali nel proprio comportamento. e > integri calcoli sul consumo digitale. perché puoi anche essere vegano e > muoverti in treno, ma se usi intensamente i social (audio e > videomessaggi su whatsapp, ascoltare musica su youtube, per non far > nomi), ecc. la tua impronta sale assai... > > la pedagogia hacker è quindi una branca delle tecnologie appropriate, > ispirata alla pedagogia degli oppressi (Freire), alla pedagogia > esperienziale (Boud-Cohen-Walker), alla tradizione critica delle > tecnologie (Mumford, Illich, Haraway). e all'hacking. un passo oltre > l'autodifesa digitale, che implica una postura di attacco e difesa, > militarizzazione difensiva da attacchi esterni. ma il confine è (anche) > interno. riguarda l'obbedire a ordini impartiti sotto forma di > "partecipazione a giochi": il gioco di trovare un posto dove cenare, > dove andare in vacanza, un libro-film che ti piace, un partner, un > argomento per i prossimi tre minuti d'attenzione. un nemico a cui > sparare, nei videogiochi o fuori dal virtuale. e quindi, di nudging in > gamification, obbedienti alle scariche di dopamina che ci piacciono > tanto, ci stiamo assuefacendo agli stati di flusso e tendiamo a lasciar > scegliere alle piattaforme (corporative o di stato, dipende da dove stai > nel mondo), che ci conoscono meglio di quanto non ci conosciamo noi. > > perciò proponiamo formazioni (spesso fuori italia, è più semplice), ad > esempio https://circex.org/it/workshops/ > > il libro di Agnese è un piccolo sunto in forma narrativa per abbassare > la soglia d'ingresso su temi complessi. e proporre al tempo stesso un > modo diverso di pubblicare e far circolare su web. > > da qualche anno ormai stiamo scrivendo un manuale di pedagogia hacker > anche per addetti ai lavori (insegnanti, educatori, ecc.), prima o poi > riusciremo ad arrivare a qualcosa. forse! > > ciao > > k. > > Il 28/09/19 16:02, Giacomo Tesio ha scritto: >> Ciao karlessi, >> mi scopro complevolmente ignorante. >> >> Ho dato una scorsa veloce alla versione online del libro e credo che lo acquisterò in cartaceo (data volant, carta manet :-D). >> >> Ma sono rimasto ancor più colpito da alekos, che purtroppo non conoscevo. >> >> Sembra un progetto veramente interessante e a quanto ho potuto capire piuttosto articolato. >> >> Me/ce ne vuoi parlare? >> (lascio in copia Nexa perché credo di non essere l'unico fra i lettori della ML cui può interessare). >> >> >> Ti chiederei anche di spiegarmi/spiegarci cosa tu intenda esattamente per Pedagogia Hacker. >> >> Trovo l'accostamento di questi due termini quanto mai ambizioso e... curioso. ;-) >> >> E lo dico come hacker che ritiene la pedagogia e l'educazione storica e informatica fondamentale, tanto da volerne fare il centro della mia azione politica. >> >> >> Giacomo >>

Oct. 5, 2019

Facebook exempts political ads from ban on making false claims | Technology | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/04/facebook-exempts-politic…> Facebook has quietly rescinded a policy banning false claims in advertising, creating a specific exemption that leaves political adverts unconstrained regarding how they could mislead or deceive, as a potential general election looms in the UK. The social network had previously banned adverts containing “deceptive, false or misleading content”, a much stronger restriction than its general rules around Facebook posts. But, as reported by the journalist Judd Legum, in the last week the rules have narrowed considerably, only banning adverts that “include claims debunked by third-party fact-checkers, or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organisations with particular expertise”. Should Trump be banned from Twitter? Read more Under Facebook’s third-party fact-checking programme, it invites independent organisations such as the UK’s Full Fact to verify claims posted to the social network. But the groups, made up mainly of small charities and nonprofits, are heavily constrained in how many claims they can fact-check, meaning they often only verify the most viral cases. But even that limit has been lifted for some political adverts. A separate policy introduced by the social network recently declared opinion pieces and satire ineligible for verification, including any website or page “with the primary purpose of expressing the opinion or agenda of a political figure”. The end result is that any direct statement from a candidate or campaign cannot be fact-checked and so is automatically exempted from policies designed to prevent misinformation. (After the publication of this story, Facebook clarified that only politicians currently in office or running for office, and political parties, are exempt: other political adverts still need to be true.) The changes, Legum reported, followed a run of Donald Trump adverts that contained false claims but were not removed under the old rules. The new rules could prompt a clash between Facebook and UK regulators. The Advertising Standards Authority does not cover political adverts in Britain, the content of which is largely unregulated, but it does cover all other adverts, including those posted on Facebook. The ASA’s code explicitly bans adverts that “materially mislead or [are] likely to do so”, language that is close to that used in Facebook’s previous policies. A Facebook spokesman said: “We don’t believe that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates. Nor do we think it would be appropriate to prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.” Facebook’s decision comes as the rival service TikTok takes the opposite stance. In a blogpost, the social network, whose reported 500 million users would make it the largest in the world not owned by Facebook, made clear it would not be hosting any political adverts. [...]

