November 2021 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

[selfie] domenica alle 17 "Potere digitale"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 10, 2021

Dec. 10, 2021

Chiedendo scusa per il "selfie", segnalo che domani alle 17 a Torino terrò una lezione per Biennale Democrazia dal titolo "Potere digitale": http://biennaledemocrazia.it/evento/potere-digitale/ Tema immenso, ovviamente, ma qualcosa proverò a dirlo. jc

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Testo di Meredith Whittaker
by Antonio Casilli Dec. 6, 2021

Dec. 6, 2021

Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions. The steep cost of capture https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-… "Big tech’s control over AI resources made universities and other institutions dependent on these companies, creating a web of conflicted relationships that threaten academic freedom and our ability to understand and regulate these corporate technologies." (...) "In addition to punishing dissent and denigrating research they find threatening, tech companies are working to co-opt and neutralize critique. They do this in part by funding and elevating their weakest critics, often institutions and coalitions that focus on so-called AI ethics, and frame issues of tech power and dominance as abstract governance questions that take the tech industry's current form as a given and AI's proliferation as inevitable. In parallel, tech firms also champion technocratic remedies such as "AI bias bounties" and fairness fixits that stage tech-enabled discrimination as a problem of bad code and "buggy" engineering [15]. Such approaches make great PR. They also serve to cast elite engineers as the arbiters of "bias," while structurally excluding scholars and advocates who don't have computer science training, but whose focus on the racialized power asymmetries and political economy of AI are essential for understanding and addressing AI harms." (...) "To begin, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who produce and rely on tech-critical work must confront and name the dynamic of tech capture, co-optation, and compromise head-on, and soon. This means incorporating reflexive critiques of the conditions and of knowledge creation, and the compromises and trade-offs faced by knowledge workers over whom interested institutions have power. Given the politics of collegial proximity that inform academic prestige networks while working to blur the lines between academic and industry workers, this is certain to be uncomfortable. But naming these dynamics is the only way to address them and to stage questions that allow us to envision and demand alternative futures." -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris-Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Associate researcher, Weizenbaum-Institut, Berlin Member, Scholarly council UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.*

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Re: [nexa] Testo di Meredith Whittaker
by Giuseppe Attardi Dec. 2, 2021

Dec. 2, 2021

Questa è la ragione per cui servirebbe un CERN for AI in Europa. Anche l’infrastruttura nazionale per l’AI proposta da Eric Schmidt tramite la National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Con lo scopo di “democratize AI”, lascia dei dubbi: In practice, then, these proposals to "democratize" access to AI research infrastructures amount to calls to subsidize tech giants further by licensing familiar infrastructure from these firms in ways that allow them to continue defining the terms and conditions of AI and AI research. — Beppe > On 30 Nov 2021, at 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2021 17:31:00 +0100 (CET) > From: Antonio Casilli <antonio.casilli(a)telecom-paris.fr> > To: nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] Testo di Meredith Whittaker > Message-ID: <764268093.2939040.1638203460934.JavaMail.zimbra(a)enst.fr> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions. > > > The steep cost of capture > https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-… > > "Big tech’s control over AI resources made universities and other institutions dependent on these companies, > creating a web of conflicted relationships that threaten academic freedom and our ability to understand > and regulate these corporate technologies." > > (...) > > "In addition to punishing dissent and denigrating research they find threatening, tech companies are working to co-opt and neutralize critique. They do this in part by funding and elevating their weakest critics, often institutions and coalitions that focus on so-called AI ethics, and frame issues of tech power and dominance as abstract governance questions that take the tech industry's current form as a given and AI's proliferation as inevitable. In parallel, tech firms also champion technocratic remedies such as "AI bias bounties" and fairness fixits that stage tech-enabled discrimination as a problem of bad code and "buggy" engineering [15]. Such approaches make great PR. They also serve to cast elite engineers as the arbiters of "bias," while structurally excluding scholars and advocates who don't have computer science training, but whose focus on the racialized power asymmetries and political economy of AI are essential for understanding and addressing AI harms." > > (...) > > "To begin, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who produce and rely on tech-critical work must confront and name the dynamic of tech capture, co-optation, and compromise head-on, and soon. This means incorporating reflexive critiques of the conditions and of knowledge creation, and the compromises and trade-offs faced by knowledge workers over whom interested institutions have power. Given the politics of collegial proximity that inform academic prestige networks while working to blur the lines between academic and industry workers, this is certain to be uncomfortable. But naming these dynamics is the only way to address them and to stage questions that allow us to envision and demand alternative futures." > > -- > Antonio A. Casilli > Professor, Telecom Paris-Institut Polytechnique de Paris > Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) > Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) > Associate researcher, Weizenbaum-Institut, Berlin > Member, Scholarly council UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) > Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society > > *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.* >

