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Crypto-* e Blockchain, raccontate da Vitalik Buterin
by Damiano Verzulli Sept. 11, 2023

Sept. 11, 2023

A naso, in questa lista ci sono numerosi esponenti del mondo accademico, non soltanto in ambito squisitamente "tecnico/ICT", ma anche in settori che definirei complementari e/o parzialmente sovrapponibili. È a questi ultimi che penso, mentre scrivo questo messaggio. Premetto che non sono un esperto di cryptomonete, né di blockchain e non ho difficolta' a dire che nonostante, negli anni, abbia provato piu' volte ad approfondire il tema, ho sempre trovato un significativo "deserto" (...ma i miei occhi erano "fortemente tecnici") o, peggio, "nebbia fitta". Di fatto, non sono neanche riuscito *mai* a trovare un interlocutore al quale io potessi fare qualche domanda... con la speranza di avere una risposta "ragionata" e che mi convincesse. Alla fine, ho sempre scelto di... lasciar perdere e tornare agli altri task. Tale approccio è leggermente cambiato un paio d'anni fa, quando una persona che stimo si è messo "a studiare" e... si è fatto una certa competenza (tecnica, in primis... ma non solo). Quella persona, ad inizio settembre, mi ha suggerito un libro: => "Proof of Stake: la nascita di Ethereum e la filosofia della blockchain" - Vitalik Buterin: - https://ecommerce.ilsole24ore.com/shopping24/proof-of-stake.html che ho comprato giovedi' scorso. Il testo è in edicola (anche se si fa molta fatica a trovarlo), col Sole 24 ore, ed è la traduzione in Italiano (molto ben fatta) dell'originale inglese. Si tratta di un testo che raccoglie i principali scritti di Vitalik Buterin (russo, classe 1994, emigrato in Canada, arrivato 2° ad una edizione delle olimpiadi d'informatica organizzate qui, in Italia) che a partire dal 2014 ha iniziato a scrivere di BitCoin (la moneta), di blockchain, e, soprattutto, DI TUTTI QUEGLI ELEMENTI NON-TECNICI CHE NE RAPPRESENTANO LA RAGION D'ESSERE (la filosofia delle decentralizzazione; i problemi della centralizzazione; la gestione del consenso; le problematiche legate alla gestione delle "comunita'"; etc. etc.). Lo promuovo, qui in lista, perché vi ho trovato numerosissimi ed interessantissimi spunti di riflessione che.... sono tutto, fuorché "tecnici". C'e' sicuramente una componente "tecnica"... ma è ASSOLUTAMENTE TRASCURABILE rispetto al resto dei contenuti, cha spaziano --in modo estremamente argomentato-- su temi di "filosofia", "sociologia", "psicologia" ed altri. Ecco: ai NON-tecnici di questa lista, a coloro che NON si occupano di tecnologia per vivere, chiederei di dargli un'occhiata e poi, magari, raccontare qui la propria visione (non-tecnica) del mondo descritto da Vitalik, e del suo "sogno" di realizzare qualcosa (di tecnico) che possa risolvere (nel mondo "digitale") quei problemi che invece, nel mondo reale, non si riescono a risolvere... Un caro saluto, DV -- Damiano Verzulli e-mail: damiano(a)verzulli.it --- possible?ok:while(!possible){open_mindedness++} --- "...I realized that free software would not generate the kind of income that was needed. Maybe in USA or Europe, you may be able to get a well paying job as a free software developer, but not here [in Africa]..." -- Guido Sohne - 1973-2008 http://ole.kenic.or.ke/pipermail/skunkworks/2008-April/005989.html

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MEMENTO | 164° Mercoledì di Nexa | 13 settembre 2023, ore 17.00
by Nexa Media Sept. 11, 2023

Sept. 11, 2023

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi ricordiamo che *mercoledì 13 settembre*, alle ore 17.00, si terrà il *164° Mercoledì di Nexa* con un incontro dal titolo /*"La rivoluzione digitale. Storia di un'ideologia"*/. Ospite dell'incontro: *Gabriele Balbi* (USI Università della Svizzera italiana)/*.*/ _L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE._ _SEDE FISICA_ dell'incontro: Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono *Portineria* e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI <https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. _STANZA VIRTUALE_ dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Maggiori informazioni alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-164 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(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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The lessons of Chile’s struggle against Big Tech
by Daniela Tafani Sept. 11, 2023

Sept. 11, 2023

The lessons of Chile’s struggle against Big Tech Salvador Allende’s greatest legacy is his attempt to democratise technology By Evgeny Morozov<https://www.newstatesman.com/author/evgeny-morozov> <https://www.newstatesman.com/author/evgeny-morozov> On 1 August 1973, a seemingly mundane diplomatic summit took place in Lima, Peru. But there was nothing remotely mundane about the summit’s revolutionary agenda. The attendees – mostly high-ranking diplomats from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – aspired to create a more just technological world order. A world order that may have prevented the rise of Silicon Valley – and of Big Tech along with it. A good first step, they thought, was to join forces and explore ways to curb the growing influence of multinational corporations. This was particularly pressing in the realm