March 2024 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Joe Biden has just dealt a big defeat to big tech | Joseph Stiglitz | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/18/joe-biden-has-just-dealt-a…> Joe Biden has just dealt a big defeat to big tech | Joseph Stiglitz Joseph Stiglitz Last year, Joe Biden’s administration infuriated lobbyists representing big tech firms and others that profit from our personal data by denouncing a proposal that would have gutted domestic data privacy, online civil rights and liberties, and competition safeguards. Now, the US president’s new executive order on Americans’ data security reveals that the lobbyists had good reason to worry. After decades of data brokers and tech platforms exploiting Americans’ personal data without any oversight or restrictions, the Biden administration has announced that it will ban the transfer of certain kinds of data to China and other countries of concern. It is a small, but important, step towards protecting Americans’ sensitive personal information, in addition to government-related data. Moreover, the order is likely a precursor to additional policy responses. Americans are rightly worried about what is happening online, and their concerns extend well beyond privacy violations to a host of other digital harms, such as mis- and disinformation, social media-induced teenage anxiety, and racial incitement. The firms that make money from our data (including personal medical, financial, and geolocation information) have spent years trying to equate “free flows of data” with free speech. They will try to frame any Biden administration public interest protection as an effort to shut down access to news websites, cripple the internet, and empower authoritarians. That is nonsense. Tech companies know that if there is an open, democratic debate, consumers’ concerns about digital safeguards will easily trump concerns about their profit margins. Industry lobbyists thus have been busy trying to short-circuit the democratic process. One of their methods is to press for obscure trade provisions aimed at circumscribing what the US and other countries can do to protect personal data. It might seem obvious that a US president should protect Americans’ privacy and national security, both of which could be jeopardised depending on how and where the vast amounts of data that we all generate are processed and stored. Yet, amazingly, former President Donald Trump’s administration sought to prohibit the US from placing any restrictions on “the crossborder transfer of information, including personal information” to any country if such transfers were related to the business of any investor or service provider operating in the US or other countries signing the agreement. The Trump administration’s proposal to include this rule in the World Trade Organization did provide for one exception, which ostensibly would allow some regulation “necessary to achieve a legitimate public policy objective”, but it was designed not to work in practice. While big tech lobbyists cite the exception to rebut criticism of the broader proposal, the provision’s language comes straight from a WTO “General Exception” that has failed in 46 of 48 attempted uses. The ban on crossborder data regulation was just one of four proposals that big tech lobbyists convinced Trump officials to slip into the revised North American Free Trade Agreement and to propose at WTO-related talks. Written in arcane jargon and buried among hundreds of pages of trade-pact language, these provisions were misleadingly branded as “digital trade” rules. By prohibiting governments from adopting certain policies, the proposal’s industry-written terms threatened bipartisan efforts in the US Congress to counter big tech’s abuses of consumers, workers, and smaller businesses. They also undercut the US regulatory agencies responsible for protecting our privacy and civil rights, and for enforcing antitrust policy. In fact, had the Trump-era rules banning government restrictions on data flows gone into effect at the WTO, they would have barred the Biden administration’s own new data-security policy. Few people realised the Trump-era proposal even existed – except, of course, for the lobbyists who had been quietly commandeering trade talks. While no previous US trade pacts had included provisions pre-empting executive and congressional authority over data regulation, digital platforms suddenly would have been granted special secrecy rights. The kinds of algorithmic assessments and AI pre-screenings that Congress and executive-branch agencies deem critical to protecting the public interest would have been banned. After Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, industry lobbyists still hoped to make these anomalous rules a new norm. Their plan was to get the same provisions added to a Biden administration agreement called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But instead of going with the lobbyists, Biden administration officials worked with Congress to determine that the Trump-era proposals were not compatible with congressional and administration goals for digital privacy, competition, and regulation. Now, we can understand why tech lobbyists were so incensed by the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw support for the Trump-era proposal. They recognised that by casting aside big tech’s favoured “digital trade” handcuffs, the Biden administration was reasserting its authority to regulate the large platforms and data brokers that Americans across the political spectrum think have too much power. Trade agreements have gotten a bad name precisely because of this kind of behaviour by corporate lobbyists. The US needs a robust debate about how best to regulate big tech, and over how to maintain competition while preventing the digital harms that are stoking political polarisation and undermining democracy. Obviously, the debate should not be tethered by constraints imposed surreptitiously by big tech through trade agreements. US trade representative Katherine Tai is exactly right when she says that it would be “policy malpractice” to lock in trade rules limiting action on these matters before the US government has established its own domestic approach. Whatever one’s position on the regulation of big tech – whether one believes that its anti-competitive practices and social harms should be restricted or not – anyone who believes in democracy should applaud the Biden administration for its refusal to put the cart before the horse. The US, like other countries, should decide its digital policy democratically. If that happens, I suspect the outcome will be a far cry from what big tech and its lobbyists were pushing for. Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and a former chief economist of the World Bank. Ⓒ Project Syndicate

