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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