of advanced technologies, the majority of which originated from the US and western Europe. These technologies often had to be imported to Latin America at exceedingly high costs. One study found that between 1962 and 1968 Chile alone saw its payments for tech services doubled, with the country’s companies paying for many expired or non-existent patents. It was in order to avoid such absurd external obstacles that the five nations gathering in Peru had signed the Andean Pact four years earlier. A regional free-trade agreement of a radical, almost extinct kind, it aimed to facilitate the collective pursuit of industrialisation and economic development. Through it, the five countries would pool their political power and try to avoid the steep costs associated with importing foreign technology. The pact also fostered the establishment of joint research and development projects to create domestic alternatives. Orlando Letelier, then serving as foreign minister under the socialist president Salvador Allende, led the Chilean delegation. His speech in Lima echoed the radical aspects of Allende’s technology agenda, noting that “we live in a world where the Roman concept of property, when applied to technology, fosters exploitation”. Letelier highlighted the increasing technological dependence of the region. “Today,” he lamented, “approximately 500 multinational corporations control 90 per cent of the world’s productive technology.” To mitigate such disparities, Letelier called for the creation of a new international institution. It would facilitate developing countries’ access to the benefits of advanced technology and research, including patents, in a manner akin to how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) grants them access to financial capital. Admittedly, this proposed International Technology Fund would need to adopt a less prescriptive approach than the IMF and be less subordinate to the US<https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us>. Here was a blueprint for an alternative technological world order, informed by an insight lost on most of today’s technology analysts: a country’s technological backwardness is often the result of long-running geopolitical and geoeconomic factors – it almost never stems simply from rigid bureaucracy or the lack of an innovation culture. In other words, success in the global technology game was a factor of a country’s power and sovereignty, not of its inventiveness and openness to new ideas. In the new global system envisioned by Letelier and Allende, each nation, including those currently referred to as the Global South, would eventually be capable of developing their own unique industrial – and technological – stack. This strategy would prevent them from having to rent various technologies – think of cloud computing or artificial intelligence today – from the multinationals, thereby halting the cycle of their own technological and economic dependency. But this vision was never realised. Merely six weeks after the summit in Lima, on 11 September 1973, Allende’s government was toppled in a military coup that ushered in General Augusto Pinochet’s cruel dictatorship. Orlando Letelier spent the next 12 months in brutal concentration camps, alongside many other prominent members of Allende’s administration. Upon his eventual release and exile to the US, Letelier fervently pursued the anti-Pinochet cause. He became a vehement critic of the neoliberal economists advising the Chilean government at the time, known as the Chicago Boys. A month after the Nation published his major exposé on Milton Friedman and his followers – an essay that showed the bankruptcy of their solutions to Chile’s economies woes – Letelier met a tragic end. His car was blown up in Washington, DC, on direct orders from Pinochet’s regime. One month later, Chile dropped out of the Andean Pact. This was the end of Chile’s ambitious – and completely forgotten – struggle to reclaim technologies from Big Tech and Big Capital. As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup, it’s tempting to see Allende as a tragic but hapless figure, who spent most of his short-lived presidency fending off efforts to unseat him. It’s true that the ambitious agenda outlined in “40 Measures” the famous electoral programme of Allende’s six-party Popular Unity coalition, was secondary to the government’s efforts to survive the onslaught of the CIA, multinational companies, Chilean oligarchs and various far-right terrorist movements. And yet, for all the problems and crises, there were plenty of radical, utopian and even otherworldly initiatives that still have the power to inspire us today. Surprisingly, many of them had to do with technology; Letelier’s push for the tech equivalent of the IMF was just one of many examples. Common to all of them was an understanding of technology through the lens of geopolitics and heterodox economics – a lens that got destroyed by the global neoliberal transformation that followed the coup. While Pinochet embraced the Chicago School of economics, Allende’s government was the beneficiary of what might be called the Santiago School of technology. And as we contemplate a post-neoliberal future, free of the Chicago Boys’ influence, we have much to learn from these humbler but wiser