August 2022 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Will Europe Force a Facebook Blackout?

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-eu-us-data-transfers/> Facebook faces trouble in Europe—and Meta wants you to know about it. Every three months since June 2018, the company has used its financial results to warn that it could be forced to stop running Facebook and Instagram across the continent—potentially pulling its apps from millions of people and thousands of businesses—if it can’t send data between the EU and the US. Whether Meta’s bluffing will become clear soon enough. Data regulators are on the verge of making a historic ruling in a years-long case, and they are expected to say Facebook’s data transfers across the Atlantic should be blocked. For years, Meta has fought against European privacy activists over how data is sent to the US, with courts ruling multiple times that European data isn’t properly protected and can potentially be snooped on by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies. While the case focuses on Meta, it has widespread ramifications, potentially impacting thousands of businesses across Europe that rely upon the services of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more. At the same time, US and European negotiators are scrambling to finalize a long-awaited new data-sharing deal that will limit what information US intelligence agencies can get their hands on. If negotiators can’t get it right, people’s privacy will remain at risk and billions of dollars of trade will be put in jeopardy. At the start of July, the Irish Data Protection Commission, Facebook’s main data regulator in Europe, issued a draft decision that would block Meta from sending data across the Atlantic. While the specifics of that draft decision aren’t known, if it is enacted, it could create a Facebook blackout across Europe. Under the GDPR, Europe’s data law, countries across the continent get 30 days to scrutinize Ireland’s Meta decision and respond with any potential changes or complaints. That time is now up. A spokesperson for the Irish regulator says “some” objections have been received from a “small” number of other countries and it is working to address these. Experts say these are likely to be minor points of law, rather than overturning the entire decision. So, how likely is it that Meta will actually pull its services from Europe? In reality, the chances are probably pretty slim. Meta has said it has “no desire” to leave the continent, going as far as publishing a blog post titled “Meta Is Absolutely Not Threatening to Leave Europe.” Europe’s 30-plus countries are a large market for Meta, and stopping services, even temporarily, could be costly. (A close comparison is when the company briefly banned news posts in Australia in early 2021, following a row with publishers.) While Meta may not leave Europe, it may have to make changes to how it stores and transfers data once the final decision from the Irish regulator is published, although there is no set timeline. It may also face a fine. “My guess is that Meta is going to have to look at some form of geo-siloing if they want to continue to operate in the EU,” says Calli Schroeder, global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit digital rights research organization. Schroeder, who previously worked with companies on international data transfers, says this approach could mean Meta would have to create its own servers and data centers in the EU that aren’t connected to its broader databases. Advertisement Harshvardhan Pandit, a computer science research fellow at Trinity College Dublin who is researching the GDPR, says that as data authorities are still considering Meta’s case and a final decision hasn’t been published yet, they could include several caveats or steps that Meta should take to fall in line. For instance, one recent data protection decision in Europe gave a six-month period for a company to make changes to its business. “I think the most pragmatic solution would be for them to create the European infrastructure, like Google or Amazon, which have quite a few data centers here,” Pandit says, adding that Meta could also introduce more encryption to how it stores data and maximize how much it keeps in the EU. All these measures would be costly, though. Jack Gilbert, director and associate general counsel at Meta, says that the issue “is in the process of being resolved.” Facebook did not respond specifically to questions about its plan to respond to the Irish decision. European officials have twice ruled that systems put in place to share data between the EU and US don’t properly protect people’s data—the complaints have been ongoing since the early 2010s. European courts ruled that international data-sharing agreements weren’t up to scratch first in 2015 and then again in July 2020, when the Privacy Shield agreement was ruled illegal. See What’s Next in Tech With the Fast Forward Newsletter From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to transformed cities and new startups, sign up for the latest news. Your email By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from WIRED. You can unsubscribe at any time. “All that the EU is asking for when organizations transfer data to other countries is to protect that data in line with the GDPR,” says Nader Henein, a research vice president specializing in privacy and data protection at Gartner. “The issue is that laws in the US that protect the data of ‘nonresident aliens’ are woefully insufficient and make it very difficult for organizations like Facebook to comply with local law and the GDPR.” While Meta is the focus of the most high-profile complaint, it isn’t the only company impacted by a lack of clarity on how companies in Europe can send data to the US. “The data transfer issue is not Meta-specific,” David Wehner, Meta’s chief strategy officer, said in a July earnings call. “It relates to how in general data is transferred for all US and EU companies back and forth to the US.” The impacts of the July 2020 decision to get rid of Privacy Shield are now being felt. Since January of this year, multiple European data regulators have ruled that using Google Analytics, the company’s traffic-monitoring service for websites, falls foul of the GDPR. Danish authorities went even further: Schools can’t use Chromebooks without restrictions being put in place. “There is a ton of legal uncertainty, and there is a significant compliance risk,” says Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, vice president of global privacy at Future of Privacy Forum, a nonprofit think tank. Most Popular Politicians are well aware of the problems. In March, US president Joe Biden and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a new Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework, which will change the way data is sent between the EU and US. The deal, which will be introduced by executive order, will limit what data US intelligence agencies can access and will create a new system where Europeans can complain if they think they’ve been illegally spied upon by US agencies. However, since the deal was announced, no specifics—including any legal texts—have been published. In June, officials said the deal could be published in the coming weeks, but so far, there has been little public progress. The US Department of Commerce says discussions are still taking place, including a meeting between both sides last week. (A European Commission spokesperson says work on the new agreement is ongoing, but they do not have a timeline that can be shared.) The longer the negotiations take, the more blocking orders will drop. “Obviously, if that framework is not complete, we would be in jeopardy of being able to transfer data,” Facebook’s Wehner said earlier this year. The deal is likely to take a while yet. “Realistically, at this point, we're looking at a potential adequacy decision for this Trans-Atlantic data transfers framework sometime next year—maybe the first quarter of next year,” Zanfir-Fortuna says. Once the details have been published, EU officials will spend months scrutinizing the specifics to see if they fall in line with court orders. And they won’t be the only ones pouring over it. Privacy activists and lawyers will also be looking at the agreement and could launch further legal challenges if they find that data moving from Europe to the US still isn’t protected strongly enough. “The continued challenges are not unwarranted, particularly considering the Snowden revelations and the prevalence of Big Tech firms coming out of the US,” Schroeder says. “As a whole, America really needs to make sure we rise to the challenge of showing that we can be good stewards of the industry that we're trying to be leaders in.”

