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

Decentralizing the Web with FreedomBox
by Giacomo Tesio April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decentralizing-web-freedombox-james-pemantel… In the Computer Underground of the 80's and 90's, there was an axiom "Knowledge is power; Information is freedom." Information is critical to our democracy and it has become apparent that popular technology can be used in ways -- both deliberately and passively -- that weaken democracy: - The way that news is presented on social media is designed to be addictive and provoke intense responses. - Geo-tracking features of social media platforms have been used to intimidate protesters and discourage dissent. - Voter manipulation via social media influenced recent US and UK national elections. - In some countries, the platforms are censored by governments and in other cases the propensity for information to "go viral" is exploited by the state to control users. The trend for popular technology is for it to be centralized on servers and controlled by someone else. At the advent of personal computing, it was the client that went into the home, not the server. FreedomBox is a non-profit project that is designed to decentralize the web by putting the control of one's information back into the hands of the user. It is a distribution of Debian GNU/Linux entirely comprised of Free Software with a web frontend that makes management and installation of software user-friendly.

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Walmart Responds To Bezos: "How About Paying Your Taxes?" | Zero Hedge
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-11/walmart-responds-bezos-how-about-… (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 Alberto Cammozzo April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

Impressionanti le stime: "Amazon controls around 35-40 percent of the entire cloud computing market" <https://gizmodo.com/amazon-is-aggressively-pursuing-big-oil-as-it-stalls-ou…> In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centers with 100 percent renewable energy. Apple, Facebook, and Google made similar pledges two years before that, and pressure from consumers and environmental groups drove Amazon to follow suit. For the next two years, the tech giant made admirable strides toward achieving its goal, bankrolling large solar plants and wind farms. Then, it stopped. Amazon hasn’t announced any new deals to supply clean energy to its data centers since 2016, and it quietly abandoned plans for one of its last scheduled wind farms last year. Meanwhile, in 2017, according to internal company documents viewed by Gizmodo, Amazon undertook a concerted push to win over a new industry, perhaps best summed up by the name of a presentation at Amazon Web Services’ annual company Sales Kick-Off event that February: “Positioning for Success in Oil & Gas.” Over the last two years, as Amazon’s clean energy promises have stalled out, Earth’s most customer-centric company has aggressively courted the fossil fuels industry, landing deals and partnerships with companies like BP, Shell, and Halliburton, offering data-based services such as machine learning for enhanced exploration, internet of things-enabled oilfield automation, and remote site data transportation. All this has occurred during a period in which the threat of climate change has been widely and clearly articulated by the top scientists in the field, and the urgency they say is necessary to reduce carbon emissions has never been better understood. Amazon Web Service still displays a Sustainability page that claims “AWS is committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible” and that it is “committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure.” Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO, broke a champagne bottle atop a massive turbine to christen an Amazon wind farm in Texas in 2017 in a high-flying PR stunt designed to broadcast the company’s clean energy bona fides. Bezos also joined Bill Gates’ multibillion-dollar investment fund “focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation” in 2016, to considerable fanfare. And Amazon won headlines the next year for joining Apple and Google in signing the ‘We’re Still In’ pledge to uphold the Paris climate agreement to draw down global carbon emissions. Yet Amazon’s actual renewable energy deployment has plateaued at the halfway mark—the last milestone the company lists on its Sustainability Timeline is “AWS achieved 50% renewable energy usage,” in January of 2018—and now even risks decreasing as a total share of the company’s energy supply, as research from Greenpeace energy analysts indicates that Amazon is continuing to rapidly build new data centers without adding clean sources of power to run them with. With the publication of its February 2019 report, Greenpeace pulled no punches: “Amazon Breaking Commitment to Power Cloud with 100% Renewable Energy,” its release announced. “Despite Amazon’s public commitment to renewable energy, the world’s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it’s still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy,” the activist group’s senior corporate campaigner, Elizabeth Jardim, wrote at the time. And an internal database of “Oil and Gas Key Accounts” for 2018 viewed by Gizmodo contains dozens of current and targeted clients that include some of the largest private contributors to climate change, like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and entities like Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company. Notably, many accounts (such as BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, HESS, Shell, Schlumberger, and Woodside) are listed in the documents as “2018 lighthouse accounts,” indicating Amazon is still in the early phases of developing this business, and these companies were treated as early adopters of its oil and gas services. An events calendar viewed by Gizmodo lists a detailed log of oil and gas-related events AWS representatives would be attending, like Oil & Gas Industry Day in Calgary, Canada’s oil industry capital, where AWS’s Jon Guidroz delivered the keynote speech in 2017. These documents, combined with industry pitches and case studies on AWS’s own website, show that beginning in at least 2017, Amazon has begun a targeted campaign to win oil, gas, and coal business at a time that scientists say it is imperative most fossil fuels be left in the ground if we are to avoid severe climate disruption. All while the company was reneging on, or at best indefinitely idling, its own pledges to build more clean energy. “There is deep irony that the very companies that are supposed to represent the leading edge of technological innovation and advancement are actually taking us backward,” the climatologist Michael Mann told me, “when it comes to their business practices, when it comes to the single greatest technological challenge we face: the challenge to decarbonize our economy rapidly enough to avert catastrophic climate change impacts.” The irony is, in this case, twofold: Despite promising to make their operations more sustainable, Amazon’s massive cloud operation appears to once again be getting dirtier, powered by a growing