October 2020 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Undocumented backdoor that covertly takes snapshots found in kids’ smartwatch
by Giacomo Tesio Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

A popular smartwatch designed exclusively for children contains an undocumented backdoor that makes it possible for someone to remotely capture camera snapshots, wiretap voice calls, and track locations in real time, a researcher said. The X4 smartwatch is marketed by Xplora, a Norway-based seller of children’s watches. The device, which sells for about $200, runs on Android and offers a range of capabilities, including the ability to make and receive voice calls to parent-approved numbers and to send an SOS broadcast that alerts emergency contacts to the location of the watch. A separate app that runs on the smartphones of parents allows them to control how the watches are used and receive warnings when a child has strayed beyond a present geographic boundary. # But that’s not all It turns out that the X4 contains something else: a backdoor that went undiscovered until some impressive digital sleuthing. The backdoor is activated by sending an encrypted text message. Harrison Sand and Erlend Leiknes, researchers at Norwegian security company Mnemonic, said that commands exist for surreptitiously reporting the watch’s real-time location, taking a snapshot and sending it to an Xplora server, and making a phone call that transmits all sounds within earshot. Sand and Leiknes also found that 19 of the apps that come pre-installed on the watch are developed by Qihoo 360, a security company and app maker located in China. A Qihoo 360 subsidiary, 360 Kids Guard, also jointly designed the X4 with Xplora and manufactures the watch hardware. “I wouldn't want that kind of functionality in a device produced by a company like that,” Sand said, referring to the backdoor and Qihoo 360. In June, Qihoo 360 was placed on a US Commerce Department sanctions list. The rationale: ties to the Chinese government made the company likely to engage in “activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” Qihoo 360 declined to comment for this post. [...] As the researchers made clear, even if someone with physical access to the watch and the skill to send an encrypted SMS activates this potential flaw, the snapshot photo is only uploaded to Xplora’s server in Germany and is not accessible to third parties. The server is located in a highly-secure Amazon Web Services environment. Continua su https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/a-watch-designed-exc… L'hack dello smartwatch è descritto in modo più chiaro qui https://www.mnemonic.no/blog/exposing-backdoor-consumer-products E' triste che lo si definisca "eroico", mentre si tratta semplicemente di un lavoro ben fatto. Domanda per i giuristi in lista: in questo caso, ha senso parlare di presunzione di conformità ai requisiti del marchio CE? Non c'è proprio nessun ente preposto a verificare la sicurezza dei prodotti che entrano o che vengono prodotti in Europa? Giacomo

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Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world | Royal Society Open Science
by Enrico Nardelli Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.201199 Abstract Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK (/n//=/ 1050 and /n//=/ 1150), Ireland (/n/ = 700), the USA (/n/ = 700), Spain (/n//=/ 700) and Mexico (/n//=/ 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research. -- 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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L’umanità dell’internet. Un ricordo di Giancarlo Livraghi.
by Antonio Iacono Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

Non è l'anniversario della sua scomparsa (22/2/2014) ma sono capitato per caso sul suo sito [1] e vorrei ricordarlo. Molti di "noi del web 1.0" l'hanno letto, qualcuno l'ha conosciuto personalmente, ma se nella lista c'è qualche "giovane" che non avesse mai sentito parlarne gli consiglio vivamente di farsi un giro tra i suoi scritti. Come quello sull'umanità delle rete, sull'anima e il corpo [2]. Le rubriche [3], gli articoli "offline" [4] e tantissimo altro. Antonio [1] http://www.gandalf.it [2] http://www.gandalf.it/uman/09.htm [3] http://www.gandalf.it/nodi/index.htm [4] http://www.gandalf.it/offline/home.htm

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Google and Oracle are headed to the Supreme Court. The future of software hangs in the balance.
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

Google and Oracle are headed to the Supreme Court. The future of software hangs in the balance. A generation of software built around shared assumptions for interoperability faces an uncertain future depending on the outcome of a yearslong legal fight between Google and Oracle. Tom Krazit https://www.protocol.com/google-oracle-supreme-court-software-api (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Fwd: Fai le tue proposte per attuare la Strategia Nazionale sulle competenze digitali - ParteciPa
by Mauro Alovisio Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

