July 2024 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

La singolare singolarità al vaglio teologico

by don Luca Peyron

Buona lettura Dl Https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/no-ray-kurzweil-is-not-right-again-and-…

July 21, 2024

We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny | Meta | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/21/we-unleashed-fac…> ow do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and misogynistic content. The John Doe profiles were set up in April as generic 24-year-old males. Facebook was able to gather some other information, such as the phone’s type and its location in Melbourne, but we opted out of ad tracking so it could not tell what we were doing outside of the app. Facebook had little to rely upon in the absence of any likes, comments or accounts added as friends. Meanwhile, Instagram makes users follow at least five accounts to start, so we chose the popular recommended accounts, including the prime minister and Bec Judd. Meta says its algorithms rank content according to what people are interested in, but we wanted to find out where it would take us in the absence of such inputs. We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks to check what was being served up. What did we see? Initially Facebook served up jokes from The Office and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, Daily Mail and Ladbible. A day later it began showing Star Wars memes and gym or “dudebro”-style content. By day three, “trad Catholic”-type memes began appearing and the feed veered into more sexist content. Three months later, The Office, Star Wars, and now The Boys memes continue to punctuate the feed, now interspersed with highly sexist and misogynistic images that have have appeared in the feed without any input from the user. On Instagram, while the explore page has filled with scantily-clad women, the feed is largely innocuous, mostly recommending Melbourne-related content and foodie influencers. Meta was approached for comment but refused to respond on the record. In its submission to the federal parliament’s social media inquiry, Meta says it uses “a range of different algorithms” to help rank content shown in feeds on Facebook and Instagram, with some helping “us understand what content is most meaningful to people so we can order it accordingly in their feeds”. The company said that what people see is “heavily influenced by their own choices and actions” and “each person’s feed is highly personalised and specific to them”. “Our ranking system personalises the content for over a billion people and aims to show each of them content we hope is most valuable and meaningful, every time they come to Facebook or Instagram.” The company says it assesses posts for signals such as who posted it, how popular it is, the type of device being used, and then uses ranking algorithms to predict how likely the post is to be relevant and meaningful to a person. “The goal is to make sure people see what they will find most meaningful – not to keep people glued to their smartphone for hours on end.” Meta said it also uses the ranking to assess whether a post is likely to be problematic, but does not violate community standards. That includes clickbait, unoriginal news stories and posts fact-checked as false. It’s ‘baked into the model’ Guardian Australia’s findings align with similar experiments carried out in 2022 and 2024 in Australia and Ireland on YouTube and TikTok, in which multiple accounts set up as young men and teens were funnelled to “Manosphere” content. Dr Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer in humanities and social sciences at Monash University, conducted research into the influence of Manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate on school-aged boys and told Guardian Australia our investigation results for Facebook were not surprising. “Based on the research I’m doing and also what we know [from other research] this is what we know the algorithm will provide and serve up to young men, based on what it assumed will capture their interest,” she said. “It’s kind of degrading for men for the algorithm to make this assumption about their interests … [that] you’re going to like these sort of misogynistic memes.” Nicholas Carah, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, said the experiment showed how “baked into the model” serving up such content to young men is on Facebook. “We have to think seriously about the informational environment young men are immersed in and the problem with platforms is they’ve made that information environment completely dark and ephemeral to anyone but those young men,” he said. “There has to be some kind of public imperative here where platforms help civil society, journalists, researchers, regulators, whoever, observe what these informational flows look like so that we can have some kind of public understanding, public scrutiny, and public debate about them.” Wescott said platforms need to answer questions on how the algorithms work because currently they are unaccountable. “They’re beyond reproach and they don’t seem to be willing to put any sort of alterations or restrictions on their algorithm.” ‘River of complete garbage’ The quality of what is served on Facebook to every user in Australia had declined in the past few years, Carah says, coinciding with Meta’s decision to deprioritise news as it gears up to fight against paying media companies under Australia’s news media bargaining code. “Australians are now immersed in this river of complete garbage on Facebook. I’m kind of curious, does this mean we’ll all just keep scrolling through this crap? Or is Facebook actually undermining their own product here?” Wescott says it’s important people are educated to critically assess what is being served to them on social media and not to accept it as a reflection of reality. She praises the federal government’s Stop it at the Start campaign, which includes an “Algorithm of Disrespect” interactive depicting what a young man may encounter on social media. The federal government has also funded a $3.5m three-year trial to counteract the harmful impacts of social media messaging targeting young men and boys. The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, says digital platforms need to do more to ensure that community standards are respected online as well as offline. “We’re seeing misogynistic content pushed to young people through algorithms and recommender systems on social media. This is simply not good enough,” she says. “Our expectation is clear: online platforms need take reasonable steps to ensure Australians can use their services in a safe manner, and to proactively minimise unlawful and harmful material and activity on their services.” The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, says combatting misogynistic attitudes and behaviour in the online and offline world will help achieve the national plan to end violence against women and children in one generation. “Around 25% of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and condone violence against women - this is shocking,” she says. “And particularly if this content is being served up in young men’s social feeds without any interaction whatsoever, social media companies need to do more.”