Oct. 4, 2019

Re: [nexa] IMA - Internet, Mon Amour

by karlessi

Ciao, sono un po' in imbarazzo, con il senso di colpa ignorante soprattutto ;) alekos.net è una faccenda di artigiani, delle tecnologie digitali in particolare. perciò poca automazione e molto "tailoring", dicono gli anglofili, ovvero attenzione alle situazioni e alle interazioni specifiche. in termini sistemistici, per esempio, non c'è devops, dico kubernetes, rancher, docker, ecc. ma nemmeno ansible che tenga se ogni intervento è differente. ogni arnese può essere utile, certo, ma spesso è superfluo. non è per ideologia, ma per esperienza: la scalabilità a ogni costo non fa per noi. controproduttività, diceva Ivan Illich. perché poi, nei progetti europei come in tante altre occasioni di lavoro in rete, ti trovi a fare "integrazione di cloud" e deliri sui sistemi di autenticazione e app e framework menate. Quando forse sarebbe tanto più semplice un bel rasoio occamista e, non dico risolverla a FTP, ma una banale istanza nextcloud o simili (pure per le PA, invece di continuare a chiedere privacy ai big dell'IT) e tanta formazione. cmq viene da http://alekos.org/ al momento stiamo lavorando su un calculator della carbon footprint. abbiamo la base, drupal (nonostante le debolezze intrinseche del sistema, è meno peggio di altri) webform con calcoli, da esporre in qualche modo anche mobile. un calcolatore che permetta di fissare obiettivi, a differenza di quelli che ci sono in giro, per aiutare le persone a percepire cambiamenti reali nel proprio comportamento. e integri calcoli sul consumo digitale. perché puoi anche essere vegano e muoverti in treno, ma se usi intensamente i social (audio e videomessaggi su whatsapp, ascoltare musica su youtube, per non far nomi), ecc. la tua impronta sale assai... la pedagogia hacker è quindi una branca delle tecnologie appropriate, ispirata alla pedagogia degli oppressi (Freire), alla pedagogia esperienziale (Boud-Cohen-Walker), alla tradizione critica delle tecnologie (Mumford, Illich, Haraway). e all'hacking. un passo oltre l'autodifesa digitale, che implica una postura di attacco e difesa, militarizzazione difensiva da attacchi esterni. ma il confine è (anche) interno. riguarda l'obbedire a ordini impartiti sotto forma di "partecipazione a giochi": il gioco di trovare un posto dove cenare, dove andare in vacanza, un libro-film che ti piace, un partner, un argomento per i prossimi tre minuti d'attenzione. un nemico a cui sparare, nei videogiochi o fuori dal virtuale. e quindi, di nudging in gamification, obbedienti alle scariche di dopamina che ci piacciono tanto, ci stiamo assuefacendo agli stati di flusso e tendiamo a lasciar scegliere alle piattaforme (corporative o di stato, dipende da dove stai nel mondo), che ci conoscono meglio di quanto non ci conosciamo noi. perciò proponiamo formazioni (spesso fuori italia, è più semplice), ad esempio https://circex.org/it/workshops/ il libro di Agnese è un piccolo sunto in forma narrativa per abbassare la soglia d'ingresso su temi complessi. e proporre al tempo stesso un modo diverso di pubblicare e far circolare su web. da qualche anno ormai stiamo scrivendo un manuale di pedagogia hacker anche per addetti ai lavori (insegnanti, educatori, ecc.), prima o poi riusciremo ad arrivare a qualcosa. forse! ciao k. Il 28/09/19 16:02, Giacomo Tesio ha scritto: > Ciao karlessi, > mi scopro complevolmente ignorante. > > Ho dato una scorsa veloce alla versione online del libro e credo che lo acquisterò in cartaceo (data volant, carta manet :-D). > > Ma sono rimasto ancor più colpito da alekos, che purtroppo non conoscevo. > > Sembra un progetto veramente interessante e a quanto ho potuto capire piuttosto articolato. > > Me/ce ne vuoi parlare? > (lascio in copia Nexa perché credo di non essere l'unico fra i lettori della ML cui può interessare). > > > Ti chiederei anche di spiegarmi/spiegarci cosa tu intenda esattamente per Pedagogia Hacker. > > Trovo l'accostamento di questi due termini quanto mai ambizioso e... curioso. ;-) > > E lo dico come hacker che ritiene la pedagogia e l'educazione storica e informatica fondamentale, tanto da volerne fare il centro della mia azione politica. > > > Giacomo > -- "C.I.R.C.E. - https://circex.org" "tecnologie appropriate - https://alekos.net" GPG keys available via keyservers https://pgp.mit.edu/ Key fingerprint = BDFB 786F 6B35 7EB0 CE48 530C FCF9 E111 3537 3013

