September 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

"For Ride-Hailing Drivers, Data Is Power"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 16, 2019

Sept. 16, 2019

*For Ride-Hailing Drivers, Data Is Power** * Sarah Holder Aug 22, 2019 /Uber drivers in Europe and the U.S. are fighting for access to their personal data. // //Whoever wins the lawsuit could get to reframe the terms of the gig economy. /[...] continua qui: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/uber-drivers-lawsuit-persona… /

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"Hubert Horan: Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty-One: Mike Isaac’s Book Ignores Economics and Financial Results and Gets the Uber Story Almost Entirely Wrong"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 16, 2019

Sept. 16, 2019

*Hubert Horan: Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty-One: Mike Isaac’s ** **Book Ignores Economics and Financial Results and Gets the Uber ** **Story Almost Entirely Wrong* /By Hubert Horan, who has 40 years of experience in the management and // //regulation of transportation companies (primarily airlines). Horan has no // //financial links with any urban car service industry competitors, investors // //or regulators, or any firms that work on behalf of industry participants/ One of the recurring themes of this series has been the poor quality of Uber coverage in the mainstream business and tech press. On September 3rd, Mike Isaac, who has been covering Uber for the New York Times since 2014, published Super Pumped! The Battle For Uber.[1] Isaac’s central argument is that Uber is a fundamentally successful company that was nearly undone by ‘[CEO Travis] Kalanick’s boundary-pushing behavior, unabashed pugnacity, and eventually, the CEO’s own personal decline.” (p. xviii). “Uber was the unicorn to end all unicorns” (p. 6), with the potential to “drag the entire transportation industry out of the analog world and into the digital one” (p. 64). Uber represented the “best and worst of Silicon Valley” (p.xviii). It was “a company worth tens of billions of dollars that succeeded in changing the way we move through the world, yet nearly destroyed itself in a bonfire of bad behavior, ugly decisions, and greed” (p. xx) and provides a cautionary tale “about how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong” and threaten the survival of “a multi-billion dollar empire.” (p. xix). The misogyny and rest of the bonfire of bad behavior directly reflected Kalanick’s personality, and became rampant because Kalanick prevented the Board from exercising normal discipline and control. Isaac argues that Uber was brought back from the depths of its 2017 crises when key Board members realized “Uber didn’t have an image problem, it had a Travis problem” (p.235) and began to assert their role as the adults in the room, initiating the “Battle for Uber”. When an outside investigation led by former Attorney General Eric Holder produced damming findings, the Board forced Kalanick’s resignation as CEO. Since his hiring, new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has worked to “systematically undo nearly everything his predecessor had stood for.” (p. 331) Every component of Isaac’s argument is wrong. [...] continua qui: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-…

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Pagina Fb sequestrata, ma non viene oscurata - Emilia-Romagna
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 16, 2019

Sept. 16, 2019

<http://www.ansa.it/emiliaromagna/notizie/2019/07/19/pagina-fb-sequestratano…> La pagina Facebook delle maschere bianche contro i presunti 'padroni sfruttatori' di Bologna è sotto sequestro. Il provvedimento di oscuramento è stato disposto a fine maggio, ma, a distanza di più di un mese e mezzo, non è stato possibile eseguirlo. "Dobbiamo prendere atto, con amarezza, che nel tempo della massima formale evidenza della riservatezza, esistono luoghi di fatto inaccessibili anche alla Magistratura più attenta, nei quali sono i gestori dei social a regolare i diritti delle persone", commenta l'avvocato Gabriele Bordoni, difensore di un barista che ha presentato querela, sentendosi diffamato dal contenuto del gruppo chiamato 'Il padrone di merda'. Lo spazio Fb, riconducibile a esponenti di collettivi, raccoglie segnalazioni e pubblica immagini e video delle azioni contro i 'padroni'. A inizio aprile Massimiliano Bolelli, titolare del bar Balanzone di via Petroni, assistito dall'avvocato Bordoni, ha denunciato di essere stato preso di mira con messaggi offensivi e blitz nel locale. Il contesto è questo: <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/16/horrible-bosses-masked-activ…>