share of fossil fuels. AWS is then selling its fossil-fueled cloud to oil, gas, and coal companies, to help them better find and extract more fossil fuels. As of now, Amazon is burning the climate from both ends. In mid-March of 2019, just two months after Amazon had toppled Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable public company, the web giant sent one of its top executives to speak at IHS Markit CERAweek, the indecipherably named oil and gas conference in Houston. CERAweek bills itself as “the premier annual gathering of senior energy executives, innovators and honored officials offering dialogue and insight into the energy future.” There, Andrew Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, pitched the oil and gas executives in the crowd on moving their operations to the cloud and stressed how closely the company had been working with them. “A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners,” Jassy said from the stage during his ‘Agora innovation session,’ “and these are companies like Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Halliburton.” Jassy, one of the most senior executives at Amazon—his direct report is Jeff Bezos—went on to detail the ways that Amazon was helping oil companies effectively and efficiently extract more oil and gas and save money by automating their operations. (Video of the talk is available online.) Apparently, it was a hit. “Their Agora session attracted a huge crowd around the hall!! I thought they were serving alcohol or something!” one attendee tweeted. Historically, few would associate Amazon and big oil as close bedfellows, but that is likely to change, and fast. Many of the largest tech companies (Apple being a notable outlier) are teaming up with oil majors to help them accelerate the location and extraction of fossil fuels. Google opened an oil and gas division just last year, for instance, and Microsoft has inked deals with giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Collectively, the deals between the oil belt and Silicon Valley are worth billions of dollars. Onstage at CERAweek, Jassy listed three cutting edge technologies he believes will, with Amazon’s help, transform the oil and gas industry: machine learning, internet of things tech, and automation. “You can see it changing the way things are done in this industry,” Jassy said. “If you look at what Shell’s doing,” he continued, “they’re taking all these images and well logs, and cleansing the data and tagging the data and then trying to use machine learning and building algorithms that assess what are the characteristics and the patterns that leads to success wells versus ones that are less successful with the goal ultimately to be able to use machine learning and AI 100% to target which wells to go pursue. That is heady stuff. That is a very different model than has existed in the past. That is a game changer.” Jassy also says he sees more oil companies turning to AWS for automation solutions. “There are a whole number of activities today that we have human beings doing that you’re going to have robots and drones doing in the future—and no it doesn’t mean there’s going to be no jobs for human beings—we’re not going to run out of those anytime soon. ... We’re starting to see a lot of oil and gas companies who are starting to build drones,” he says, pointing to AWS’s robotics service, Robomaker. “All kinds of things that are dangerous and arduous for human beings to do, we’re going to have robots do,” Jassy says, “and we’ll use the humans do more value-added activities.” One of the slides in that early 2017 presentation viewed by Gizmodo promises to offer AWS employees instructions on “how to position AWS and effectively sequence your approach to long term entrenchment” in the gas industry. Two years later, with a top executive courting the industry in Houston, dozens of clients on the roster and a detailed public website full of AWS Oil and Gas case studies, the effort is well underway. Jassy’s pitch broadly mirrors the one Amazon lays out in greater detail online, on its page touting AWS for Oil & Gas (tagline: “Cloud computing to enable digital transformation and fuel innovation in Oil and Gas”). The stated “benefits” range from “Accelerate and optimize exploration, drilling, and production by using AWS machine learning and big data tools” to “allow oil and gas companies to reduce the time required for seismic data processing from several months to a few days.” A sidebar in one of the promotional tipsheets puts Amazon’s promises more succinctly: -Find Oil Faster -Recover More Oil -Reduce the Cost Per Barrel -Reduce Risk and Ensure Compliance That can probably be read in the order in which the promises appeal to the oil companies. AWS also lists its less extractive pitches, like that it will help improve safety compliance and monitor equipment for maintenance. The site is also littered with numerous blog posts and articles extolling the appeal of AWS to the oil industry. In one, Eddie Murray, Global Oil & Gas Leader, Amazon Web Services, pitches oil and gas companies on migrating their data to the cloud where they might “apply machine learning models to extract more value from that data while stored in low-cost storage services,” like the apparently unironically named “Amazon Glacier.” Amazon Web Services undergirds a vast swath of the internet as we know it. Because of its lack of transparency, it’s impossible to say just how much of the web runs on AWS, but researchers estimate that Amazon controls around 35-40 percent of the entire cloud computing market. In 2018, AWS was bigger than its three biggest rivals—Google, Microsoft, and IBM—combined. Netflix—itself responsible for generating around 15 percent of the world’s entire web traffic—is hosted by AWS. So is Airbnb. And Slack, and Yelp. NASA uses AWS. Literally millions of websites are hosted by AWS, which is why, when it goes down, it can feel like it takes the whole internet with it. And it’s continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Amazon’s Jassy said in his talk that AWS has become a “$30 billion revenue run-rate business” for the company. “It’s growing about 45 percent year over year.” Last year, AWS brought in more money than McDonald’s. And it’s the chief source of all of Amazon’s operating income—Amazon makes more money from AWS than it does on Amazon.com. “Really we’re in the midst of a titanic shift to the cloud,” as Jassy put it. That’s why data centers are rapidly becoming a significant energy issue. Right now, the IT sector is responsible for about 2 percent of global carbon emissions. Some outer estimates project that it will drain one-fifth of the world’s energy by the next decade, as more and more data-intensive services migrate to the cloud. And that’s why it remains a serious issue that Amazon is idling on its clean energy promises. Google officially hit its target of powering its operations with 100 percent clean energy in early 2018. So did Apple. Facebook says it will get there by 2020. Microsoft’s progress has been slower, but in 2018, it signed what was heralded as the largest corporate solar agreement in the U.S. Amazon appears to be the only major tech company so dramatically stalling out in its pursuit of renewables. [...]

