June 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

How Tanks on Tiananmen Square Defined China's Model for Control - Bloomberg
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31/how-tanks-on-tiananmen-s…> Western capitals are fuming about Beijing’s actions, Chinese companies face unprecedented sanctions and the nation’s exports are being punished. The same was true in 1989 after tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4 to crush student protests. In that 30-year interlude, China has gone from global pariah to a nation slugging it out on the international stage with the world’s biggest superpower. Those three decades are a story not just of the transformation of China’s fortune, but of the shift in technology and ideas that altered global politics and is increasingly turning developing nations toward China’s model of central control. [...] But China’s success in fostering economic growth and power while managing to avoid widespread political reform has proven an attractive model for leaders in countries rich and poor who are looking to emulate that creation of wealth. "The Chinese government has become increasingly confident about its mode of governance," said Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It increasingly believes that the kind of dictatorship that can be economically powerful and at least on the surface stable could be attractive to other governments." [...] Those changes show that, while China marks the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen by censoring any reference to the event, the world is still grappling with the consequences of the path Beijing took that night. "Free speech was the norm and censorship was the exception" in the early days of the internet, said Lokman Tsui, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a former Asia policy executive at Google who focused on free expression. "The whole climate has changed. Governments are looking to China as a model."

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Una Rete per unire, non dividere
by don Luca Peyron June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

"L’era delle Rete ci dice che il mondo della comunicazione non è più, se mai lo è stato, un mondo a parte, fatto di professionisti, giornalisti, mediatori. È il nostro mondo. È il mondo degli uomini. Se saranno i miliardi di fruitori della Rete a esigere per se stessi e per tutti un futuro caratterizzato dalla condivisione della regola di base che tutti ci unisce, allora la Rete saprà farci riscoprire come membra gli uni degli altri". Buona lettura e buona settimana dl https://www.agensir.it/chiesa/2019/06/01/53a-giornata-mondiale-per-le-comun… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google - WSJ
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-is-preparing-antitrust-inve… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook and Twitter are growing into the mainstream | Media | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/social-platform…> [...] Facebook had fielded Monika Bickert to answer questions from Anderson Cooper on CNN about the video. Bickert is Facebook’s most thoughtful and knowledgeable executive, heading its product policy and counter-terrorism. Her talking points were very familiar: Facebook’s approach is to flag when something is false, to reduce its reach through algorithmic throttling, but not to remove material altogether unless immediate harm flows from it. Hence terrorism and scientifically inaccurate claims about vaccinations are gone, but Holocaust denial and a clearly misleading clip that affects the democratic process are not. “We are not in the news business,” Bickert told Anderson Cooper. “We are in the social media business.” Engineers and lawyers in Silicon Valley are often mocked for their lack of facility in communications, but over the years they have been remarkably effective in constructing a whole language which casts a gauzy blanket of euphemism over a heap of ugly truths. They have eradicated all meaning and distinction around dramatically different social, cultural and political interactions by labelling them “content”, they have made the diseased metaphor of “virality” a virtue, and rebranded sales people “influencers”. Even the phrase “social media” is a positive denominator which hides a multitude of sins. The business Facebook is in is advertising (to be clear), and the “social media business” is not only the news business (increasingly), it is also the politics business, the public health business, the terrorism business, the education business, the everything in bytes business. In fact, the approach that Bickert described of flagging material as false, and reducing the reach of it, telling people who have seen it that it is wrong, is not a bad strategy and it exceeds the measures taken by many media outlets with their own material who would readily criticise Facebook. It is a necessary measure but not sufficient. In other matters, Facebook is on shaky ground. Its stated policy from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is that people should decide what they believe for themselves up to and including Holocaust denial, which is arguably incompatible with its position on removing material which creates the potential of immediate harm. These are wide philosophical questions that cannot be used as the basis of rules that robots execute. There is not yet a computational way to correctly decide one slowed-down video is an attack on democracy and another is a piece of satire. What Facebook proposes, in one dimension, is the assembly of an independent content body, which will advise on such matters. I am pretty sure that there would be a split in how any diverse council would come to a conclusion on Pelosi: editors, whose job it is essentially to safeguard the publishing of very little material and stop incorrect information reaching the public domain, would say take it down. Those who think in a more long-term or philosophical dimension about free speech would say keep it up. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and whoever else outsources decision-making on these issues will eventually have to internalise them, too, and have a recognisable culture, set of rules, appeals process and communications system which is capable of responding quickly to information crises. The disruption that minor calls about malicious material creates are too much for any corporate system to withstand, unless it has been designed to deal with them. The inevitable outcome will be a narrowing of the type of material promoted and circulated. The platforms are no longer innovators in terms of speech, publication and the public sphere; they are incumbents, gatekeepers, publishers, however you want to describe them. In other words they are done with disruption, and will therefore inevitably become perpetuators of incumbency themselves. As the experiment of levelling access to tools and speech comes to a shuddering halt, the platforms will increasingly favour the establishment, whether that is among a narrow band of mainstream media suppliers, a smaller number of high-follower influencers, a tiered system of political actors or a particular class of advertisers. [...]