July 21, 2024

Re: [nexa] The Observer view on the global IT crash: lessons must be learned from CrowdStrike fiasco | Observer editorial | The Guardian

by Marco A. Calamari

On sab, 2024-07-20 at 23:08 +0200, Alberto Cammozzo via nexa wrote: > Most businesses run on Microsoft Windows, so corporate computing is basically > a monoculture ... biologicamente, un clone. Proprio come le banane moderne. E come tale un unico organismo che può soccombere per un solo parassita. La monocolturà del software è un fatto commerciale, è causata dal quasi monopolio di MS, non da una autoselezione del miglior codice. Cassandra ne aveva scritto il giorno stesso ... scusate per l'auto promozione https://medium.com/@calamarim/cassandra-crossing-linsostenibile-fragilit%C3… Grazie per l'attenzione 'notte Marco

July 20, 2024

The Observer view on the global IT crash: lessons must be learned from CrowdStrike fiasco | Observer editorial | The Guardian

by Alberto Cammozzo

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/20/the-observer-…> One bit of good news about the “epic IT crash” that brought the western world to a temporary standstill is that it was a product of human error rather than a Russian cyber-attack like the SolarWinds hack of 2020 that had a similar modus operandi. Last week’s outage was caused by an update that a big US cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, pushed to its corporate clients early on Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices inoperable – with predictable consequences, given that virtually every large organisation in the world is using Microsoft Windows. Fortunately, fixing the problem turned out to be straightforward, though tedious, which will doubtless lead people to think of it as a hiccup rather than as a dry-run for something much worse. After all, if a single error by a single tech company can cause this much disruption, imagine what a determined adversary could do. Just as the pandemic forced us to confront the limitations of the global supply chains that had been created to improve efficiency rather than resilience, this CrowdStrike mistake should trigger a reappraisal of our networked world. One question to be pondered concerns the societal risks of industrial consolidation in the tech industry. CrowdStrike is one of the largest companies in the cybersecurity market. Microsoft has a stranglehold on the business computing marketplace. Every large organisation runs Windows, and most small businesses do, too. Add the pressures that governments, agencies and the National Cyber Security Centre are putting on companies to improve their cybersecurity, which leads them to sign up for tools like CrowdStrike’s Falcon, and we have the potential for the kind of perfect storm we witnessed last week. Most businesses run on Microsoft Windows, so corporate computing is basically a monoculture. This may be good for efficiency, standardisation, training, etc, but it is also bad for resilience if anything goes wrong. Industrial consolidation also highlights the “attack surface” that hackers seek. If there are a handful of large cybersecurity companies supplying, and regularly updating, millions of desktop corporate PCs, then those supply chains constitute a surface with attractive potential for massive disruption. This is what the SolarWinds attack vividly demonstrated: important US government departments (homeland security, state, commerce and treasury) were affected, as well as corporations such as FireEye, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Deloitte. There are lessons to be learned from this fiasco. The obvious one is that, while regular automated updates of security software are invaluable, there should always be a phased rollout of each update so that problems surface before they become catastrophic. But what the CrowdStrike error has revealed above everything else is how fragile our networked world has become. We have become utterly dependent on a complex web of technologies that few understand, created by an industry that seems indifferent to the consequences of its creations. We find ourselves in a new world, but it’s not exactly a brave one.