Santiago Boys. The Santiago School owes its existence to the fact that the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Cepal) is headquartered in the Chilean capital. For the first few decades after its launch in 1948, this institution challenged the mainstream account of free trade – and technology’s role in it – which has been espoused by economists in Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Imagine a richer country selling cars to a poorer one, which, in turn, reciprocates with bananas. As the two specialise and introduce technological innovations, prices of both commodities fall. Everyone is happy; progress marches ahead. The Cepal economists disagreed with this rosy prediction, arguing that, over time, the developed countries tend to come out stronger from such trades. First, technological innovation benefits the car manufacturers more than it helps the banana growers; you can’t 3D-print tropical fruit. Second, rich countries that typically produce more advanced goods also have powerful trade unions, who, in defending the interests of their workers, also prevent the prices of cars from adjusting as swiftly as those of bananas. The Cepal economists argued that, in a world of ever-sophisticated technology, free trade favours the rich and the powerful: over time, it takes more and more Latin American bananas to pay for one European car. To quote one important participant in this debate – the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then a mere academic – the invisible hand of the market resembles that of the wicked stepmother: instead of correcting inequalities, it aggravates them. Hence the Santiago/Cepal dissent to the free-trade vision of Chicago: instead of accepting free trade and eliminating tariffs, developing countries should use trade and industrial policy to manufacture more of their current imports domestically. Maybe not the whole car yet but, say, the steering wheels and the tyres. This policy, known as import-substitution, quickly earned the support of reformist governments all over Latin America. It was easily the hottest policy idea of the 1950s. But a decade in, some dissenting Santiago-based economists and sociologists – many of them, such as Cardoso, were Brazilians fleeing the country’s own military coup of 1964 – began to grasp its limits. For one thing, you can’t simply make steering wheels the way one grows bananas: it requires expensive machines and the kind of know-how protected by intellectual property laws. If a country simply imports them from the US and western Europe – all in the hopes of “industrialising” and building advanced industries – it risks developing an even greater dependence on the advanced economies and multinational corporations. This radicalisation of the initial Cepal agenda became known as dependency theory, taking Santiago by storm. It couldn’t be otherwise. Between 1960 and 1970, Santiago emerged as a haven many radical European and Latin American intellectuals – the “capital of the left”, as some christened it. Alain Touraine, Manuel Castells, Armand Mattelart, Franz Hinkelammert, Ruy Mauro Marini, Maria da Conceição Tavares: international leftist intellectuals of all kinds made Santiago their home (and that’s not even counting impressive domestic talent, from Pablo Neruda to Marta Harnecker). For all its flaws and inconsistencies, dependency theory got one thing right: it correctly identified technology as the latest frontier of power and accumulation – and doing so a good decade before Apple was even founded. As Andre Gunder Frank, a Chicago-trained German economist who defected from the neoliberal camp to teach in Brazil and later Chile, wrote in the mid-1960s, “American technology is becoming the new source of monopoly power and the new basis of economic colonialism and political neo-colonialism.” He may as well have been talking about quantum computing, 5G or artificial intelligence. The Santiago School saw the fight for technological sovereignty as fundamental to any meaningful economic sovereignty – and, with it, national development. Without its own technological and scientific base, a country that assembled cars was as dependent as a country growing tropical fruit. As the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro – a friend of Allende’s and a distinguished member of the Santiago School – put it at the time, there’s not much difference between being a banana republic and a Volkswagen republic. The reason why the Santiago stance on technology seemed so radical was, in part, because it undermined the rosier orthodox account furnished by modernisation theory, which shaped so much of Washington’s stance in the Cold War. From their perches at MIT, Stanford and the Rand Corporation, modernisation theorists argued that technological and economic progress went hand in hand. Thus, as long as countries could arrive at a “take-off” point – mostly by borrowing the solutions that had worked in North America or western Europe – their upward developmental trajectory was assured. The Santiago School disagreed, seeing foreign control over technology as a key bottleneck on the road to development. Instead, they advocated building up a nation’s own technological capacity, for, as Allende once colourfully put it, “We have a right to our own