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Biometrics, smartphones, surveillance cameras pose new obstacles for US spies
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 1, 2021

Dec. 1, 2021

Largamente prevedibile. <https://www.livemint.com/technology/tech-news/biometrics-smartphones-survei…> Operatives widely suspected of working for Israel’s Mossad spy service planned a stealthy operation to kill a Palestinian militant living in Dubai. The 2010 plan was a success except for the stealth part—closed-circuit cameras followed the team’s every move, even capturing them before and after they put on disguises. In 2017, a suspected U.S. intelligence officer held a supposedly clandestine meeting with the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, days before the latter was assassinated. That encounter also became public knowledge, thanks to a hotel’s security camera footage. Last December , it was Russia’s turn. Bellingcat, the investigative website, used phone and travel data to track three operatives from Moscow’s FSB intelligence service it said shadowed and then attempted to kill Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. Bellingcat named the three. And published their photographs. Espionage and covert action aren’t what they used to be. A trained CIA case officer could once cross borders with a wallet full of aliases or confidently travel through foreign cities undetected to meet agents. Now, he or she faces digital obstacles that are the hallmarks of modern life: omnipresent surveillance cameras and biometric border controls, not to mention smartphones, watches and automobiles that constantly ping out their location. Then there is “digital dust," the personal record almost everyone leaves across the internet. Combined with advances in artificial intelligence that allow rapid sifting of this data, the technologies are fast becoming powerful tools for foreign adversaries to root out spies, according to current and former U.S. and Western intelligence officials. “It’s really bad," a former top U.S. counterintelligence official said of the impact on U.S. espionage operations. “It really challenges the fundamental assumptions and approach of how you do business." “Ubiquitous technical surveillance," as it is known, is now a pervasive concern at the CIA, forcing it to devise new, often more resource-intensive ways of recruiting agents and stealing secrets, the officials said. In the new environment, it is “much more complicated to conduct traditional tradecraft," CIA Director William Burns acknowledged during his February confirmation hearing. “The agency, like so many other parts of the U.S. government, is going to have to adapt." He added: “I’m entirely confident that the women and men of CIA are capable of that." In the Dubai case, Israel has never confirmed or denied its involvement. The CIA has declined to comment on its ties to the North Korean leader’s half brother. Russia has denied poisoning Mr. Navalny. A January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank said that while advanced digital technologies will also help U.S. spy agencies gather intelligence and spot adversaries, the advantage lies with authoritarian societies like China and Russia that can exert greater control over them. CIA officers “will struggle to maintain cover and operate clandestinely and face a persistent risk of exposure—of themselves, their agents, and their operational tradecraft," said the report by a CSIS task force. In an interview, a senior CIA official disputed suggestions that the agency’s operating space is shrinking, and said it would employ both new and traditional spy tradecraft. “We go to extraordinary lengths to avoid detection of our officers, and the sources we are meeting." “Humint isn’t dead, not by a long shot," the official said, using the acronym for human intelligence. Others aren’t so sure. “The foundational elements of espionage, I argue, have been shattered—they have already been broken," said Duyane Norman, a former CIA station chief who led an early agency effort to adapt spying for the digital age, called “Station of the Future." As an example, he asks, how can a CIA officer purport to work for another government agency or private enterprise if his cellphone isn’t regularly present at that entity’s location, there is no record of him making ATM withdrawals or paying