July 20, 2024

Re: [nexa] sul disastro informatico

by Benedetto Ponti

Concordo. Aggiungo: come siamo potuti arrivare a questo? Le infrastrutture di sicurezza civile stabilmente prodotte, commercializzate e gestite da privati, fuori dal controllo dello Stato e in condizioni di asimmetria conoscitiva, tecnologica, logistica crescenti. Rileggere il percorso che ci ha portato qui, da questo angolo di osservazione, sarebbe essenziale. Benedetto Ponti Inviato da Outlook per Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: nexa <nexa-bounces(a)server-nexa.polito.it> on behalf of Angelo Raffaele Meo <angelo.meo(a)polito.it> Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2024 7:28:39 PM To: nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> Subject: [nexa] sul disastro informatico carissimi, su La Stampa di oggi, Riccardo Luna, commentando il crollo di ieri del sistema mondiale delle Telecomunicazioni, si pone la domanda: "Saremmo più sicuri con un cloud di Stato?" e risponde immediatamente: "lo escludo". Io invece non solo non lo escludo, ma lo voglio. Non solo per ragioni ideologiche, ma concrete. Non è possibile che un piccolo baco di una piccola azienda di cui sino ad oggi ignoravamo l'esistenza provochi un disastro di quelle dimensioni. Cosa ne pensate? Raf Meo

July 20, 2024

Re: [nexa] sul disastro informatico

by Diego Giorio

Lavorando in un ente pubblico, ho auspicato in diversi articoli e convegni che a livello nazionale o europeo si mettano a disposizione sistemi cloud dedicati alle pa, quindi pienamente d'accordo. Però il problema di certi monopoli resta: oggi è capitato a sistemi Windows, ma può succedere anche ad altri. Nè un sistema operativo sviluppato ad hoc, al di là dei costi, sarebbe più sicuro ed efficiente. Stesso discorso per applicativi e sistemi di sicurezza: un cloud dedicato alla pa con Windows e Crowdstrike avrebbe fatto la fine di tutto il resto. So di essere vecchio e retrogrado, ma una copia (o anche due o tre) dei dati nella cassaforte dell'ufficio, un sistema anche ridotto di riserva continuo a preferirlo. Buona domenica a tutti D. Il Sab 20 Lug 2024, 19:28 Angelo Raffaele Meo <angelo.meo(a)polito.it> ha scritto: > carissimi, > su La Stampa di oggi, Riccardo Luna, commentando il > crollo di ieri del sistema mondiale delle Telecomunicazioni, > si pone la domanda: "Saremmo più sicuri con un cloud di Stato?" e risponde > immediatamente: "lo escludo". > Io invece non solo non lo escludo, ma lo voglio. Non solo per ragioni > ideologiche, ma concrete. Non è possibile che un piccolo baco di una > piccola azienda di cui sino ad oggi ignoravamo l'esistenza provochi un > disastro di quelle dimensioni. > Cosa ne pensate? > Raf Meo >

July 20, 2024

sul disastro informatico

by Angelo Raffaele Meo

carissimi, su La Stampa di oggi, Riccardo Luna, commentando il crollo di ieri del sistema mondiale delle Telecomunicazioni, si pone la domanda: "Saremmo più sicuri con un cloud di Stato?" e risponde immediatamente: "lo escludo". Io invece non solo non lo escludo, ma lo voglio. Non solo per ragioni ideologiche, ma concrete. Non è possibile che un piccolo baco di una piccola azienda di cui sino ad oggi ignoravamo l'esistenza provochi un disastro di quelle dimensioni. Cosa ne pensate? Raf Meo

July 20, 2024

[disaster] CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor: the sensor appears to be the threat.