solutions.” But it wasn’t just a matter of trade and industrial policy, as Cepal had been preaching for decades. It also involved confrontations with multinational companies that stood in the way of technological progress; the radicalisation of engineers and scientists who often hid behind the neutral veneer of science; and experimentation with new computer-based tools of planning and management to show that bureaucracy can be just as effective at managing the economy as the market. Chile was naturally the main testing ground for the policy prescriptions of the Santiago School. For example, a year or so before Allende came to power, Chile established a government agency called the Institute for Technological Research (Intec). It was tasked with helping national companies and ministries acquire domestic technological expertise. In essence, Intec centralised technological expertise in a single government agency and made it available to industry. This was to reduce Chile’s dependence on foreign technology and expertise, all while building up local capacity. In a sense, Intec was the anti-McKinsey<https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/11/mckinsey…> of its era. Instead of helping to downsize the public sector and make it more market-friendly, it leveraged the knowledge of designers, scientists and engineers to serve national development. Intec was housed in a much bigger institution of the Chilean state – the State Development Corporation (Corfo). Its remit had been to mobilise domestic and foreign capital to spearhead the development of important new industries, such as steel-making, crucial to Chile’s industrialisation efforts. Corfo partly shared in the Santiago School agenda, but it was also closely tied to Chilean industrial capital. As a result, it became a frequent target of attacks from the left – including from a young senator called Salvador Allende – who thought it was not strategic enough, especially when it would spin off and privatise the industries it had nurtured. When Allende came to power, it finally became possible to radicalise Corfo, and use it to accelerate Chile’s pursuit of technological sovereignty. This is, for example, how the Allende-era Corfo launched the National Electronics Company, which was tasked with building a semiconductor plant in the north of the country. This would have allowed Chile – once a mere exporter of nitrates and copper – to become a technologically sophisticated economy capable of meeting its own development needs. Had Allende been allowed to enact the other policy prescriptions of the Santiago School, Chile may have evolved into a South Korea or Taiwan of Latin America. Unlike them, though, Allende’s Chile was not a right-wing authoritarian state that suppressed workers’ rights in favour of industrialisation. The coup destroyed this possibility of a left-wing – and fully democratic – industrialisation in Latin America. Allende’s pursuit of technological sovereignty required much more than dispatching Intec consultants to rationalise production. He also needed to be confrontational, not least because some of Chile’s most important telecommunications, including telephones and telexes, were in the hands of the very foreign technology multinational that the Santiago School saw as detrimental to national development. That company was ITT, and, by the time of Allende’s election in 1970, it had a highly controversial reputation in the region. With roots in Puerto Rico and Cuba, ITT quickly established itself on US territory. During the 1920s, it used its founders’ connection to Wall Street to rapidly expand in Latin America (this greatly helped the American state win the battle for global telecom supremacy against the UK). By the early 1950s, ITT was widely disliked by many of its local customers, who complained that it was charging exorbitant fees but barely invested in infrastructure upgrades. As a result, local economies stagnated: left to the forces of the market, telecommunications – an important factor of economic development – became an obstacle rather than an enabler. The young Fidel Castro – then an aspiring lawyer – even sued ITT’s local subsidiary in Cuba; his law firm won the case, but it was reversed by the country’s dictator Fulgencio Batista. As a consequence, ITT was one of the first companies Castro nationalised in 1960 (shortly after the Cuban Revolution that concluded a year earlier brought him to power). Castro’s boldness may have inspired Leonel Brizola, a radical governor in Brazil, who in 1962 proceeded to do the same with ITT’s local properties in his state. There seemed little desire to let these Latin American techno-nationalists do as they pleased. The company mobilised its allies in Washington – and humiliated Brazil into paying a hefty price for such nationalisation, while Brizola and his brother-in-law, the country’s then leader João Goulart, were painted as communists siding with the Soviets. Two years later, Goulart was overthrown by the Brazilian military. None of this deterred Allende. During his 1970 presidential campaign, he promised to nationalise the firm and put engineers – rather than managers – in charge of strategic decisions there. ITT gave money<https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00901R000600100004-0.pdf> to