April 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Il kernel Linux adotta il Code Of Conduct
by Francesco Mecca Sept. 9, 2020

Sept. 9, 2020

Il mondo del FOSS e piu` in generale quello dell'informatica non e` un universo a se` stante ma coesiste con il mondo della politica e ci interagisce. Il 16 settembre Linus con questa email http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1809.2/00117.html ha annunciato di prendersi una pausa dallo sviluppo del kernel. Inoltre si scusa per il suo comportamento aggressivo: "The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely. I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately." Questo cambiamento, che non ha precedenti in 30 anni di benevola dittatura, rientra nel panorama molto piu` ampio dell'attuale conflitto ideologico fra le vecchie idee di selezione per merito e le piu` nuove idee di selezione per diversita`, fra il "technical coding" e il "social coding", alt-destre e la sinistra culturale. Francesco Mecca

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Regolamentare Internet...
by Carlo Blengino Aug. 12, 2019

Aug. 12, 2019

espungere il male, prevenire ogni devianza, da Internet e dal mondo. Bel pezzo di Fabio Chiusi. Ricordo solo che tutte le battaglie per i diritti civili, tutte, sono iniziate infrangendo regole, scardinando concetti consolidati e ritenuti dai più giusti e sacrosanti, spesso sono stati commessi reati per permettere all'umanità di fare un passo avanti. Rosa Park fu arrestata legittimamente per aver violato il posto riservato dalla legge ai bianchi (nell'IOT di domani probabilmente un software non l'avrebbe neppure lasciata salire sul bus) e meno di 30 anni fa decine di giovani italiani rischiarono la galera rifiutandosi di fare il servizio militare...per dire. Grazie Fabio https://www.valigiablu.it/internet-politica-regole/

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Model Metropolis (da SimCity alla SmartCity?)
by Giacomo Tesio June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

Un brillante articolo da Kevin T. Baker, storico: https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/ Ai miei occhi, pone questioni interessantissime. Di straordinaria attualità nel momento in cui vecchi giocatori di SimCity (come me) ragionano, discutono, votano o decidono sulle "Smart City". E di straordinario interesse non solo storico politico, ma informatico. Mostra come l'informatica e la programmazione siano mezzi di espressione capaci di diffondere un sistema di credenze e valori complesso (150 equazioni e 200 variabili) SENZA comunicazione verbale. Diffondendo veri e propri pregiudizi senza una singola rete neurale a nascondere / giustificare i bias. Giacomo ____ Almost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.” Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today. [...] When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible. [...] Forrester argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. [...] In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse. [...] Expert knowledge, of course, has an important place in democratic deliberation, but it can also cut people out of the policy process, dampen the urgency of moral claims, and program a sense of powerlessness into our public discourse. Appeals to a social system’s “complexity” and the potential for “perverse outcomes” can be enough to sink transformative social programs that are still on the drawing board.

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119° Mercoledì di Nexa | 8 maggio 2019
by Nexa Media May 6, 2019

