August 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

"Maths and tech specialists need Hippocratic oath, says academic"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 17, 2019

Aug. 17, 2019

*Maths and tech specialists need Hippocratic oath, says academic * / //Ian Sample Science editor// //@iansample// // //Fri 16 Aug 2019 17.00 BST / Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development in laboratories and tech firms, a leading researcher has said. The ethical pledge would commit scientists to think deeply about the possible applications of their work and compel them to pursue only those that, at the least, do no harm to society. Hannah Fry, an associate professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London, said an equivalent of the doctor’s oath was crucial given that mathematicians and computer engineers were building the tech that would shape society’s future. […] Continua qui: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/16/mathematicians-need-doctor-…

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Branko Milanovic: “The state, when it wants to use its power, tends to be strong | Edinburgh International Book Festival
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 17, 2019

Aug. 17, 2019

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/news/branko-milanovic-the-state-when-it-wants-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Maths and tech specialists need Hippocratic oath, says academic | Science | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 17, 2019

Aug. 17, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/16/mathematicians-need-doctor-…> Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development in laboratories and tech firms, a leading researcher has said. The ethical pledge would commit scientists to think deeply about the possible applications of their work and compel them to pursue only those that, at the least, do no harm to society. Hannah Fry, an associate professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London, said an equivalent of the doctor’s oath was crucial given that mathematicians and computer engineers were building the tech that would shape society’s future. “We need a Hippocratic oath in the same way it exists for medicine,” Fry said. “In medicine, you learn about ethics from day one. In mathematics, it’s a bolt-on at best. It has to be there from day one and at the forefront of your mind in every step you take.” Fry will explore the power and perils of modern mathematics in December when she delivers the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Made popular by figures from Michael Faraday to Carl Sagan, the demonstration-filled sessions were launched in 1825 and became the most prestigious public science lectures in Britain. In the three-lecture series, Secrets and Lies: the Hidden Power of Mathematics, Fry will examine the maths of risk and luck, from finding the perfect partner to keeping healthy and happy. She will also explore how algorithms that feast on data have infiltrated every aspect of our lives; what problems maths should be kept away from; and how we must learn when the numbers cannot be trusted. Fry said she got a sense of the ethical blindspots scientists can have while describing to an academic conference in Berlin the computer modelling of the 2011 riots she had done for the Metropolitan police. The audience, which understood the realities of a police state, heckled her from their seats. [...]

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Google “Machine Learning Fairness” Whistleblower Goes Public, says: “burden lifted off of my soul” – Project Veritas
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 16, 2019

Aug. 16, 2019

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/08/14/google-machine-learning-fairness-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Amazon’s algorithm is reading a new emotion on faces: fear
by Luigi Scorca Aug. 16, 2019

Aug. 16, 2019

https://www.fastcompany.com/90390197/amazons-algorithm-is-reading-a-new-emo…

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Towards a Free and Open Internet - Areo
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 16, 2019