for lunch with a credit card in the vicinity, and no sign of him on video cameras there? Having no electronic “signature"—as in not carrying a cellphone and having no presence on the internet—is itself a tipoff to adversary spy services, Mr. Norman and others said. In a 2018 speech, Dawn Meyerriecks, who was then deputy CIA director for Science & Technology, said that in about 30 countries, foreign intelligence services no longer bother to physically follow agency officers “when we leave our place of employ," an apparent reference to U.S. embassies. “The coverage is good enough that they don’t need to. Between CCTVs and wireless infrastructure." A recent top secret cable from counterintelligence officials at CIA’s headquarters to stations and bases world-wide warned that a large number of agency informants in foreign countries were being captured, according to officials familiar with its contents. The cable suggested a more difficult operating environment for U.S. spies abroad, in part as a result of pervasive digital surveillance. It was first reported by the New York Times. Intelligence officials, citing operational secrecy, declined to discuss further details of how such surveillance in the hands of Chinese, Russian, Iranian and other governments potentially crimps the CIA’s mission—or how the agency is responding. But they offered outlines of what the future of spying might look like. Crossing international borders under an assumed name is rapidly becoming yesteryear’s tradecraft, because of biometrics like facial recognition and iris scans, several former officials said. “It’s more difficult for intelligence officers to masquerade under alias," said a retired Western intelligence officer who estimated he had nine false identities during his career, and credit cards for each. More spying will be done in “true name," meaning the spy won’t pose as someone else, but “live their cover" as a businessperson, academic or other professional with no obvious connection to the U.S. government. Moscow and Beijing have sent “a massive influx" of what are known as nontraditional intelligence collectors abroad globally, said former U.S. counterintelligence chief William Evanina. Asked if the U.S. would do likewise, he replied: “That would be a great presumption on your part." Spying is also becoming more of a team sport. Where once a lone spy conceived and conducted an operation—meeting an agent, retrieving cached documents—in the future, it will require a group to help watch for digital surveillance and guide the CIA officer around it. Ms. Meyerriecks in her 2018 speech described how, as a test, a CIA team compiled a map of surveillance cameras in the capital of a U.S. adversary she didn’t name, along with the type of camera and the direction each was pointed. Using artificial intelligence, the team plotted a surveillance-free route that a CIA officer could travel. While headquarters colleagues monitor over a computer dashboard, the CIA officer on the street might wear a smartwatch telling her if she is “green"—free of digital surveillance—yellow, or red. These undertakings require more time, personnel and other resources. It is more “Mission Impossible" than James Bond, and “implies fewer operations, total" with a smaller pool of foreigners recruited to spy for the U.S., said Mr. Norman. “You’re going to spend a lot more energy working on the few that are important." There are also endless digital tricks to play in what Mr. Evanina called “the technological version of cat and mouse." For example, it is possible to “spoof" a cellphone’s location, misleading foreign spycatchers to think their quarry is in one place, when he is safely in another, current and former CIA officials said. The officials say the CIA, which turns 75 next year, has faced and overcome profound technological challenges before. In Cold War-era Moscow of the 1980s, it was long assumed the agency couldn't recruit and meet Soviet spies under the KGB’s nose. A former station chief and his colleagues devised ways, including new methods of short-range communications with agents and of disguise, and the agency during that period was able to run one of the most valuable Soviet spies of the Cold War, Adolf Tolkachev. “Most technological challenges are surmountable," the senior CIA official said. “We play great offense, and aren’t sitting around in a defensive crouch."