Aug. 11, 2022

Intel close to $5 billion deal for chip factory in Italy

by Luigi Scorca

https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-italy-intel-close-5-bln-deal-c…

Aug. 8, 2022

Have the tech giants finally had their bubble burst? I’d hate to speculate | John Naughton

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/06/have-the-tech-giants-…> A speculative bubble, wrote Nobel laureate Robert Shiller in Irrational Exuberance, his landmark book on human foolishness, is “a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler’s excitement”. Observers of the tech industry are wearily familiar with this kind of irrationality. Throughout 2020 and 2021, as Covid-19 wreaked economic havoc on countries throughout the western world, the tech industry remained strangely untouched by what was happening on the ground. While the rest of us cowered in lockdown, the pandemic made tech bosses and owners insanely richer. Their companies grew faster and became even more profitable while other industries languished. Apple had so much extra cash that it spent $90bn (£74bn) – nearly the gross domestic product of Kenya – buying its own shares. Amazon laid out $50bn in 2021 on warehouses, hiring tens of thousands of employees, ordering fleets of electric vehicles and building cloud computing centres. And so on. So while the pandemic had put many conventional companies on life support, it looked as though it had consolidated the dominance of Alphabet (neé Google), Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, making them the new masters of our networked universe. And then something happened. On 19 November 2021 the Nasdaq stock market index (which is heavily influenced by tech companies) stood at an all-time high of 16,057, then suddenly went into rapid decline. As I write, it stands at 12,369. And so the question became: was this just what economists euphemistically call a “market correction” or an indicator that this particular speculative bubble had really burst? The answer, if the quarterly figures released last week by the tech giants are anything to go by, is that it looks as though the bubble has at least been punctured. The numbers, according to an analysis by Luke Gbedemah and Sebastian Hervas-Jones of Tortoise Media, suggest that a split is emerging between the companies that can “sustain an economic downturn and those that might be facing existential decline”. The figures indicate that, for the first time in the history of the industry, the combined real revenue growth rate of the companies was negative rather than positive and real revenues overall were less than the year before. Alphabet’s revenues, for example, were up by 13% but its profits fell by 14%. Apple’s revenues increased by a whisker but profits were down by more than 10%. Amazon’s revenues were up by 7% but profits fell by a whopping 60.6%. Meta – that is, Facebook – had a terrible quarter, with revenues slightly down but profits dropping by 36%. Just about the only bright spot was Microsoft: its revenues were up by nearly a fifth, but even then profits just inched up by 2%. In interpreting these numbers, the usual caveats apply: these are just one quarter’s results (though Meta has now had two dreadful ones); global supply chain problems and pulling out of Russia may have had a disproportionate impact on Apple; and Amazon’s results may reflect the impact of its huge investment in Rivian, the electric vehicle manufacturer, from which it has ordered 100,000 vehicles. But overall, one has the feeling that these giant money-printing machines are moving into territory that is unfamiliar to them – territory where, instead of having endless resources for expansion and experimentation, margins will be squeezed, costs and perks cut, workers fired and efficiencies found. Suddenly, Alphabet’s chief executive is calling for staff “to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days”. Similar sanctimonious exhortations are doubtless being issued by his counterparts at the other giants. Two further thoughts stand out. The first is that the period of what one might call “tech exceptionalism” – the era when these companies and their cheerleaders were lauded for being different from normal, boring corporations – may be drawing to a close. From now on, they’re just corporations – like BT or Unilever. The second is the extent to which we have all underestimated Microsoft simply because it fumbled the smartphone opportunity. Instead, it focused on providing the basic computational infrastructure of the organisational world. The NHS, for example, has something like 750,000 PCs, all of them running Microsoft operating systems and software. Ditto for the UK government, large corporations, university administrations and small and medium-size enterprises in the western world. And it now has a successful cloud computing business. It’s not glamorous or exciting but it’s a rock-solid, enduring business. If you bought shares in it 30 years ago, you’d have the basis for a pretty good pension now. And it’ll still be around when Facebook is just a bad memory.