Gent.me/mi segnalo consultazione on line promossa dal Governo sulle competenze digitali https://partecipa.gov.it/processes/strategia-Nazionale-competenze-digitali Cordiali saluti Mauro Alovisio

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Consultazione Pubblica BCE su Euro Digitale
by Silvia Crafa Oct. 14, 2020

Oct. 14, 2020

Buondi', segnalo la Consultazione Pubblica aperta dalla BCE sulla possibile introduzione dell'euro digitale: (news) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/html/digitaleuro.it.html (Report) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/Report_on_a_digital_euro~4d7268b458… (consultazione) https://epsilon.escb.eu/limesurvey3/434111?lang=it un caro saluto, Silvia Crafa

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Saranno i dati a governarci?
by Antonio Iacono Oct. 13, 2020

Oct. 13, 2020

"Siamo una parte dell’ingranaggio: anzi, no. Piano piano saremo noi gli automi del sistema, privati dolcemente, attraverso una massiva azione di profilazione delle nostre abitudini di consumo, del nostro 'libero arbitrio'. Il governo dei dati sanitari, del resto, è l’ultima frontiera della profilazione predittiva, ma intanto la digicrazia sta brillantemente superando la sua fase sperimentale in diversi altri settori." L’Avv. Andrea Lisi ne parlato ieri con Giovanni Crea, Docente presso Università Europea di Roma e Direttore della Rivista DETEP dell’Istituto Italiano per la Privacy e Valentina Albanese, ricercatrice dell’Università Bologna e studiosa di Geografie digitali. youtu.be/1r1tGOCKJRc

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Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself
by Federico Guerrini Oct. 13, 2020

Oct. 13, 2020

Long read sul New Yorker: "There are reportedly more than five hundred full-time employees working in Facebook’s P.R. department. These days, their primary job is to insist that Facebook is a fun place to share baby photos and sell old couches, not a vector for hate speech, misinformation, and violent extremist propaganda. In July, Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a top flack at Facebook, published a piece on AdAge.com and on the company’s official blog titled “Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate,” in which he wrote, “There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.” The previous week, Guy Rosen, whose job title is vice-president for integrity, had written, “We don’t allow hate speech on Facebook. While we recognize we have more to do . . . we are moving in the right direction.” (...) It would be more accurate to say that the company is moving in several contradictory directions at once. In theory, no one is allowed to post hate speech on Facebook. Yet many world leaders—Rodrigo Duterte, of the Philippines; Narendra Modi, of India; Donald Trump; and others—routinely spread hate speech and disinformation, on Facebook and elsewhere. The company could apply the same standards to demagogues as it does to everyone else, banning them from the platform when necessary, but this would be financially risky. (If Facebook were to ban Trump, he would surely try to retaliate with onerous regulations; he might also encourage his supporters to boycott the company.) Instead, again and again, Facebook has erred on the side of allowing politicians to post whatever they want, even when this has led the company to weaken its own rules, to apply them selectively, to creatively reinterpret them, or to ignore them altogether. (...) In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/why-facebook-cant-fix-itself Ciao, F. -- http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/ http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/newsroom-curators-and… My latest book: Content Curation (Italian) http://www.amazon.it/Content-Curation-Federico-Guerrini/dp/8820366126

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Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’ | Social media | The Guardian
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 12, 2020

Oct. 12, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/10/cory-doctorow-technologists-h… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook sta manovrando per evitare problemi antitrust
by Diego Giorio Oct. 12, 2020

Oct. 12, 2020

Lascio a chi ha conoscenze in materia la valutazione dell'affidabilità di questo articolo, ma ho trovato interessante la questione antitrust che verrebbe aperta con l'elezione di un democratico Saluti a tutti D. https://thenexttech.startupitalia.eu/82738-20201008-perche-facebook-sta-int… [https://startupitaliaeumedia.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploa…]<https://thenexttech.startupitalia.eu/82738-20201008-perche-facebook-sta-int…> Perché Facebook sta integrando tutte le sue app? Per evitare lo spezzatino antitrust<https://thenexttech.startupitalia.eu/82738-20201008-perche-facebook-sta-int…> Il rapporto della Camera statunitense non lascia dubbi, e l'eventuale vittoria di Biden condurrebbe a uno smembramento dei b"big four" della tecnologia statunitense: ecco come il social tenta di resistere all'assalto thenexttech.startupitalia.eu

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