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Ex-Google worker fears 'killer robots' could cause mass atrocities | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/15/ex-google-worker-fears-k…> A new generation of autonomous weapons or “killer robots” could accidentally start a war or cause mass atrocities, a former top Google software engineer has warned. Laura Nolan, who resigned from Google last year in protest at being sent to work on a project to dramatically enhance US military drone technology, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned. Nolan said killer robots not guided by human remote control should be outlawed by the same type of international treaty that bans chemical weapons. Unlike drones, which are controlled by military teams often thousands of miles away from where the flying weapon is being deployed, Nolan said killer robots have the potential to do “calamitous things that they were not originally programmed for”. There is no suggestion that Google is involved in the development of autonomous weapons systems. Last month a UN panel of government experts debated autonomous weapons and found Google to be eschewing AI for use in weapons systems and engaging in best practice. Nolan, who has joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and has briefed UN diplomats in New York and Geneva over the dangers posed by autonomous weapons, said: “The likelihood of a disaster is in proportion to how many of these machines will be in a particular area at once. What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed. “There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways. Which is why any advanced weapons systems should be subject to meaningful human control, otherwise they have to be banned because they are far too unpredictable and dangerous.” Google recruited Nolan, a computer science graduate from Trinity College Dublin, to work on Project Maven in 2017 after she had been employed by the tech giant for four years, becoming one of its top software engineers in Ireland. She said she became “increasingly ethically concerned” over her role in the Maven programme, which was devised to help the US Department of Defense drastically speed up drone video recognition technology. [...]

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Economist: The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019

The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation More public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/09/12/the-alternatives… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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A meeting with Jeffrey Epstein led to a gift — and, now, regrets - The Boston Globe
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019

Il quadro si arricchisce di sempre nuovi elementi. jc https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/13/meeting-with-epstein-led-gift-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Google AI propaganda comics
by Antonio Casilli Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019

Remember those old US Christian propaganda comics? Google AI did the same, but for machine learning. Admittedly, this is a useful artifact if you want to summarize the rudiments of it. Plus, it is impeccably crafted, because Google money bought "Bite Me" artist Dylan Meconis and... OMG, Scott McCloud himself. But the amount of ideological BS is unbearable. Especially in light of how they went the extra mile to conceal the #digitallabor that is necessary to generate and annotate data. I mean, for pete's sake, in this story labeled data literally fall from the frigging sky (see case n. 28). And, yes, it is mentioned in passing that when you practice machine learning "you will need humans to sort data by hand". But those humans are not considered essential to and never depicted within the narrative. The story takes place in a STEM world: a white limbo whose only characters are an engineer, a mascot-like computer, and a cat. Here be coders, coders' machines and coders' pets! In this worldwiew, even a feline is more important than a micro-worker to explain how ML comes to be. But enough with me ranting. Here's the story: https://cloud.google.com/products/ai/ml-comic-1/ You can read it, discuss it with friends, use it to teach your "AI & society 101" class. But always remember that, in the immortal words of Shakespeare, "this is a tale told by a software engineer, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (but their own viewpoint)". -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor (HDR), Telecom Paris (Paris School of Telecommunications) Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society

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Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain - VICE
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019

Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain Millions of books are secretly in the public domain thanks to a copyright loophole, a new project seeks to put them on the Internet Archive. By Karl Bode | Sep 10 2019, 2:26pm https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3534j/libraries-and-archivists-are-scan… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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LA Times: "48 states are probing Google on antitrust grounds. Why isn’t California?"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 14, 2019

Sept. 14, 2019

*48 states are probing Google on antitrust grounds. Why isn’t California?* By Suhauna Hussain Staff Writer Sep. 10, 2019 10 AM Attorneys general from nearly every U.S. state have jointly launched an investigation into Google’s “potential monopolistic behavior.” Notable for its absence: California, Google’s home state. Citing a need to protect the integrity of “potential and ongoing investigations,” Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra declined to say why he refused to join the chief law enforcement officers of 48 other states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, in examining the Mountain View-based internet giant’s dominance in online advertising. Alabama is the only other state not participating in the probe, announced Monday. [...] continua qui: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-09-09/48-states-are-…

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Tragedy of the Commons after 50 Years by Alain Marciano, Brett M. Frischmann , Giovanni Battista Ramello :: SSRN
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 14, 2019

Sept. 14, 2019

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3451688 (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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