May 6, 2019

Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-119> NEXA 119° Mercoledì di Nexa Mercoledì 8 maggio 2019, ore 18.00 - 20.00 Politecnico di Torino http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-119 Alla scoperta del "DNA politico" del Senato italiano Speaker Chiara Ravazzi (CNR-IEIIT) This event will be webcast live: https://nexa.polito.it/nexa-hangout-on-air Negli ultimi decenni, la comunità scientifica ha dedicato sforzi significativi allo studio di modelli matematici che descrivano in maniera semplificata la formazione di opinioni in gruppi sociali. Tra questi, il modello introdotto da *Friedkin* e *Johnsen* è stato validato sperimentalmente per gruppi deliberativi di piccole e medie dimensioni. Secondo questo modello,*le opinioni degli agenti evolvono nel tempo mediando le opinioni altrui con le proprie convinzioni iniziali*. In questo senso, gli agenti non sono completamente aperti, essendo spinti con perseveranza da un attaccamento individuale dovuto, per esempio, all'influenza di una specifica ideologia di gruppo. Ingrediente chiave, per offrire spunti per strategie di controllo efficaci a orientare i comportamenti sociali verso obiettivi desiderati, è lo sviluppo di nuovi strumenti in grado di estrarre questa “testardaggine” dai dati sociali. In occasione del seminario, Chiara Ravazzi cercherà di fare il punto su questo tipo di ricerche e affronterà il problema di stima dell’*attaccamento degli individui al proprio gruppo ideologico e della influenza di gruppi ideologici concorrenti* a partire dall’osservazione di dati di voto, e presenterà i risultati di una analisi condotta congiuntamente dal Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche e Politecnico di Torino nel contesto del Senato Italiano. Lo scenario politico italiano rappresenta un*caso di studio molto interessante per la sua complessità*, rispetto ad altre istituzioni deliberative straniere, essendo composto da molti agenti, da più gruppi partitici, alta migrazione di membri verso gruppi. Il contributo principale della ricerca è l'introduzione di una *nuova misura di affinità*, Political Data-aNalytics Affinity (*Political DNA*), che riassume l'influenza esercitata su ciascun senatore da ciascun gruppo ideologico. Può essere interpretato allo stesso modo come un indicatore quantitativo del grado di ribellione alla disciplina del gruppo. BIOGRAFIE - e informazioni supplementari [RAVAZZI] *Chiara RAVAZZI* ha conseguito nel 2011 il dottorato in “Mathematics for Engineering Sciences” al Politecnico di Torino. Attualmente è ricercatrice di ruolo presso il Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) presso l'Istituto CNR-IEIIT, lavorando nel Gruppo “Systems Modeling & Control” (SMC). La Dottoressa Ravazzi è Membro dell’IEEE, Membro del Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee (IEEE Signal Processing Society) e Membro del CNIT (Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni). Dal 2019 è membro del Conference Editorial Board (CEB) della IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) e lavora come Associate Editor per la rivista IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. I suoi interessi includono ricerche nell’ambito della Teoria dell’Informazione, modellistica, analisi e controllo in sistemi interconnessi. *Letture consigliate e link utili:* * A. Longo, C. Ravazzi, F. Dabbene, G. Calafiore, /Learning Political DNA in the Italian Senate/ <https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07940>, in "arXiv", 2018. * A. V. Proskurnikov, C. Ravazzi, F. Dabbene, /Dynamics and structure of social networks from a systems and control viewpoint: A survey of Roberto Tempo’s contributions/ <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468696418300065>, Online Social Networks and Media, Volume 7, pp. 45-59, 2018. * C. Ravazzi, R. Tempo, F. Dabbene, /Learning Influence Structure in Sparse Social Networks/ <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8170225>, in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 1976-1986, Dec. 2018. * P. Frasca, C. Ravazzi, R. Tempo, H. Ishii, /Gossips and Prejudices: ergodic randomized dynamics in social networks/ <http://www.smc.ieiit.cnr.it/contents/people/Ravazzi_homepage/publications/T…>, Proceedings of IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems, Koblenz, Germany, 25-26 September 2013. Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” <https://www.facebook.com/nexa.center/> <https://twitter.com/nexacenter> <https://www.youtube.com/user/NexaCenter> #IEEE <https://twitter.com/IEEEorg> #nexawednesday <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nexawednesday&src=typd> #Cnr <https://twitter.com/StampaCnr> Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che studia Internet e il suo effetto sulla società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma divulgativo, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Francesco Ruggiero*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 349 1335082, francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it <mailto:francesco.ruggiero@polito.it>. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>.

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Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community
by Giacomo Tesio May 1, 2019

May 1, 2019

https://github.blog/2019-04-29-apache-joins-github-community/ In 2016, Apache made the decision to start integrating GitHub’s repository and tooling with their own services. After solidifying the integration over the years, they decided to simplify how they work and move all Git projects to GitHub. As of February 2019, Apache’s migration to GitHub was complete ____ 3 anni di lavoro per introdurre un single point of failure fuori dal controllo della comunità al centro del processo di sviluppo di oltre 350 progetti open source fondamentali per l'infrastruttura di milioni di aziende in tutto il mondo. E se vi chiedete perché... https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html Giacomo

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The Tragedy of "The Tragedy of the Commons" - Scientific American Blog Network
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong By Matto Mildenberger on April 23, 2019 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-t… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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US warns British telecom giants against use of Huawei kit
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/04/30/vodafone-admits-finding-h… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Amazon Is Aggressively Pursuing Big Oil as It Stalls Out on Clean Energy
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-is-aggressively-pursuing-big-oil-as-it-stalls-ou… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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European Tech Insights
by don Luca Peyron April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

Buongiorno a tutti, una ricerca interessante da analizzare: un cittadino europeo su quattro preferirebbe lasciare che fosse un’intelligenza artificiale a prendere decisioni importanti sulla gestione del proprio Paese. Nei Paesi Bassi, in Germania e nel Regno Unito, la percentuale è ancora più alta con un cittadino su tre che ammette di preferire una macchina per determinare la direzione del proprio paese piuttosto che un essere umano. https://www.ie.edu/cgc/research/tech-opinion-poll-2019/# ed un articolo che ne individua alcune questioni https://forbes.it/2019/04/24/intelligenza-artificiale-al-posto-dei-politici/ Buona lettura! dl _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Amazon's system for tracking its warehouse workers can automatically fire them - MIT Technology Review
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613434/amazons-system-for-tracking-its-w… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Buttarelli: We need to talk about terms and conditions | European Data Protection Supervisor
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/blog/we-need-talk-abou… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Is your pregnancy app sharing your intimate data with your boss?
by Giacomo Tesio April 29, 2019