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Uber’s Path of Destruction - American Affairs Journal
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/ Uber’s Path of Destruction by Hubert Horan Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality. An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate. Uber not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business. (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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sulla trasparenza degli algoritmi...
by Enrico Nardelli June 2, 2019

June 2, 2019

...ben prima di arrivare alle tecniche di intelligenza artificiale... https://www.orizzontescuola.it/lalgoritmo-per-la-mobilita-non-garantisce-tr… Ciao, Enrico -- EN ===================================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Dipartimento di Matematica - Universita' di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it home page: http://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/enardelli/ http://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ ===================================================================== --

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Beijing AI Principles - 新闻
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 2, 2019

June 2, 2019

http://www.baai.ac.cn/blog/beijing-ai-principles (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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PIIE Policy Brief: "Opening Internet Monopolies to Competition with Data Sharing Mandates"
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 2, 2019

June 2, 2019

*Opening Internet Monopolies to Competition with Data Sharing Mandates** * /Claudia Biancotti (PIIE) and Paolo Ciocca (Consob)// / /Policy Brief 19-3// // //April 2019/ Over the past few years, it has become apparent that a small number of technology companies have assembled detailed datasets on the characteristics, preferences, and behavior of billions of individuals. This concentration of data is at the root of a worrying power imbalance between dominant internet firms and the rest of society, reflecting negatively on collective security, consumer rights, and competition. Introducing data sharing mandates, or requirements for market leaders to share user data with other firms and academia, would have a positive effect on competition. As data are a key input for artificial intelligence (AI), more widely available information would help spread the benefits of AI through the economy. On the other hand, data sharing could worsen existing risks to consumer privacy and collective security. Policymakers intending to implement a data sharing mandate should carefully evaluate this tradeoff. FULL DOCUMENT: https://piie.com/system/files/documents/pb19-3.pdf

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"For the United States, More Digital Privacy Would Mean More National Security"
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 2, 2019

June 2, 2019

*For the United States, More Digital Privacy Would Mean More National Security* Claudia Biancotti (PIIE) April 10, 2019 5:30 PM The US government is stepping up efforts to counter China's ability to obtain private data of American citizens through the acquisition of information technology companies. In January 2018, for example, the Chinese technology company Kunlun completed the acquisition of<https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/09/chinas-kunlun-completes-full-buyout-of-gr…> California-based Grindr, a gay dating app. The acquisition was reversed<https://www.ft.com/content/30408b0e-50e2-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294> in March 2019 by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency panel with the power<https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/the-committee-on-fore…> to block foreign deals adversely affecting US national security. According to some experts<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/the-trump-administration-appar…>, the aim of CFIUS was to prevent the Chinese government from exploiting sensitive data on sexual behavior to blackmail US citizens. A few weeks later, CFIUS forced a different Chinese company to divest its stake<https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/cfius-forces-patientslikeme-into-fire-sale-…> in an app that collects health information, confirming that concerns around personal data are becoming more significant in the review process. […] Continua qui: https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/united-states-more-di…

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Police Unlock AI's Potential to Monitor, Surveil and Solve Crimes
by gianluca quaglia June 1, 2019

June 1, 2019

Law enforcement agencies like the New Orleans Police Department are adopting artificial-intelligence based systems to analyze surveillance footage. WSJ's Jason Bellini gets a demonstration of the tracking technology and hears why some think it’s a game changer, while for others it’s raising concerns around privacy and potential bias. continua qui [...] https://www.wsj.com/video/police-unlock-ai-potential-to-monitor-surveil-and…

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