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Opinion | We’re Not Going to Take It Anymore - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/internet-privacy-regulation.html We’ve given up too much control over our digital lives. We need a law to take some of it back. (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Russia passes bill to allow internet to be cut off from foreign servers | World news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/11/russia-passes-bill-internet-c…> Russian politicians have approved a controversial bill that would allow Moscow to cut off the country’s internet traffic from foreign servers, in a key second reading that paves the way for the bill to become law on 1 November. Lawmakers in the State Duma, parliament’s lower house, voted 320 to 15 to pass the proposed bill. The proposed measures would create technology to monitor internet routing and steer Russian internet traffic away from foreign servers, ostensibly to prevent a foreign country from shutting it down. Authors of the initiative say Russia must ensure the security of its networks after the US president, Donald Trump, unveiled a new US cybersecurity strategy last year that said Russia had carried out cyber-attacks with impunity. The legislation has been dubbed a “sovereign internet” bill by Russian media. [...]

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Questioni relative allo sviluppo e alla persistenza nel socialismo con caratteristiche cinesi
by Giacomo Tesio April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

Nel 2013 non si parlava ancora di Fake News come oggi, ma il peso della Storia e la sua problematica relazione con la memoria (che noi italiani dovremmo conoscere bene) spingeva già Xi Jinping a "sottolineare" si tratta di "un problema storico ma soprattutto una questione politica". Che cos'è la Verità? https://medium.com/@deidesk/diversi-problemi-su-come-aderire-e-sviluppare-i… Perché l’Unione Sovietica si è disintegrata? Perché il Partito Comunista dell’Unione Sovietica è crollato? Una ragione importante è che la lotta ideologica è molto feroce: il PCUS ha negato la storia sovietica, la sua stessa storia, ha negato Lenin e Stalin, impegnandosi nel nichilismo storico, confondendo le menti a quasi tutti i livelli delle organizzazioni di partito, e non ponendo l’esercito sotto la guida del partito. Alla fine, il Partito Comunista dell’Unione Sovietica ha distrutto l’Unione Sovietica, un paese socialista, e si è disgregato. Questa è una lezione dal passato! [...] Egli ha anche sottolineato: “La valutazione del compagno Mao Zedong e l’elaborazione del Pensiero di Mao Zedong, non sono solo questioni personali che coinvolgono il compagno Mao Zedong, che è inseparabile dall'intera storia del nostro partito e del nostro Paese. Questo per vedere il quadro globale.”Questo non è solo un problema teorico ma soprattutto un problema politico: è un grosso problema politico in patria e all'estero”. Queste sono la visione e la mente di un grande uomo di stato marxista. Immaginate se respingessimo del tutto il compagno Mao Zedong, il nostro partito potrebbe sopportarlo? Il sistema socialista del nostro paese potrebbe rimanere saldo? Se non sostenessimo [l’eredità del maoismo], sarebbe il caos. Pertanto, gestire correttamente la relazione tra pratica socialista ed elaborazione prima e dopo la riforma e apertura non solo è un problema storico ma soprattutto una questione politica.