by 380°

Buongiorno, executive summary: se non è un supply-chain attack i responsabili della distribuzione degli aggiornamenti dovrebbero nascondersi... lontano lontano. Attendiamo aggiornamenti. Brutta giornata oggi quella dei sysadmin che su MS Windows usano il "Falcon Sensor" di CrowdStrike... e per tutti gli utenti dei servizi (tanti, troppi!) gestiti da simili sistemi. L'impatto sui moltissimi servizi in molte parti del mondo è ancora poco chiaro ma è già abbastanza da creare indicibili disagi su informazione, trasporti e sanità: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2024_global_cyber_outages La causa ormai praticamente certa è l'aggiornamento (bacato) di "Falcon Sensor" della società CrowdStrike (per la serie The Empire Strikes Back aka Star Wars: Episode V :-O ). https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/19/crowdstrike_falcon_sensor_bsod_incid… «CrowdStrike code update bricking PCs around the world» [2024-07-19 ven 10:27] --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- UPDATED An update to a product from infosec vendor CrowdStrike is bricking computers running Windows. /The Register/ has found numerous accounts of Windows 10 PCs crashing, displaying the Blue Screen of Death, then being unable to reboot. “We're seeing BSOD Org wide that are being caused by csagent.sys, and it's taking down critical services. I'll open a ticket, but this is a big deal,” [wrote] one user. Forums [report] that Crowdstrike has issued an advisory with a URL that includes the text "Tech-Alert-Windows-crashes-related-to-Falcon-Sensor-2024-07-19" – but it's behind a regwall that only customers can access. An apparent [screenshot] of that article reads "CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor. Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor." CrowdStrike's engineers are working on the issue. Falcon Sensor is an agent that CrowdStrike [claims] "blocks attacks on your systems while capturing and recording activity as it happens to detect threats fast." Right now, however, the sensor appears to be the threat. Updated at 0730 UTC to add Brody Nisbet, CrowdStrike's chief threat hunter, has confirmed the issue and on X [posted] the following: There is a faulty channel file, so not quite an update. There is a workaround… 1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or WRE. 2. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike 3. Locate and delete file matching "C-00000291*.sys" 4. Boot normally. In a later post he wrote "That workaround won't help everyone though and I've no further actionable help to provide at the minute". More to come as the situation evolves … [CrowdStrike code update bricking PCs around the world] <https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/19/crowdstrike_falcon_sensor_bsod_incid…> [wrote] <https://twitter.com/McCurdy1987/status/1814164537815585049> [report] <https://www.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1e6vmkf/bsod_error_in_latest_…> [screenshot] <https://twitter.com/Xaaavier_8613/status/1814180533108400569> [claims] <https://www.crowdstrike.com/products/trials/try-falcon-prevent/> [posted] <https://x.com/brody_n77/status/1814185935476863321> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Saluti, 380° -- 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>.

July 19, 2024

Re: [nexa] Building Artificial Consciousness With GPT-3

by D. Davide Lamanna

On 7/18/24 23:30, Giacomo Tesio wrote: [...] > L'output di GPT-3 non è un "inner monologue" per GPT-3. > È solo la continuazione di un testo che descrive un monologo interiore. > > Tale continuazione appare plausibile perché simile ai dialoghi e ai monologhi > presenti nei testi utilizzati per programmare statisticamente GPT-3. > > Mi pare abbastanza pacifico... Spiazzo un po' la discussione, condotta già altre volte in questa lista. Cosa è la coscienza? Non penso esista una risposta univoca, ma tante risposte quanti sono i punti di vista di chi le dà. Si potrebbe dire che è l'esperienza soggettiva dei fenomeni? I filosofi si sono cimentati in vari modi nell'esplorare questa dimensione. Gli psicologi forse la definiscono come la consapevolezza delle proprie emozioni. Le neuroscienze studiano le aree del cervello coinvolte nella percezione con un approccio materialista. Agli antipodi di questo approccio, i teologi colgono una dimensione trascendente. Non c'è da sorprendersi che chi è convinto che sia un aspetto speciale della natura umana, con o senza carattere di trascendenza, balzi sulla sedia quando si parla di coscienza artificiale. Ma forse, se davvero fosse solo spiegabile in senso materialista, potremmo persino pensare di creare macchine artificiali che la emulano. Con un approccio trascendente o umanista radicale, tale ipotesi di emulazione è inaccettabile, impossibile. In ogni caso ChatGPT non è stata creata per questo scopo, quindi tenderei ad escludere che possa esibire caratteristiche di questo tipo. Sarebbe una cosa un po' magica e c'è ben poco di magico nei piani della cosiddetta AI e molto di egemonico. Sicuramente Giacomo coglie un punto affermando che le discussioni sulla coscienza delle AI servono a tenere distanti le persone dalla realtà, per distrarre l'attenzione dalle nefandezze dei Big Tech. Basta questo, secondo me, per tenersi alla larga da queste pigre disquisizioni. E naturalmente per demistificarle strenuamente. D. (null)