Aug. 6, 2022

Facial recognition smartwatches to be used to monitor foreign offenders in UK | Home Office | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/05/facial-recognition-smartwa…> Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/home-office> and the Ministry of Justice. In May, the government awarded a contract <https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/60bb8854-257a-4c11-b3e0-e…> to the British technology company Buddi Limited <https://www.buddi.co.uk/> to deliver “non-fitted devices” to monitor “specific cohorts” as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of £6m. A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve “daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control”, with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. Those obliged to wear the devices will need to complete periodic monitoring checks throughout the day by taking a photograph of themselves on a smartwatch, with information including their names, date of birth, nationality and photographs stored for up to six years. Locations will be tracked “24/7, allowing trail monitoring data to be recorded”. Photographs taken using the smartwatches will be cross-checked against biometric facial images on Home Office systems and if the image verification fails, a check must be performed manually. The data will be shared with the Home Office, MoJ and the police, with Home Office officials adding: “The sharing of this data [to] police colleagues is not new.” The number of devices to be produced and the cost of each smartwatch was redacted in the contract and there is no mention of risk assessments to determine whether it is appropriate to monitor vulnerable or at-risk asylum seekers. The Home Office says the smartwatch scheme will be for foreign-national offenders who have been convicted of a criminal offence, rather than other groups, such as asylum seekers. However, it is expected that those obliged to wear the smartwatches will be subject to similar conditions to those fitted with GPS ankle tags, with references in the DPIA to curfews and inclusion and exclusion zones. In a National Audit Office report <https://www.nao.org.uk/report/electronic-monitoring-a-progress-update/> in June, the government said it “regards electronic monitoring as a cost-effective alternative to custody, which contributes to its goals to protect the public and reduce reoffending”. Campaigners say 24-hour surveillance of asylum seekers breaches human rights, and may have a detrimental impact on migrants’ health and wellbeing. Lucie Audibert, a lawyer and legal officer for Privacy International, said: “Facial recognition is known to be an imperfect and dangerous technology that tends to discriminate against people of colour and marginalised communities. These ‘innovations’ in policing and surveillance are often driven by private companies, who profit from governments’ race towards total surveillance and control of populations. “Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanising and invasive technology against migrants.” Dr Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, said: “Electronic monitoring is an intrusive technology of control. Some individuals develop symptoms of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation and overall deterioration of mental health. “The Home Office is still not clear how long individuals will remain on monitoring. They have not provided any evidence to show why electronic monitoring is necessary or demonstrated that tags make individuals comply with immigration rules better. What we need is humane, non-degrading, community-based solutions.” A Home Office spokesperson said a “portable biometrically accessed device” would soon be introduced to complement the existing fitted device, or ankle tag. “The public expects us to monitor convicted foreign-national offenders and to suggest this contract applies to asylum seekers who have arrived via illegal means is simply wrong. Since August 2021, the Home Office has successfully tagged over 2,500 foreign criminals, reassuring victims that their perpetrators cannot escape the law and will be removed from the UK at the earliest opportunity. “Since January 2019, the government has removed over 10,000 foreign criminals. Foreign criminals should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them and the government is doing everything possible to increase the number of foreign national offenders being deported.” Buddi Limited have been approached for a comment.