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Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.
by Giacomo Tesio April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-founda… Another controversy has been simmering over the article “femme,” the French word for woman, Ms. Rault said. At issue is whether the first paragraph should refer to gender in addition to biological sex, and whether transgender women should be included in the definition of woman. This debate devolved into an “edit war,” a heated back-and-forth in which Wikipedians continuously edit an article to overwrite the other side’s changes and reflect the language they want. [...] Wikipedians also began to discuss the “content gender gap,” which includes an imbalance in the gender distribution of biographies on the site. The latest analysis, released this month, said about 18 percent of 1.6 million biographies on the English-language Wikipedia were of women. That is up from about 15 percent in 2014, partially because of activists trying to move the needle. [...] In countries where it is more dangerous for L.G.B.T. individuals to be open about their identities, harassment on Wikipedia can be particularly virulent. Once, an administrator on a Wikipedia page blocked an editor simply because that person’s username suggested that the editor could be gay, said Rachel Wexelbaum, a Wikipedian who works to improve L.G.B.T. content on the website. Eventually, she said, Wikimedia’s Trust and Safety Team got involved, and the administrator was blocked for those actions. [...] If a volunteer administrator finds the allegations of abuse credible, the user can be barred from editing anywhere on the site. Administrators for some Wikipedias, such as the English-language site, can also declare a “topic ban,” a socially enforced tool in which other editors are responsible for making sure the guilty user is not involved in editing articles that mention prohibited subjects. Violating a topic ban can result in a sitewide ban.

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Re: [nexa] Cloud europeo per maggiore competitività
by Giuseppe Attardi April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

Cloud europeo sì, ma dove sono gli atti pratici per la sua creazione? Occorre investire in infrastrutture e in soluzioni federate che consentano la condivisione, lil deployment cross-platform e l'assenza di lock-in. Non basta occuparsi dei dati e della possibilità di trasferirli: i dati sono intrinsecamente legati alle piattaforme per elaborarli. Non basata garantire la possibilità di esportare i dati, ma anche di poter trasferire col minimo sforzo le applicazioni che li usano. La soluzione di GARR è di fornire strumenti di declarative modeling, affichè i deployment siano espressi in modo dichiaratvo, non con codice platform specific. Terraform e Juju sono i due principali esempi. Il secondo è anche Open Source. -- Beppe On 10/04/19 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2019 06:26:47 +0000 > From: Diego Giorio<dgiorio(a)hotmail.com> > To:"nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it" <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] Cloud europeo per maggiore competitività > Message-ID: > <MN2PR13MB3136B263ABFBB00F66166046BE2E0(a)MN2PR13MB3136.namprd13.prod.outlook.com> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Interessante, ma mi chiedo perchè non si stia organizzando un cloud, nazionale o europeo, destinato esclusivamente alla PA: a titolo personale, mi aiuterebbe a superare la diffidenza che nutro verso il cloud - anche se certificato - per i dati sensibili della mia amministrazione. > > Buona giornata a tutti > > https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/cloud-europeo-priorita-nella… > > Cloud europeo, priorità nella corsa alla competizione globale | Agenda Digitale<https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/cloud-europeo-priorita-nella…> > Omogeneità normativa ed eliminazione delle barriere che frammentano i mercati locali i pilastri cruciali per la messa a punto di una "nuvola" sovranazionale. In grado di spingere l'economia dei dati come leva di crescita e occupazione. E riacquistare centralità nello scenario geopolitico dominato dal conflitto Usa-Cina > www.agendadigitale.eu

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Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
by Giacomo Tesio April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-y… The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers [...] Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word—or come across an amusing recording. [...] Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere. [...] ...the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don’t provide a user’s full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number. [...] “You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home,” said Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. “I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

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Official EU Agencies Falsely Report More Than 550 Archive.org URLs as Terrorist Content
by Giacomo April 11, 2019

April 11, 2019

http://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-report-more… The European Parliament is set to vote on legislation that would require websites that host user-generated content to take down material reported as terrorist content within one hour. We have some examples of current notices sent to the Internet Archive that we think illustrate very well why this requirement would be harmful to the free sharing of information and freedom of speech that the European Union pledges to safeguard. In the past week, the Internet Archive has received a series of email notices from Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on archive.org as “terrorist propaganda”. At least one of these mistaken URLs was also identified as terrorist content in a separate take down notice from the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication

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Security Flaws in WPA3 Protocol Let Attackers Hack WiFi Password
by Giacomo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/wpa3-hack-wifi-password.html The Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack). Though WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect Wi-Fi networks against offline dictionary attacks, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found weaknesses in the early implementation of WPA3-Personal, allowing an attacker to recover WiFi passwords by abusing timing or cache-based side-channel leaks. "Concretely, attackers can then read information that WPA3 was assumed to safely encrypt. This can be abused to steal sensitive transmitted information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and so on," the researchers say.

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"Ethics washing made in Europe"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

Ethics washing made in Europe On Tuesday, the EU has published ethics guidelines for artificial intelligence. A member of the expert group that drew up the paper says: This is a case of ethical white-washing. Thomas Metzinger /Thomas Metzinger is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Mainz and was a member of the commission's expert group that has worked on the guidelines published on Tuesday./ /Read his op-ed in German here <https://background.tagesspiegel.de/ethik-waschmaschinen-made-in-europe>./ It's really good news: Europe has just taken the lead in the hotly contested global debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). On Monday in Brussels, the EU Commission presented its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. The 52-member High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG AI), of which I am a member, worked on the text for nine months. The result is a compromise of which I am not proud, but which is nevertheless the best in the world on the subject. The United States and China have nothing comparable. How does it fit together? [...] continua qui: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/eu-guidelines-ethics-washing-made-in-eu…

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the-coming-ai-autumn
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

http://jeffreybigham.com/blog/2019/the-coming-ai-autumnn.html (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism – OneZero
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://onezero.medium.com/landlord-2-0-techs-new-rentier-capitalism-a0bfe4… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Election meddling by foreign powers already underway, says Canadian spy agency
by Alberto Cammozzo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

I servizi in Canada e Israele sono preoccupati per gli interventi (russi e cinesi) nei social che mirerebbero ad accentuare la frammentazione politica e la polarizzazione sociale. *Election meddling by foreign powers already underway, says Canadian spy agency* <https://intelnews.org/2019/04/09/01-2527/> CSE CanadaThe manipulation of social media by foreign governments aiming to sow division in Canada ahead of the country’s federal election in October is growing, according to the country’s signals intelligence agency. In a report published Monday, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s national communications interception agency, warns that election meddling by foreign powers is already taking place. The report, titled “2019 Update: Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process”, says that voters, as well as specific political figures, have been targeted by foreign powers since 2015 in the North American country. The foreign intelligence agencies behind the efforts to manipulate Canada’s electoral process have systematically attempted to “polarize Canadians or undermine Canada’s foreign policy goals”, says the report. These efforts will continue and intensify in the run-up to October, claims the report, and concludes by warning that Canadians should expect to “encounter some form of foreign cyber interference ahead of, and during, the 2019 federal election”. However, foreign cyber interference on the scale that was experienced in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States is improbable, according to the CSE. Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canada’s primary national intelligence service, said in an interview last week that Ottawa would have to be patient in dealing with Russia and —especially— China. Speaking at a public forum hosted by the Canadian International Council in Vancouver, Richard Fadden noted that neither China nor Russia wish to go to war with the West. What they want instead is to “fragment the West” and thus increase their own influence on the international scene, said Fadden, who directed the CSIS from 2009 to 2013. It would be fair for Canada to “poke back”, he said, but would have to be “careful how [to] do it”, he added. “We need to be realistic. We’re dealing with an emergent superpower and […] we’re going to have to be patient”, Fadden concluded. Anche qui: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/08/canada-election-meddling-soci…> *Why Are Israeli Elections Extremely Sensitive to Fake News?* <https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-are-israeli-elections-extremely-sensitive-fake…> [...] Political, economic, and social splits are the most important elements in the creation and distribution of fake news. Malicious actors tend to use fake news in order to heighten existing tensions between political, social, or religious groups. This weakened social cohesion makes societies more vulnerable to foreign influence campaigns. Many of the Russian trolls messages on social networks during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections did not focus on the presidential candidates, but rather were aimed at increasing tensions between American voters in the various issues of American society, especially between black and white Americans. By strengthening the conflicts, the Russian trolls sought to weaken the societal unity in the United States and public confidence in the U.S. democratic structure thereby influencing voting patterns. Israel’s inherent political instability, along with the great fragmentation of Israeli society, makes the country particularly vulnerable to foreign influence activities. Those who want to influence Israeli politics and foreign policy by disseminating fake news on social networks will be able to invest relatively limited and short-term efforts to exploit the existing divisions within the country. At the end of January, the technology firm Vocativ unveiled Iranian influence efforts, mainly on Twitter, which reached an estimated target audience of half a million Israeli users a month. The bots often rephrased authentic news headlines in a controversial manner to incite divisive responses from the electorate, focusing on issues such as wealth inequality, sexual harassment, poverty in Israel, and undermining of the Supreme Court. If successful, these efforts could lead to a shift of three or four seats on the electoral map, which may be very significant for determining the winning candidate of the upcoming elections. The Israeli answer to disinformation activities Despite the fateful potential of foreign influence campaigns, Israel - the "startup nation" - is lagging behind other countries in dealing with these campaigns. While some countries have developed coherent strategies for dealing with fake news, such as Denmark’s establishment of an inter-ministerial task force to counter influence operations in 2017, the current Israeli steps against online disinformation campaigns rely only on ad-hoc measures. For example, since the beginning of the election campaign, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has worked with Twitter to identify and block more than 400 accounts that spread fake news. But what will happen after April 9? It can be assumed that regardless of the level of the foreign involvement in the upcoming elections, proposals to establish a permanent and long-term policy for dealing with foreign disinformation campaigns will be discussed. Based on worldwide experience and taking into account the Israeli reality, there are two steps that can be considered for effective Israeli policy. In 2017, the Central Elections Committee formulated recommendations to update the Propaganda Methods Law, which had not been updated since 1959. The recommendations included creating a duty of transparency for political publications on social networks (a step now being implemented by the Chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Judge Hanan Melcer), the prohibition of advertising of sponsored ads on networks on election day, the explicit prohibition to publish racist content during the elections, and improving the transparency of published election surveys. The legislative process for approving the recommendations was stalled, so its completion is vital. The second measure should be educational. In countries such as Canada, Belgium, and Croatia, there are varied media literacy campaigns and the Luxembourgian government implemented a national digital education strategy within its education system. Online influence operations for political needs are not limited to election campaigns and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Therefore, it is important that the Israeli government formulate and implement relevant policies as soon as possible.