March 19, 2024

Re: [nexa] L'AI e il cambio di paradigma

by Antonio

> alla fine il collo di bottiglia è proprio il cloud, perché per il training, > una tantum, ce la possiamo cavare anche con Leonardo Beh, allora aspettiamo, prima dell'estate, "Modello Italia" [1] Intanto ieri XAI-ORG ha pubblicato su Github, Grok-1 [2] A. [1] https://www.wired.it/article/modello-italia-intelligenza-artificiale-igeniu… [2] https://github.com/xai-org/grok-1/

March 18, 2024

112° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 27 marzo 2024, ore 13.00

by Nexa - Media

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare al 112° Nexa Lunch Seminar che si terrà mercoledì 27 marzo, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00, con un incontro dal titolo: "'Pay or ok': you cannot be serious". Ospite dell'incontro: Marco Giraudo (Università degli Studi di Torino). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA dell'incontro: Campus Luigi Einaudi, Lungo Dora Siena, 100 Edificio D4, II piano, Aula H1 (MAPS<https://www.google.com/maps/place/Campus+Luigi+Einaudi/@45.0734963,7.699408…>) STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Di seguito maggiori dettagli: https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-112 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Officer Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

March 18, 2024

Re: [nexa] L'AI e il cambio di paradigma

by Guido Vetere

in realtà gli array di gpu servono in training, ma per far girare in inferenza o anche in fine-tuning un LLM aperto decente bastano schede da poche migliaia di euro. il problema è la scalabilità per applicazioni 'consumer', tipo GPT, ed è il motivo per cui Mistral ha fatto l'accordo con Microsoft per il suo modello 'large' alla fine il collo di bottiglia è proprio il cloud, perché per il training, una tantum, ce la possiamo cavare anche con Leonardo tutto questo nella situazione attuale, poi domani chissà che succede, magari nuove architetture tipo 'mixture of experts' saranno più scalabili, magari il mercato consumer si differenzia la risorsa scarsa che mi preoccupa di più è quella delle competenze G. On Sat, 16 Mar 2024 at 12:53, Antonio <antonio(a)piumarossa.it> wrote: > Immaginate che il prossimo primo d'aprile, le BigTech facciano al mondo un > bel pesce d'aprile. > Si mettano d'accordo e spengano i loro server. Una disconnessione, non di > un paio d'ore come è successo il 5 marzo con Facebook e consorelle [1], ma > per sempre, o comunque per un periodo molto lungo. > A parte lo shock iniziale, la comunità di sviluppatori open source sarebbe > in grado, nel giro di poco tempo, di mettere su delle alternative valide, > considerata l'enorme quantità di software libero in grado di coprire la > quasi totalità dei servizi "offerti" dalle Big. > Già, la quasi ... Ma con l'intelligenza artificiale come la mettiamo? > Non è questione di software, l'AI è basata su una manciata di linee di > codice (v. il mio nanoLLaMA [2]) disponibile in rete liberamente. > Non è questione di dati in input. Common Crawl [3] è lì per questo, basta > una connessione ed un hard disk decente e i dati sono pronti. > E' ovviamente una questione di potenza di calcolo e di corrente elettrica, > insomma, dei "chip" che riescano ad effettuare miliardi di miliardi di > "moltiplicazioni" al secondo e accesi per mesi e mesi [4]. > Quindi ... siamo "bloccati". Il miglior lock-in che l'industria del > hardware (Nvidia) e del software è riuscita a mettere in atto. > > A. > > [1] https://notizie.tiscali.it/cronaca/articoli/anomalie-siti-meta/ > [2] https://github.com/opensignature/stories > [3] https://commoncrawl.org/ > [4] https://www.saela.eu/flops/ > _______________________________________________ > nexa mailing list > nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it > https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa >

March 17, 2024

Leading adviser quits over Instagram’s failure to remove self-harm content | Instagram | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/instagram-meta-lotte-rub…> Leading adviser quits over Instagram’s failure to remove self-harm content A leading psychologist who advises Meta on suicide prevention and self-harm has quit her role, accusing the tech giant of “turning a blind eye” to harmful content on Instagram, repeatedly ignoring expert advice and prioritising profit over lives. Lotte Rubæk, who has been on Meta’s global expert group for more than three years, told the Observer that the tech giant’s ongoing failure to remove images of self-harm from its platforms is “triggering” vulnerable young women and girls to further harm themselves and contributing to rising suicide figures. Such is her disillusionment with the company and its apparent lack of desire to change, the Danish psychologist has resigned from the group, claiming Meta does not care about its users’ wellbeing and safety. In reality, she said, the company is using harmful content to keep vulnerable young people hooked to their screens in the interest of company profit. In her resignation letter, she wrote: “I can no longer be part of Meta’s SSI expert panel, as I no longer believe that our voice has a real positive impact on the safety of children and young people on your platforms.” In an interview with the Observer, Rubæk said: “On the surface it seems like they care, they have these expert groups and so on, but behind the scenes there’s another agenda that is a higher priority for them.” That agenda, she said, was “how to keep their users’ interaction and earn their money by keeping them in this tight grip on the screen, collecting data from them, selling the data and so on.” A Meta spokesperson said: “Suicide and self-harm are complex issues and we take them incredibly seriously. We’ve consulted with safety experts, including those in our suicide and self-harm advisory group, for many years and their feedback has helped us continue to make significant progress in this space. “Most recently we announced we’ll hide content that discusses suicide and self-harm from teens, even if shared by someone they follow, one of many updates we’ve made after thoughtful discussion with our advisers.” Rubæk’s warning comes as new research by Ofcom published last week found that violent online content is “unavoidable” for children in the UK, many of whom are first exposed when still in primary school. Among the main apps mentioned by those interviewed was Instagram. Rubæk, who leads the self-injury team in child and adolescent psychiatry in the Capital Region of Denmark, was first approached about joining the select group of experts – which has 24 publicly listed members – in December 2020. The invite came after she publicly criticised Meta, then known as Facebook, over an Instagram network linked to suicides of young women in Norway and Denmark following a documentary by Danish broadcaster DR. She agreed to join in the hope of helping to change the platform to make it safer for young people. After a couple of years of having her suggestions ignored – the original network she was critical of still exists – she came to the conclusion that the panel was just for show. Now she believes the invitation could have been an attempt to silence her. “Maybe they wanted me to be a part of them so I wouldn’t be so critical of them in the future.” In emails seen by the Observer Rubæk raised the difficulties users faced in trying to report potentially triggering images with Meta in October 2021. In correspondence with Martin Ruby, Meta’s head of public policy in the Nordics, she said she had tried to report an image of an emaciated female but received a message from Instagram saying they did not have enough moderators to look at the image, which stayed on the platform. In response, Ruby said in November 2021: “Our people are looking at it, but it is not that simple.” In the same email, he mentioned the secret Instagram network that Rubæk had originally criticised, saying that Meta was “taking a closer look”. But despite its well-documented links to suicides, Rubæk says the network remains up and running today. Rubæk’s patients tell her they have tried to report self-harm images on Instagram but they often remain. One client said that after reporting one image, it vanished, but she later saw it via a friend’s account, suggesting it had only been moved from her view. Meta “does a lot of tricks” to get around removing content, said Rubæk. “The AI is so clever, finding even the smallest nipple in a photo.” But when it comes to graphic pictures of self-harm that are proven to inspire others to harm themselves, she added, it appears to be a different story.