Aug. 16, 2019

<https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/31/towards-a-free-and-open-internet/> [...] Were these interlocking visions to come to fruition, we could revisit the fantasy described above. Several clearly desirable features immediately present themselves. For example, the issue of gatekeepers who exist for technical reasons assigning themselves political authority would evaporate. Were Facebook or Twitter run on a distributed network of servers as mere protocols for data exchange, porting the so-called social graph would be a trivial endeavour. The data indicating the personal connections around which your social media experience is built would exist on your server, and on each of your connections’ servers, and would be marked as such in order to be called by the Facebook or Twitter protocol in the first place. A challenger social network would simply tap into the same data, given your permission. This might seem terribly abstract, but in fact it is exactly how the likes of Telegram and Signal work today with respect to your phone number. This in turn invites a comparison to a concept called Mobile Number Portability (MNP). This means in essence that you have a legal right to retain your mobile phone number when you switch carriers, and has been in force in most of Europe since the early 2000s, in Australia since 2001, the US since 2003, and most of Asia since the late 2000s, and more recently in a handful of other jurisdictions. What is interesting about MNP is that it is technically extremely complex and costly to implement, and furthermore is clearly not at all in the interests of carriers. Without this legal mandate, carriers would have profound network effects allowing them to either build applications such as Telegram and Signal to further lock users in, or rent-seek from those who do. And yet the discourse in this arena could hardly be more different to that surrounding Facebook and Twitter (probably because the Internet is not involved). There is no, why don’t competitors just build a competing service?, or, these companies put in the development and operational costs, so why shouldn’t they have the chance to profit?. There is only, this is obviously fair to consumers, so do it. End of discussion. To the extent that politicians or regulators feel the need or pressure to do something about big tech, this is probably the only sensible course of action. Arbitrarily large fines from the FTC, seemingly celebrated by Wall Street, will likely seem like an unhelpful quick fix before too long. Hard cases make bad law. We could and probably should mandate portability of personal data under the auspices of providing fairness to consumers and encouraging competition among web services. But it isn’t clear to me that any other form of proposed regulation would treat the disease, rather than everybody’s personal favourite symptoms. As seems to have happened with GDPR, a poorly conceived regulatory sweep will probably have the unintended consequences of further entrenching the monopolists. My preference would be to obviate regulation altogether by catalysing consumer self-sovereignty. Rearchitecting the Internet is a rather utopian goal, but the open source ethos is alive and well at practically every layer of development, up to and including upstart competing applications. So here’s my plea: stop using big tech and venture into the wild. As with all things online, this will involve a trade-off. I will not pretend that open source alternative applications such as Gab, Minds, DuckDuckGo, Telegram and Brave are yet as slick, powerful or robust as the Silicon Valley titans they seek to ultimately supplant. Nor is the underlying infrastructure of Urbit, ActivityPub or Bitcoin. The biggest problem of all is really a vicious circle: Facebook and Google have profound network effects, and open source alternatives, so far, do not. But network effects work in reverse too. We tend not to notice because this isn’t as sexy. If a critical mass of users switches away from Google or Facebook, their collapse will be surprisingly quick. This is a very dramatic potential outcome, and I suspect it is more likely that, at a certain rate of user emigration, these companies, and others, will adapt their policies to be more free and open, so as to better compete in this new environment. [...]

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Fwd: [fnf] Europols data retention Matrix
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) - lists Aug. 15, 2019

Aug. 15, 2019

Cari nexiani, condivido la pubblicazione della matrice di dati da assoggettare da data retention, da parte degli operatori telefonici e telematici, secondo l'europol. Inquietante, a dir poco, sopratutto considerata l'assurda durata della data retention in Italia. Fabio -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [fnf] Europols data retention Matrix Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 12:49:00 +0200 From: Friedemann Ebelt <friedemann.ebelt(a)digitalcourage.de> Organization: Digitalcourage To: akv-international(a)listen.akvorrat.org <akv-international(a)listen.akvorrat.org> Hi all, FYI: today we published Europols data retention Matrix (WK 3005/2018 INIT): https://digitalcourage.de/sites/default/files/2019-05/WK%2003005%2018.pdf blog article: https://digitalcourage.de/blog/2019/eu-vorratsdatenspeicherung-diese-daten-… press release: https://digitalcourage.de/2019/08/15/eu-rat-diskutiert-vorratsdatenspeicher… Tweet: EN: https://twitter.com/digitalcourage/status/1161943259834396672 DE: https://twitter.com/digitalcourage/status/1161940533675208705 Fediverse: EN: https://digitalcourage.social/@digitalcourage/102620458630583883 DE: https://digitalcourage.social/@digitalcourage/102620410839990014 Best! Friedemann -- Friedemann Ebelt | Redaktion | Kampagnen Digitalcourage e.V., Marktstr. 18, D-33602 Bielefeld https://digitalcourage.de Video der BigBrotherAwards 2019: https://bigbrotherawards.de/

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Findings of Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 14, 2019

Aug. 14, 2019

https://shiftcommission.work/findings-of-shift-the-commission-on-work-worke… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The fashion line designed to trick surveillance cameras | World news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 14, 2019

Aug. 14, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/the-fashion-line-designed-to-…> Automatic license plate readers, which use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to track the movements of cars around a city, may have met their match, in the form of a T-shirt. Or a dress. Or a hoodie. The anti-surveillance garments were revealed at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Saturday by the hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose, who presented the inaugural collection of her Adversarial Fashion line. Rose credits a conversation with a friend, the Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Dave Maass, for inspiring the project: “He mentioned that the readers themselves are not very good,” she said. “They already read in things like picket fences and other junk. I thought that if they’re fooled by a fence, then maybe I could take a crack at it.” To human eyes, Rose’s fourth amendment T-shirt contains the words of the fourth amendment to the US constitution in bold yellow letters. The amendment, which protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures”, has been an important defense against many forms of government surveillance: in 2012, for instance, the US supreme court ruled that it prevented police departments from hiding GPS trackers on cars without a warrant. [...]

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If you work for Uber or DoorDash, your boss isn't a person but an algorithm
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 13, 2019

Aug. 13, 2019

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/pringle-uber-doordash-gig-economy-1.5238… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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