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Police Body Cameras Aren't Having the Effects Many Expected
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-body-camera-effe… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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A Year Later, Cybercrime Groups Still Rampant on Facebook
by Alberto Cammozzo April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/a-year-later-cybercrime-groups-still-ra…> Almost exactly one year ago, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a mere two hours of searching revealed more than 100 Facebook groups with some 300,000 members openly advertising services to support all types of cybercrime, including spam, credit card fraud and identity theft. Facebook responded by deleting those groups. Last week, a similar analysis led to the takedown of 74 cybercrime groups operating openly on Facebook with more than 385,000 members. Researchers at Cisco Talos discovered the groups using the same sophisticated methods I employed last year — running a search on Facebook.com for terms unambiguously tied to fraud, such as “spam” and “phishing.” Talos said most of the groups were less than a year old, and that Facebook deleted the groups after being notified by Cisco. Talos also re-confirmed my findings that Facebook still generally ignores individual abuse reports about groups that supposedly violate its ‘community standards,’ which specifically forbid the types of activity espoused by the groups that Talos flagged. “Talos initially attempted to take down these groups individually through Facebook’s abuse reporting functionality,” the researchers found. “While some groups were removed immediately, other groups only had specific posts removed.” But Facebook deleted all offending groups after researchers told Facebook’s security team they were going to publish their findings. This is precisely what I experienced a year ago. Not long after Facebook deleted most of the 120 cybercrime groups I reported to it back in April 2018, many of the groups began reemerging elsewhere on the social network under similar names with the same members. Instead of reporting those emergent groups directly to people at Facebook’s public relations arm — something most mere mortals aren’t able to do — KrebsOnSecurity decided to report the re-offenders via Facebook’s regular abuse reporting procedures. What did we find? KrebsOnSecurity received a series of replies saying that Facebook had reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards. KrebsOnSecurity later found that reporting the abusive Facebook groups to a quarter-million followers on Twitter was the fastest way to get them disabled. How else have Facebook’s public statements about its supposed commitment to security and privacy been undermined by pesky facts over the past few weeks? KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that Facebook developers wrote apps which stored somewhere between 200 million and 600 million Facebook user passwords in plain text. These plaintext passwords were indexed by Facebook’s data centers and searchable for years by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. It emerged that Facebook’s new account signup page urges users to supply the password to their email account so Facebook can harvest contact details and who knows what else. Yes, that’s right: Facebook has been asking new users to share their email password, despite decades of consumer advice warning that is exactly what phishers do. Cybersecurity firm UpGuard discovered two troves of unprotected Facebook user data sitting on Amazon’s servers, exposing hundreds of millions of records about users, including their names, passwords, comments, interests, and likes. Facebook is making users searchable by marketers and others via phone number, even when that phone number was only provided solely for the purposes of multi-factor authentication. [...]