March 17, 2024

Re: [nexa] L'AI e il cambio di paradigma

by Giacomo Tesio

Ciao Antonio, Il 16 Marzo 2024 12:53:15 CET, Antonio ha scritto: > Immaginate che il prossimo primo d'aprile, le BigTech facciano al mondo un bel pesce d'aprile. > Si mettano d'accordo e spengano i loro server. Una disconnessione, non di un paio d'ore come > è successo il 5 marzo con Facebook e consorelle [1], ma per sempre, o comunque > per un periodo molto lungo. Sognamo ad occhi aperti? :-D > A parte lo shock iniziale, In effetti... una sbornia epica... :-) > la comunità di sviluppatori open source sarebbe in grado, nel giro di poco tempo, di mettere > su delle alternative valide Pochi giorni, considerata l'enorme domanda non più servita da un mercato drogato dalle sovvenzioni militari USA. > Già, la quasi ... Ma con l'intelligenza artificiale come la mettiamo? Perché, quella naturale è già esaurita? Giacomo

March 16, 2024

L'AI e il cambio di paradigma

by Antonio

Immaginate che il prossimo primo d'aprile, le BigTech facciano al mondo un bel pesce d'aprile. Si mettano d'accordo e spengano i loro server. Una disconnessione, non di un paio d'ore come è successo il 5 marzo con Facebook e consorelle [1], ma per sempre, o comunque per un periodo molto lungo. A parte lo shock iniziale, la comunità di sviluppatori open source sarebbe in grado, nel giro di poco tempo, di mettere su delle alternative valide, considerata l'enorme quantità di software libero in grado di coprire la quasi totalità dei servizi "offerti" dalle Big. Già, la quasi ... Ma con l'intelligenza artificiale come la mettiamo? Non è questione di software, l'AI è basata su una manciata di linee di codice (v. il mio nanoLLaMA [2]) disponibile in rete liberamente. Non è questione di dati in input. Common Crawl [3] è lì per questo, basta una connessione ed un hard disk decente e i dati sono pronti. E' ovviamente una questione di potenza di calcolo e di corrente elettrica, insomma, dei "chip" che riescano ad effettuare miliardi di miliardi di "moltiplicazioni" al secondo e accesi per mesi e mesi [4]. Quindi ... siamo "bloccati". Il miglior lock-in che l'industria del hardware (Nvidia) e del software è riuscita a mettere in atto. A. [1] https://notizie.tiscali.it/cronaca/articoli/anomalie-siti-meta/ [2] https://github.com/opensignature/stories [3] https://commoncrawl.org/ [4] https://www.saela.eu/flops/

March 16, 2024

Fwd: [mpiwg-announce] AI and Digital seminar series

by J.C. DE MARTIN

> > *From: *Etienne Benson <ebenson(a)mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de> > *Subject: **[mpiwg-announce] Fwd: AI and Digital seminar series* > *Date: *March 15, 2024 at 5:11:43 PM GMT+1 > *To: *Mpiwg Announce <mpiwg-announce(a)mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de> > >> AI and the Digital - Final Poster PNG copy.jpeg

March 16, 2024

Re: [nexa] The Software Heritage Archive wants to deadname me forever: part 1

by Giacomo Tesio

Caro Marco Anselmo Luca, pur essendo felice di rassicurarti, ti suggerirei di non tediare oltre l'intera lista con le tue (pur divertentissime :-D) esigenze personali. On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 01:14:04PM +0100, Marco Anselmo Luca Calamari wrote: > Ho invece letto il tuo utilizzo di sed per le operazioni di correzione del mio > nome. > > Ti confesso che sono un po' preoccupato, perché non mi è chiaro come tu lo possa > usare con le copie offline e di backup, tenuto conto che alcuni di questi mezzi > sono a sola scrittura. [...] > vorrei che tu mi confortassi che farai altrettanto su tutti i tuoi > supporti offline o di sola lettura. > Mi rendo conto che questo implicherà un poco ecologico consumo quotidiano di > cdrom ma, come mi insegni, meglio sacrificare i cdrom che le persone. Figurati, sono felicissimo di confortarti E di alleggerirti la coscienza. Non mantengo copie di backup di mailing list che dispongono di archivi pubblici affidabili: nessun cdrom verrà sacrificato al tuo vezzo. sed è più che sufficiente. > Confido che il tuo dominio dell'informatica ti consentira di automatizzare > facilmente l'operazione. Meglio ancora: grazie al mio dominio dell'informatica non ho alcun bisogno di automatizzare la modifica di backup che sarebbero superflui. Come vedi, la tua fede è ben riposta! ;-) > Ti devo infine rivolgere un'ultima richiesta, che mi è venuta in mente mentre > davo ripetizioni di fisica 2 a mia nipote. > > Con il tuo uso di connessioni wireless e bluetooth il mio nome errato è stato > trasformato in onde hertziane, che come onde sferiche si stanno diffondendo > nello spazio. > Sono molto preoccupato che tra 4 anni gli abitanti di Proxima Centauri > certamente in grado di craccare il WPA, vengano a conoscenza del mio nome > errato. > > Ti pregherei quindi di creare adatti campi hertziani di correzione > superluminali, in modo che i poveri alieni ricevano onde hertziane corrette, e > non si facciano un'opinione errata di me. Anche su questo, posso rassicurarti: le onde elettromagnetiche che giungeranno su alpha centauri fra 4 anni saranno indistinguibili dalla radiazione cosmica di fondo. Sia chiaro: non è merito mio! Fortunatamente il Signore è previdente e aveva già pensato alle tue esigenze ben prima che tu fossi concepito. Chiedi pure al prossimo evangelista che ti compare in sogno: confermerà! A presto! Giacomo PS: sei sicuro che tua nipote non trarrebbe giovamento da un docente di fisica più aggiornato? la CMBR fu scoperta nel 1964... :-D PPS: so che questa era "l'ultima richiesta" ma... se dovessi scoprire di avere ulteriori venerabili esigenze, ti prego di scrivermele in privato.