April 29, 2019

https://web.archive.org/web/20190416160537/https://www.washingtonpost.com/t… Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room. But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work. “Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard. The decision to track her pregnancy had been made easier by the $1 a day in gift cards the company paid her to use the app: That’s “diaper and formula money,” she said. [...] ...this new generation of “menstrual surveillance” tools is [...] designed largely to benefit not the women but their employers and insurers, who gain a sweeping new benchmark on which to assess their workers as they consider the next steps for their families and careers. [...] “The real benefit of self-tracking is always to the company,” Levy said. “People are being asked to do this at a time when they’re incredibly vulnerable and may not have any sense where that data is being passed.” [...] “Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: ‘You’re prying into our lives,’ ” Ezzard said. “But we slowly increased the sensitivity of stuff, and eventually people understood it’s all voluntary, there’s no gun to your head, and we’re going to reward you if you choose to do it.” “People’s sensitivity,” he added, “has gone from, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard is Big Brother,’ to, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard really is bringing me tools that can help me out.’ ” [...] Ovia began as a consumer-facing app that made money in the tried-and-true advertising fashion of Silicon Valley. But three years ago, Wallace said, the company was approached by large national insurers who said the app could help them improve medical outcomes and access maternity data via the women themselves. Ovia’s corporate deals with employers and insurers have seen “triple-digit growth” in recent years, Wallace said. The company would not say how many firms it works with, but the number of employees at those companies is around 10 million, a statistic Ovia refers to as “covered lives.” [...]

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Generazione Alpha
by don Luca Peyron April 29, 2019

April 29, 2019

Uno studio non universitario ma interessante da fonte globale. Buona lettura dl Nell’era della rivoluzione digitale qual è il percepito dei genitori nei confronti dei nati sotto il segno della tecnologia? Gran parte dei genitori è senza dubbio preoccupata dall’uso massivo della tecnologia in termini di eccessiva esposizione agli schermi dei propri figli, mancanza di esercizio mentale e perdita di capacità relazionali e sociali. Ma c’è anche un altro lato della medaglia.. https://www.hotwireglobal.com/feature/understanding-generation-alpha-2-it _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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How to use a FreedomBox running open source software to regain control of your online privacy
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/04/how-to-use-a-freedombox-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
by Giacomo Tesio April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change… Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. [...] Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation. The criticism feels ridiculous. [...] Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo. Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is “bad, but manageable” territory. Failing to put that effort in sees the world crossing more severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes like ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal cities being flooded into inhabitability. We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won’t do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. [...] It’s the Marxism of Groucho rather than Karl: “Who are you going to believe? The serious political professionals or your own lying eyes?” US Senator Dianne Feinstein’s meeting with schoolchildren petitioning her to take action over the issue went viral because of the way she condescended to them for, basically, asking her to leave them a planet behind to live on. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, “I know what I’m doing.” The obvious response is, of course, that messing something up for 30 years is quite long enough, thanks. Long tenure without results is not the same thing as expertise.

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The new digital divide is between people who opt out of algorithms and
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.fastcompany.com/90336381/the-new-digital-divide-is-between-peop… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Bolsonaro chiude facoltà pubbliche di sociologia e filosofia in Brasile
by Antonio Casilli April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.revistaforum.com.br/bolsonaro-decreta-fim-das-faculdades-de-fil…

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La competizione tecnologica che l’Europa sta perdendo – Aspenia Online
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.aspeniaonline.it/la-competizione-tecnologica-europa-sta-perdend… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Case Against Quantum Computing - IEEE Spectrum
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-against-quantum-compu… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Pentagon Wants Your Thoughts About AI but May Not Listen
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-wants-your-thoughts-ai-may-not-listen/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Statement of the FinTech Council concerning the blockchain strategy of the German government in the context of public consultations
by Giacomo April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/EN/Downloads/2019-04-17-stat… Bitcoin is now ten years old and illustrates the potential, the successes and the problems of new blockchain technologies and DLT. It is problematic for the existing legal and economic system that this technology eludes regulatory intervention by operating on a distributed, dynamic and transnational basis. The idea of using the rules technically coded into the system as an absolute reference point instead of a legal framework appears attractive at first glance but is highly problematic. Every logical system is incomplete, as has been demonstrated using formal proofs (e.g. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem). This could also be true for DLT systems. The example of “The DAO” clearly shows that not all cases can be considered in advance and that errors exist in the system. However these systems do not provide for dealing with these cases or eliminating errors. In a way, the technical system resists a legal arrangement or correction and undermines the sovereignty of the legal system, in that users participate anonymously in a system without owner or operator. In this respect, this new technology disrupts the foundations of the existing economic and legal system. The question is whether, in the course of technological progress , the further development of operator-less blockchain technology, can create the possibilities of intervening in the technology which is necessary for the legal system, or whether the conflict between the legal system and the technical systems remains unresolved. In any case, the question arises regarding which system can prevail over the other. Morally, human sovereignty over the technical system is to be demanded; in practical terms, it remains to be seen which allegiances will form and whether humans are ready to prefer technical malfunctions to human misjudgments. At present, many societies seem to be more inclined to put their faith in technology.