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Codecademy vs. The BBC Micro
by Giacomo Tesio April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://twobithistory.org/2019/03/31/bbc-micro.html In an audacious move, the BBC, a public service broadcaster funded by the government, decided that it would solve Britain’s national competitiveness problems by helping Britons everywhere overcome their aversion to computers. It launched the Computer Literacy Project, a multi-pronged educational effort that involved several TV series, a few books, a network of support groups, and a specially built microcomputer known as the BBC Micro. The project was so successful that, by 1983, an editor for BYTE Magazine wrote, “compared to the US, proportionally more of Britain’s population is interested in microcomputers.” The editor marveled that there were more people at the Fifth Personal Computer World Show in the UK than had been to that year’s West Coast Computer Faire. Over a sixth of Great Britain watched an episode in the first series produced for the Computer Literacy Project and 1.5 million BBC Micros were ultimately sold. [...] If you google “learn to code,” the first result you see is a link to Codecademy’s website. If there is a modern equivalent to the Computer Literacy Project, something with the same reach and similar aims, then it is Codecademy. “Learn to code” is Codecademy’s tagline. I don’t think I’m the first person to point this out—in fact, I probably read this somewhere and I’m now ripping it off—but there’s something revealing about using the word “code” instead of “program.”

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"Does Google meet its users’ expectations around consumer privacy? This news industry research says no"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

Does Google meet its users’ expectations around consumer privacy? This news industry research says no /A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms./ By Jason Kint <https://www.niemanlab.org/author/jkint/> @jason_kint <https://twitter.com/jason_kint> April 3, 2019, 9:52 a.m. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/does-google-meet-its-users-expectations-a…

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Special Issue IEEE: "Machine Ethics: The Design and Governance of Ethical AI and Autonomous Systems"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE Machine Ethics: The Design and Governance of Ethical AI and Autonomous Systems Volume 107, Issue 3 | March 2019 Guest Editors Special Issue Papers Point of View: The Trolley, the Bull Bar, and Why Engineers Should Care About the Ethics of Autonomous Cars Point of View: Toward the Agile and Comprehensive International Governance of AI and Robotics Scanning Our Past: Computer Graphic Re-Visited: The Virtual Reconstruction of One of the First Computer Art Exhibitions http://proceedingsoftheieee.ieee.org/view-recent-issues/march-2019/ Special Issue Papers Scanning the Issue By A. F. Winfield, K. Michael, J. Pitt, and V. Evers Designing a Value-Driven Future for Ethical Autonomous and Intelligent Systems By G. Adamson, J. C. Havens, and R. Chatila This paper provides an overview of IEEE’s current activities related to ethics and argues that human values must drive our future autonomous systems in a way that both protects and benefits humanity. A Value-Driven Eldercare Robot: Virtual and Physical Instantiations of a Case-Supported Principle-Based Behavior Paradigm By M. Anderson, S. L. Anderson, and V. Berenz This paper describes both simulated and real-robot implementations of an eldercare robot in which ethical principles are learned, via inductive logical programming, from a set of training examples provided by a project ethicist. On Proactive, Transparent, and Verifiable Ethical Reasoning for Robots By P. Bremner, L. A. Dennis, M. Fisher, and A. F. Winfield In this paper, the authors review and update an approach to the design of ethical robots based on a simulation-based internal model, in which the ethical robot’s reasoning is both transparent and verifiable. Motivations and Risks of Machine Ethics By S. Cave, R. Nyrup, K. Vold, and A. Weller In this paper, the authors clarify various philosophical issues surrounding the concept of an ethical machine and the aims of machine ethics, outlining the potential risks that must be considered and managed. Clarifying Privacy, Property, and Power: Case Study on Value Conflict Between Communities By A. Ema, H. Osawa, R. Saijo, A. Kubo, T. Otani, H. Hattori, N. Akiya, N. Kanzaki, M. Kukita, K. Komatani, and R. Ichise Based around a case study on the “flaming” of fan fiction, this paper aims to clarify notions of privacy and draw lessons for the ethical governance of AI in the presence of value conflicts. Engineering-Based Design Methodology for Embedding Ethics in Autonomous Robots By L. J. Robertson, R. Abbas, G. Alici, A. Munoz, and K. Michael This paper explores a method for embedding ethics into the design and use of an endoscopic capsule for diagnosis and drug delivery, using a codesign approach to reduce end-user risk. Inside the Organization: Why Privacy and Security Engineering Is a Challenge for Engineers By S. Spiekermann, J. Korunovska, and M. Langheinrich This paper reports on the findings from a survey of 124 engineers in order to understand the drivers and impediments facing ethical systems development with respect to privacy and security engineering. Point of View The Trolley, the Bull Bar, and Why Engineers Should Care About the Ethics of Autonomous Cars By J. Bonnefon, A. Shariff, and I. Rahwan Point of View Toward the Agile and Comprehensive International Governance of AI and Robotics By W. Wallach and G. Marchant Scanning Our Past Computer Graphic Re-Visited: The Virtual Reconstruction of One of the First Computer Art Exhibitions By J. Horáková and J. Mucha