Aug. 6, 2022

"Amazon to acquire Roomba robot vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion"

by J.C. DE MARTIN

*Amazon to acquire Roomba robot vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion** * /A huge move in the home robotics sector// / By Tom Warren @tomwarren Aug 5, 2022, 8:13am EDT 70 comments [...] continua qui: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/5/23293349/amazon-acquires-irobot-roomba-ro…

Aug. 6, 2022

Use One Big Server - Speculative Branches

by Alberto Cammozzo

To cloud or noto to cloud? Interessante analisi. <https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/> [....]In comparison, buying servers takes about 8 months to break even compared to using cloud servers, and 30 months to break even compared to renting. Of course, buying servers has a lot of drawbacks, and so does renting, so going forward, we will think a little bit about the “cloud premium” and whether you should be willing to pay it (spoiler alert: the answer is “yes, but not as much as the cloud companies want you to pay”).[...]

Aug. 4, 2022

Re: [nexa] Journal of Law, Market & Innovation - Innovation letters (Marco Giraudo)

by alessandro marzocchi

Code is law (la funzione legislativa abbandona sempre più le istituzioni tradizionali). - Il giorno mer 3 ago 2022 alle ore 09:56 Marco Giraudo ha scritto:you can find here the innovation letter from Prof. Thomas Hoppner "FROM CREATIVE DESTRUCTION TO DESTRUCTION OF THE CREATIVES: INNOVATION INWALLEDOFF ECOSYSTEMS" dealing with antitrust issues in the digital economy: https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/JLMI/article/view/6951

Aug. 3, 2022

Journal of Law, Market & Innovation - Innovation letters

by Marco Giraudo

Dear All, please find below the link to a couple of publications that might be of interest to the mailing list, relating to the section "Innovation letters" within the newly released Journal of Law, Market & Innovation. The “Innovation letters” covers “anomalies” in the legal-technological domain. Here the presentation: https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/JLMI/article/view/6950 Also, you can find here the innovation letter from Prof. Thomas Hoppner "FROM CREATIVE DESTRUCTION TO DESTRUCTION OF THE CREATIVES: INNOVATION IN WALLEDOFF ECOSYSTEMS" dealing with antitrust issues in the digital economy: https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/JLMI/article/view/6951 Thanks and best wishes Marco Giraudo -- Marco Giraudo Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza - Collegio Carlo Alberto <https://www.carloalberto.org/person/marco-giraudo/> Ph.D in Institutions Economics and Law

Aug. 3, 2022

Cybersicurezza, quando la miglior difesa è l'attacco

by don Luca Peyron

Un pezzo che sembra di costume, ma che ci introduce nella società. Buona lettura dl https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2022/08/02/news/hacker_per_contratto-3… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

Aug. 2, 2022