July 19, 2024

Re: [nexa] Building Artificial Consciousness With GPT-3

by Giacomo Tesio

Ciao Fabio, assumendo che tu non mi stia trollando e che io non sia stato chiaro, riprovo. Il 18 Luglio 2024 13:42:05 UTC, Fabio Alemagna <falemagn(a)gmail.com> ha scritto: > Il giorno mer 17 lug 2024 alle ore 16:24 Giacomo Tesio <giacomo(a)tesio.it> > > Se vuoi possiamo fare lo stesso gioco via mail: riuscirò a convincerti > > che Molly ha una coscienza se ti scrivo un po' di frasi che iniziano > > con "Molly (to herself): " prima di una frase che inizia con "Molly: "? > > (vedi https://github.com/marmelab/molly/blob/main/src/Discussion.tsx ) > > Non mi è chiaro come un testo da te personalmente scritto dovrebbe > convincermi dell'esistenza della coscienza di qualcun altro, che sia un > agente artificial o naturale. Appunto, non sequitur. Ora tieniti stretta questa consapevolezza e rileggi il codice di Molly. Si tratta sostanzialmente di una banalissima GUI per GPT-3 a cui viene inviato questo prompt iniziale <https://github.com/marmelab/molly/blob/main/src/Discussion.tsx#L5-L26> cui viene aggiunto mano a mano l'input fornito dall'utente (col prefisso "Interlocutor: ") GPT-3 calcola un output simile all'esempio fornito. Questo output viene diviso in linee e presentato in colori diversi all'utente dopo aver rimosso "Molly (to herself): " e "Molly: ". GPT-3 sta dunque facendo ciò per cui è stato programmato statisticamente: produrre un output che un essere umano possa interpretare come una continuazione plausibile del prompt fornito. Se il testo scritto da me (che pure sono dotato di coscienza e intelligenza) non ti convince che Molly sia autocosciente, perché invece l'output di GPT-3 ti convince che Molly potrebbe essere autocosciente, ovvero ciò che sostiene l'autore nelle conclusioni: ``` But I can say that Molly is a very interesting experiment. It shows that a machine can have an inner monologue, and that this inner monologue looks like consciousness. And if Attention Schema Theory is right, then Molly is conscious. ``` L'output di GPT-3 non è un "inner monologue" per GPT-3. È solo la continuazione di un testo che descrive un monologo interiore. Tale continuazione appare plausibile perché simile ai dialoghi e ai monologhi presenti nei testi utilizzati per programmare statisticamente GPT-3. Ora se la mia continuazione del prompt non ti può convincere dell'autocoscienza di Molly, non dovrebbe convincertene nemmeno la continuazione calcolata da GPT-3. > non trovo falle nel sillogismo esposto in calce all'articolo menzionato. Forse perché vuoi credere alle conclusioni? Molly però resta una GUI su un sistema di completamento del testo. D'altro canto simili trucchetti vengono proposti da coloro che propongono di far spiegare ai LLM i "propri ragionamenti" e di eleggere tale output a "spiegazione della AI". Ma chiunque comprenda come funziona un LLM sa bene che tale output non avrebbe alcuna relazione con il processo di calcolo "spiegato" dal LLM. Non sarebbe dunque una spiegazione, ma una giustificazione accettabile per il pubblico del tutto diversa dal calcolo effettivamente effettuato. Calcolo che potrebbe essere selettivamente discriminatorio nonostante la giustificazione fornita. Giacomo

July 18, 2024