March 15, 2024

Re: [nexa] riscrivere internet (was Re: The Software Heritage Archive wants to deadname me forever: part 1)

by 380°

Buongiorno, perdonatemi il messaggio è partito incompleto per errore, chiedo scusa!!! 380° <g380(a)biscuolo.net> writes: [...] > ...e ogni altra persona o organizzazione che ancora osa mantenere in > _archivio_ il proprio "deadname": > https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Rob+Speer%22+Luminoso&ia=web > > tipo: > > 1. Youtube > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hmhnD0G9RY > "Rob Speer is the chief scientist at Luminoso. He is an alumnus of the > MIT Media Lab, where he worked on the ConceptNet project, an open, > multilingual semantic network." > > 2. MIT Educational Studies Program > https://esp.mit.edu/teach/teachers/rspeer/bio.html > "ROB SPEER, MIT alum who does AI, and music on the side [...] Rob Speer > graduated from MIT with degrees in computer science and music [...]" ma anche, per citare solo i più noti: 3. Forbes perché usa ancora il suo "deadname": https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/04/aint-nuthin-so-non-c… «In 2010, OMCS co-founder and director Catherine Havasi, with Rob Speer, Dennis Clark and Jason Alonso, created Luminoso,» oltre alla Wayback Machine (di nuovo?!?) perché contiene 7 copie dell'articolo: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.forbes.com/sites/co… 4. Wired perché ha questo articolo: https://www.wired.com/2017/08/instagram-kevin-systrom-wants-to-clean-up-the… «Earlier this year, the chief scientist of the text analytics company Luminoso, Rob Speer, built an algorithm based on word embeddings to try to understand the sentiment of text posts.» ...e indovinate un po', sì ancora la Wayback Machine perché contiene 605 copie di questo articolo: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.wired.com/2017/08/i… ulteriori divertissment via: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Rob+Speer%22+Luminoso&ia=web Ma le due *perle* della collezione sono: perla 1. il suo stesso blog rspeer.github.io perché nelle sue pagine usa ancora il suo "deadname", es.: http://rspeer.github.io/blog/2013/09/04/emoji-are-more-common-than-hyphens/ «Posted by Rob Speer Sep 4th, 2013» perla 2. bugs.launchpad.net perché non ha corretto il suo "deadname" qui: https://launchpad.net/~rspeer e nemmeno in TUTTI i bug archiviati in quella piattaforma nei quali l'id utente rspeer compare come bug reporter (1 bug report, #524508) [1] o come commenter (3 bug report) [2] ...e questi sono SOLO i bug report contenuti nel gruppo "Luminoso" https://launchpad.net/luminoso che risulta essere TUTT'ORA registrato a nome "Rob Speer", che è tutt'ora il gestore di quel gruppo... sicuramente starà lavorando per eliminare quel "deadname". Comunque, i bug report individuati sopra sono un *sottoinsieme* di quelli registrati, tutti gli altri potete trovarli con una ricerca avanzata https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/+bugs?advanced=1 inserendo rspeer come reporter (35 bug reports) o come commenter (75 bug reports). C'è un sacco di lavoro da fare! Saluti, 380° [1] mi spiace ma l'URL fa proprio schifo: https://bugs.launchpad.net/luminoso/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=datecre… [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/luminoso/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=datecre… -- 380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego) «Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché» Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.

March 15, 2024