Oct. 4, 2019

How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age - The New York Times

by Alberto Cammozzo

Siamo usciti dalla fase sperimentale: l'applicazione delle tecnologie della sorveglianza per l'arresto e la deportazione degli immigrati prefigura il nuovo scenario per tutti. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.ht…> [...] Tracking immigrants in this country is an increasingly trivial exercise because it’s an increasingly trivial exercise to track any of us. The same phenomenon helped make the reporting for this article possible: Over the course of more than a year, I tried to reverse-engineer individual ICE officers’ use of America’s vast post-Sept. 11 domestic-surveillance apparatus, retracing their hunt for targets down to the very searches they entered into their computers. Based on hundreds of government-procurement records, dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents I and others obtained via public-records requests, the account that follows reveals new evidence of surveillance of detainees’ voice and video calls at ICE facilities and extensive proof that the agency relies on state D.M.V. databases and information products like CLEAR, from Thomson Reuters, to target immigrants. It shows how the Real ID Act of 2005, along with funding from the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) and help from umbrella groups like the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (A.A.M.V.A.), has laid the groundwork for real-time, real-world monitoring of American residents. It’s still a partial view. But it’s enough to show the scale of the machine. ICE’s transformation began under President Barack Obama. Criticized by activists as the “deporter in chief,” Obama indeed removed more than three million people from the country, including, in 2013, what remains the annual record — 432,448 people. But part of the spike he oversaw was an accounting trick: Near the Southern border, migrants caught trying to cross were increasingly subject to formal removal proceedings (and thus officially counted in statistics), a change from previous administrations. Away from the border, Obama tried to shift ICE’s priorities. He curtailed the agency’s longstanding practice of workplace raids, and active pursuit was now largely limited, especially during his second term, to convicted criminals, suspected gang members or terrorists and people apprehended at the border. The administration also discouraged so-called collateral arrests, in which ICE came looking for one person and instead nabbed a neighbor or a co-worker. The lowest priority were long-term residents with American children or spouses. “Felons, not families,” Obama explained in a 2014 speech. “Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who is working hard to provide for her kids.” ICE now needed systems that could more intelligently parse priority targets from the general population of millions of undocumented immigrants. Under Obama, the agency signed several key data and analytics contracts that have since drawn controversy, including with Thomson Reuters, the Silicon Valley firm Palantir and the Beltway start-up Giant Oak, and it relied ever more on local-federal data-sharing initiatives that flourished after Sept. 11. Information that was once siloed or tedious to access — driver’s-license photos, phone records, jail bookings — was increasingly at deportation officers’ fingertips. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to throw out his predecessor’s priority list. He issued Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” on his sixth day in office. “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” the order reads, “if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” Data once used to focus on prioritized groups could now, in theory, be used against anyone, and individual officers now had a freer hand to pursue their own priorities. The results were predictable: Both the percentage and sheer number of arrests by ICE of people without criminal convictions shot upward. There were 58,010 such arrests during the administration’s first 14 months, according to an analysis by NBC News — nearly three times as many as during the preceding 14 months. Statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, meanwhile, show a significant rise in immigration cases involving long-term residents. In an interview before her retirement this year, Elizabeth Godfrey, ICE’s acting field office director for the Pacific Northwest region, pointed to another reason the profile of its arrestees had changed: A series of pre-Trump court decisions, notably one made by a federal judge in Oregon in 2014, led a growing number of jails across the country to stop honoring ICE requests that they notify the agency of pending releases or hold immigrants beyond their scheduled release dates. This, together with sanctuary policies in a growing number of jurisdictions, cut off deportation officers’ easiest source of arrests, driving them to new hunting grounds. Officers working out of Godfrey’s Portland office — which was shut down for more than a week by protests last year — still carefully prioritized their targets, she said. They studied them in advance. Before attempting an arrest, they completed a form, the Field Operations Worksheet, and had it approved by two layers of supervisors. When given a choice, they would always pursue someone with a serious criminal history rather than someone without. But that wasn’t always the choice. Targeting decisions also depend on who’s findable. And today who’s findable depends on who has left a trail for officers to follow: people with driver’s licenses, people with car insurance, people with utility bills, people who pay U.S. taxes, people with social-media accounts, people with stable homes, people with American-born children, people who live American lives, people who once thought — if only for a moment — that they weren’t on the list. “We still have a job to do,” Godfrey told me. “We still have a mandate. So where are we going to locate these people? At a place of employment or at their home or anywhere else we can find them.” Image Shellfish beds near the Port of Peninsula, Nahcotta, Wash. Over time, ICE officers began arresting many of the industry’s workers. Shellfish beds near the Port of Peninsula, Nahcotta, Wash. Over time, ICE officers began arresting many of the industry’s workers.CreditMatt Black/Magnum, for The New York Times 3. ‘They knew who I was.’ The first person outside Pacific County’s Mexican community to notice the ICE crackdown was Erin Glenn, a soft-spoken high school teacher whose family has lived and farmed in the area for five generations. In 2015, after years of little noticeable ICE activity, a man she’d known for decades was suddenly picked up and deported. At first Glenn, who studied Spanish in college and later taught English to recent immigrants, let doubts creep in. “It’s the feds,” she says. “I thought they must know something about him I didn’t.” But the next year, as Trump campaigned and soon won the presidency on promises to clamp down on immigration, ICE arrested at least eight more of Glenn’s neighbors and friends, and she saw a trend. She began to privately tally the names of the people who had disappeared. The arrests seemed to accelerate, and the list became more detailed: how people were taken, where they were taken, when they were taken and whom they left behind. [...] If the recurring fear in Pacific County was that some unknown person — the sheriff, a local informant — was secretly behind ICE’s arrests, the recurring fear among rights groups in the other Washington, in the District of Columbia, was quite the opposite: that immigration decisions would soon be so automated as to effectively cut humans out of the loop. Exhibit A as the new administration took control of the capital was the Extreme Vetting Initiative. The initiative was ICE’s attempt to bring an ill-defined Trump campaign promise to life using artificial intelligence. The agency introduced it in a July 2017 “industry day” in a Marriott conference room near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, inviting a flock of technology firms and Beltway contractors. The event’s host was the Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit (C.T.C.E.U.), an office within H.S.I. that scrutinizes visa applicants and visa holders before and after they arrive in the United States. The guests, according to a sign-in sheet obtained by The Intercept, were a parade of billion-dollar companies — Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers — along with various smaller newcomers, including the social-media monitoring start-ups Giant Oak and Babel Street. To build the system it wanted, ICE expected to award one or some of them a contract worth $100 million or more. Interest was so high that the Marriott event, originally planned for one day, had to stretch to two. The goal of the Extreme Vetting Initiative was “determinations via automation,” ICE explained to the attendees. It sought partners whose algorithms could scan social media and other publicly available information and assess whether an immigrant was likely to become a “positively contributing member of society” — or whether he or she intended “to commit criminal or terrorist attacks.” Written text would be analyzed for sentiment, Facebook posts for aberrant thoughts, emojis for signs of criminality. The system would replace C.T.C.E.U.’s human analysts and “generate a minimum of 10,000 investigative leads annually.” In early 2018, ICE seemed to retreat from the Extreme Vetting Initiative, which has since been renamed the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative. The contract, for $102 million, went to CSRA, a Beltway giant already doing work for ICE that has since been purchased by General Dynamics. The company employed more than 100 human analysts — ensuring that people would still be firmly in charge of vetting other people. But the retreat, procurement documents show, was partial at best: H.S.I. had already been testing automated social-media profiling under Obama, and many of the technology companies that showed up at ICE’s Marriott event were already working for it. In 2016, ICE paid a broadband provider $50,400 “to strengthen C.T.C.E.U.’s open-source social-media exploitation capabilities as well as future growth by adding fiber-optic internet.” For the social-media capabilities themselves, it paid $1.4 million that year — and has since paid millions more — to Giant Oak, a rapidly expanding, 30-person analytics firm in Virginia that was founded by the behavioral economist and former C.B.P. chief of staff Gary Shiffman. One of Giant Oak’s early contracts was for a DARPA “quantitative counterinsurgency” project in Afghanistan. Two years ago, Forbes reported on the company’s work with ICE and detailed its flagship product, GOST, short for Giant Oak Search Technology, which allows users to search the dark web and social media to create “a dossier on each individual with everything you need to know, such as web page images and keywords already highlighted.” When I met Shiffman in a pub in Georgetown last year, he confirmed that the company worked for H.S.I., vetting visa holders and visa applicants, but not for E.R.O. Its technology wasn’t in the hands of domestic deportation officers like Miller and Dietz. He made clear that he didn’t want to live in a country that indiscriminately rounded up foreigners. But if public safety was the goal, the answer wasn’t to stop scanning people’s data. It was to do it the right way. “Now this is my theory,” he told me, “and you tell me if it’s crazy or wrong. But I think that the better we have entity resolution” — that is, the better we can compile and measure people’s data — “the less of a surveillance state we’ll have.” Once the machine is perfect, as long as you’re following the rules, you won’t even have to know it’s there. [...]

Oct. 4, 2019