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Implications of Quantum Computing for Encryption Policy - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
by Alberto Cammozzo April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

<https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/25/implications-of-quantum-computing-…> [...] The security of encryption systems relies on the use of operations that can be done quickly by someone who knows a secret key but requires vastly more time for someone who does not know it. An encryption algorithm typically has an adjustable key size, and the algorithm is designed so that a modest increase in the key size causes a modest increase in decryption time for those who know the key, but a massive increase in decryption time for those who don’t know it. This ensures that the key size can be made large enough so that decryption becomes massively, prohibitively expensive for those who do not know the key, but remains very practical for keyholders. The security of a cryptographic algorithm depends on maintaining a very large gap between the effect of a key size increase on those that know the key versus those that do not know it. Decryption without knowing the key amounts, in practice, to a kind of brute-force search: it requires searching an extremely large space of possible secret keys, trying different keys in turn until finding one that unlocks the encrypted data. On a classical computer, the expected time required to do this is proportional to the number of possible keys that exist—the searcher must try half of the possible keys to have a fifty-fifty chance of trying the correct one. The effect of quantum computing on the security of an encryption algorithm depends on how large of an effect quantum computing will have on the time required for nonkeyholders to find the secret key. Encryption Algorithms That Quantum Will Thoroughly Compromise For some encryption algorithms, quantum computing might allow those without the key to sidestep entirely the need to do brute-force search by, for example, enabling a key extraction algorithm that can find the decryption key directly without a blind search. For instance, the popular Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption algorithm relies on the assumption that factoring a large number is very difficult. In RSA, the secret key is essentially a pair of large prime numbers, P and Q. The product of multiplying P and Q is published, but it is assumed that an adversary who knows the product of P and Q cannot derive the factors P and Q from that product except by a variant of brute-force search. Factoring appears to be very time-consuming for classical computers, but a quantum computer could quickly extract the factors P and Q by using a method called Shor’s Algorithm. In a world with large quantum computers, RSA would not be secure because someone without the key who knows the publicly available product of P and Q could quickly recover the secret key. Encryption Algorithms That Can Be Kept Secure By Increasing Key Size Other encryption algorithms are not prone to being defeated so thoroughly by a method like Shor’s Algorithm. For these methods, quantum computing is not a fatal threat, because an adversary must still engage in brute-force search. But there is a quantum shortcut, called Grover’s Algorithm, that can speed up any brute-force search substantially, allowing a space of a given size to be searched in an amount of time proportional to the square root of that size. This approach would be enough to defeat many encryption methods if they are not adjusted. In this case, it is possible to compensate for the effect of quantum computing by increasing the key size, expanding the space that must be searched by brute force, so as to counteract the effect of Grover’s Algorithm. For many encryption algorithms, doubling the key size, say from 128 bits to 256 bits, has the effect of squaring the size of the key space that someone without the key would have to search. This countermeasure exactly offsets the square-root effect of Grover’s Algorithm, restoring the security level of the pre-quantum algorithm. One consequence is that data that was encrypted before the emergence of viable quantum computing—with the original smaller key size—will become susceptible to decryption when quantum computing does become available, but data encrypted with the larger quantum-safe key size will continue to be secure. (Like classical computers, quantum computers would be expected to get faster over time, necessitating the same kinds of generational increases in key size that have been necessary in the pre-quantum computing era.) [...]

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The Tech Industry’s Psychological War on Kids – Richard Freed – Medium
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-k… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Bundeskartellamt - Homepage - Bundeskartellamt prohibits Facebook from combining user data from different sources
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/20… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Skip the Surveillance By Opting Out of Face Recognition At Airports
by gianluca quaglia April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

By Jason Kelley April 24, 2019 Government agencies and airlines have ignored years of warnings from privacy groups and Senators that using face recognition technology on travelers would massively violate their privacy. Now, the passengers are in revolt as well, and they’re demanding answers. Last week, a lengthy exchange on Twitter between a traveler who was concerned about her privacy and a spokesperson for the airline JetBlue went viral, and many of the questions asked by the traveler and others were the same ones that we’ve posed to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials: Where did you get my data? How is it protected? Which airports will use this? Where in the airports will it be used? Most importantly, how do I opt-out? [...] continua qui https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/skip-surveillance-opting-out-face-rec…

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