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Cloud europeo per maggiore competitività
by Diego Giorio April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

Interessante, ma mi chiedo perchè non si stia organizzando un cloud, nazionale o europeo, destinato esclusivamente alla PA: a titolo personale, mi aiuterebbe a superare la diffidenza che nutro verso il cloud - anche se certificato - per i dati sensibili della mia amministrazione. Buona giornata a tutti https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/cloud-europeo-priorita-nella… [https://dm2ue6l6q7ly2.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/18100621/cl…]<https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/cloud-europeo-priorita-nella…> Cloud europeo, priorità nella corsa alla competizione globale | Agenda Digitale<https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/cloud-europeo-priorita-nella…> Omogeneità normativa ed eliminazione delle barriere che frammentano i mercati locali i pilastri cruciali per la messa a punto di una "nuvola" sovranazionale. In grado di spingere l'economia dei dati come leva di crescita e occupazione. E riacquistare centralità nello scenario geopolitico dominato dal conflitto Usa-Cina www.agendadigitale.eu

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In Finlandia detenuti classificano i dati per addestrare le intelligenze artificiali
by Matteo G.P. Flora April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

In Finlandia pare che un programma pilota stia utilizzando i detenuti per classificare i dati per addestrare le intelligenze artificiali. <https://go.thefool.it/2WXa0vY> Lo fanno per conto di Vainu, una startup finlandese. La questione è controversa, perché da una parte la compagnia sostiene che così possono acquisire competenze preziose, dall’altra, secondo diversi detrattori, si tratta di vero e proprio sfruttamento... M. [image: photo] *Matteo G.P. Flora* Founder and CEO, TF Group srl +39.347.9676430 | mf(a)thefool.it http://thefool.it Via Vitruvio, 1, Milano (MI), Italy <http://us.linkedin.com/in/matteoflora> <http://facebook.com/lastknight> <http://youtube.com/user/mgpfvideo> <http://twitter.com/lastknight>

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UK White Paper: "Online Harms"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

* **The Online Harms White Paper sets out the government’s plans for a world-leading package of measures to keep UK users safe online.** * *This consultation closes at** **11:59pm on 1 July 2019* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-white-paper Consultation description The Online Harms White Paper sets out the government’s plans for a world-leading package of online safety measures that also supports innovation and a thriving digital economy. This package comprises legislative and non-legislative measures and will make companies more responsible for their users’ safety online, especially children and other vulnerable groups. The White Paper proposes establishing in law a new duty of care towards users, which will be overseen by an independent regulator. Companies will be held to account for tackling a comprehensive set of online harms, ranging from illegal activity and content to behaviours which are harmful but not necessarily illegal. This consultation aims to gather views on various aspects of the government’s plans for regulation and tackling online harms, including: * the online services in scope of the regulatory framework; * options for appointing an independent regulatory body to implement, oversee and enforce the new regulatory framework; * the enforcement powers of an independent regulatory body; * potential redress mechanisms for online users; and * measures to ensure regulation is targeted and proportionate for industry. This is an open public consultation. We particularly encourage responses from organisations, companies and others with relevant views, insights or evidence. This consultation closes at 23:59, 1 July 2019.

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Deliveroo lancia un servizio in abbonamento
by Luigi Scorca April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

Deliveroo studia da Amazon Prime: la società delle consegne di cibo a domicilio si è inventata un "pacchetto abbonamento" che per 9,99 euro al mese permette agli utenti di azzerare le spese di consegna su tutti gli ordini https://www.repubblica.it/economia/rapporti/osserva-italia/stili-di-vita/20…

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Ford Taps the Brakes on the Arrival of Self-Driving Cars
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 10, 2019

April 10, 2019

https://www.wired.com/story/ford-taps-brakes-arrival-self-driving-cars/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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