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Foto: 13ª Conferenza Nexa (30/11/2021)
by Andrea Pellegrini Nov. 30, 2021

Nov. 30, 2021

Ciao a tutti, Ecco un po’ di foto dell’interessantissima, come sempre, conferenza annuale svolta oggi: https://oc.p3ll3.eu/apps/gallery/s/Uq6L10JSnjVrwuu <https://oc.p3ll3.eu/apps/gallery/s/Uq6L10JSnjVrwuu> A presto Ciao Ciao Andrea Pellegrini 346 705 0039 <tel:+393467050039> Via Superga, 5 Pino Torinese (TO) Italy pelle(a)andreapellegrini.net <mailto:pelle@andreapellegrini.net>

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Amazon poised to pass UPS and FedEx to become largest U.S. delivery service by early 2022, exec says
by Luigi Scorca Nov. 30, 2021

Nov. 30, 2021

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/11/29/amazon-on-track-to-be-largest-us-delive… Luigi

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in Gazzetta il decreto di attuazione della direttiva sul diritto di autore nel mercato unico digitale
by Mauro Alovisio Nov. 29, 2021

Nov. 29, 2021

Gent.me/mi segnalo la pubblicazione del Decreto Legislativo 8 novembre 2021, n. 177 ad oggetto: "Attuazione della direttiva (UE) 2019/790 del Parlamento europeo e del Consiglio, del 17 aprile 2019, sul diritto d'autore e sui diritti connessi nel mercato unico digitale e che modifica le direttive 96/9/CE e 2001/29/CE. (21G00192) (GU Serie Generale n.283 del 27-11-2021) <http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/gu/2021/11/27/283/sg/pdf> note: Entrata in vigore del provvedimento: 12/12/2021 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/QANDA_21_2821 https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/atto/serie_generale/caricaDettaglioAtto/or… Cordiali saluti

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martedì 30/11/2021: evento l'UNESCO per i 5 anni di Software Heritage
by Stefano Zacchiroli Nov. 29, 2021

Nov. 29, 2021

Salve Nexiane e Nexiani, domani, martedì 30 Novembre 2021, si terrà dalle 9:30 alle 12:30 un evento all'UNESCO <https://events.unesco.org/event?id=1423818652&lang=1033> a Parigi per i 5 anni di Software Heritage <https://www.softwareheritage.org/2021/06/30/five-years-of-software-heritage/>. Sarà un'occasione unica per saperne di più sullo stato attuale di Software Heritage <https://www.softwareheritage.org/>, e scoprire perché tale infrastrutture è importante per una moltitudine di attori, dall'università agli archivisti di patrimonio culturale, dall'industria all'amministrazione pubblica. Sarà possibile seguire l'evento in diretta streaming. Il programma e le informazioni di connessione sono disponibili a partire della pagina dell'evento nell'agenda dell'UNESCO <https://events.unesco.org/event?id=1423818652&lang=1033>. A presto -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack(a)upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack _. ^ ._ Full professor of Computer Science o o o \/|V|\/ Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris o o o </> <\> Co-founder & CTO Software Heritage o o o o /\|^|/\ Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director '" V "'

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Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società annuncia la comunità Nexa 2021-2022
by Nexa Media Nov. 29, 2021

Nov. 29, 2021

Gentilissimi, Alla vigilia della 13° conferenza annuale del Centro Nexa, che si terrà domani al Politecnico di Torino nel giorno del 15° anniversario della costituzione formale del Centro, siamo lieti di annunciarvi la nuova composizione della comunità Nexa per l'anno accademico 2021-2022. Quest'anno i nuovi membri sono: due /Faculty Fellow//s/, *Giovanni Leghissa*, professore associato presso il Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’educazione dell’Università di Torino, e *Don Luca Peyron*, presbitero della Diocesi di Torino, laureato in Giurisprudenza e licenziato in Teologia Pastorale; due /Fellows/, *Giuseppe Futia*, Senior Data Scientist presso GraphAware Srl e alumnus del Centro Nexa, e *Francesco Ruggiero*, insegnante, scrittore e alumnus del Centro Nexa. Per maggiori informazioni sui nuovi membri della comunità Nexa è possibile consultare la pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/2021-2022-comunita Cordiali saluti, -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino _web:_ https://nexa.polito.it/ _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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GAO - CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION CISA Should Assess the Effectiveness of its Actions to Support the Communications Sector - notsp
by Diego.Latella Nov. 29, 2021

Nov. 29, 2021

FYI: CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION CISA Should Assess the Effectiveness of its Actions to Support the Communications Sector https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104462?utm_campaign=usgao_email&utm_con… Diego -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it [1]) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) CNR/GI-STS (http://gists.pi.cnr.it) https://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, fax: +390506212040 =================== I don't quite know whether it is especially computer science or its subdiscipline Artificial Intelligence that has such an enormous affection for euphemism. We speak so spectacularly and so readily of computer systems that understand, that see, decide, make judgments, and so on, without ourselves recognizing our own superficiality and immeasurable naivete with respect to these concepts. And, in the process of so speaking, we anesthetise our ability to evaluate the quality of our work and, what is more important, to identify and become conscious of its end use. […] One can't escape this state without asking, again and again: "What do I actually do? What is the final application and use of the products of my work?" and ultimately, "am I content or ashamed to have contributed to this use?" -- Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum ["Not without us", ACM SIGCAS 16(2-3) 2--7 - Aug. 1986] Links: ------ [1] http://www.isti.cnr.it

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