Allende’s political adversaries in Chile to try to prevent his victory. When Allende did win, it kept looking for ways to destabilise him – including by pressuring Washington to cut off its loans to Chile and suspend technical aid. So Allende simply went ahead and took over the company. By today’s standards, it was an unprecedented blow against the power of Big Tech. From now on, ITT – just like hundreds of other strategic companies nationalised by Allende’s government – would be run from Corfo, the State Development Corporation. And its focus would be the national development strategy, not boosting profits. This proved easier said than done. The initial phases of Allende’s revolution were so exciting that workers at many enterprises that were not initially deemed strategic – including a caramel factory – demanded that they be taken over as well. Second, the US ambassador – and he surely wasn’t alone – did his best to deprive Allende of cadres who could run these nationalised firms. This was done by spreading what today we would call “fake news”: that Allende would eventually close the borders and prevent managers and engineers from leaving the country – so they had to move out now. This was the context in which Allende embarked on a startling initiative to use computers and telex networks to make up for the lack of qualified managers: Project Cybersyn. While its history has been masterfully explored by Eden Medina in Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011), it’s important to emphasise the broader intellectual and policy links between Cybersyn and the Santiago School. First of all, many of Allende’s young economists and engineers were steeped in the world of dependency theory. Some of them even brought courses on development and dependency to the engineering faculty of their universities. Once these youthful technocrats moved to government positions in the Allende administration, they surrounded themselves with many of the Brazilian dependency theorists who were in exile in Chile at the time. Others, such as Andre Gunder Frank, were in Santiago to offer advice and criticism. Second, Cybersyn was a project that grew out of Corfo and was housed in Intec, Chile’s state-owned consulting firm. The German designer of its Operations Room<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine>, an Intec employee, was an avid reader of dependency theory as well, citing Gunder Frank in his essays. Third, Cybersyn was meant to furnish the software for the practical realisation of the theoretical aspects – such as the nationalisation of ITT (which also ended up in Corfo) – preached by the dependency theory. And just as the Chicago School and neoliberalism eventually found allies in Silicon Valley’s platforms, the Santiago School and its brand of technology-aware dependency theory made good use of socialist cybernetic software such as Cybersyn. The realisation of that original Santiago vision today would certainly require newer and better software. Yet the approach’s basics – the idea that technology is geopolitics by other means; that technological progress is no guarantee of social and economic progress; and that power is what allows some countries to innovate and condemns others to stagnation – remain highly relevant in our own world of Big Tech. Granted, Allende was hardly a tech wizard. In fact, he made plenty of tech blunders – at one point even inviting ITT to check his office for bugs. Yet it was under his leadership that a minor Latin American country systematically pursued a geopolitically informed technology policy – and didn’t shy away from confronting powerful corporate actors. It’s this bold stance – combined with an intellectually dynamic framework – that made Allende’s demise a tragedy. The 1973 coup not only deprived Chile of its precious democracy – it also robbed us of a world in which countries could stand up to powerful companies, defend their own technological sovereignty, and harness innovation to build a more equal and just world. Instead, the problems that affected Chile in the pre-Allende period became the problems of the whole world – or, at least, the world outside Silicon Valley. What the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano – a friend of Allende and part of the broader Santiago School universe – wrote of his region in his classic Open Veins of Latin America (1971) still rings true: “Latin America is condemned to suffer the technology of the powerful, which attacks and removes natural raw materials, and is incapable of creating its own technology to sustain and defend its own development.” Only today, his insight applies to the whole planet. What we got instead was a world run by half a dozen ITTs – all legitimised through the notion that innovation is a matter of ideas and ideals, not of sheer power relations and military strength. For all his shortcomings, Allende, who won the Chilean elections despite opposition from both ITT and the CIA, knew that innovation in the real world was not at all like this. And that’s why, for all his contributions to democratic socialism, his greatest legacy may be in mobilising the Santiago School, showing the world a path towards democratic technology. https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/09/salvador-allende-fig…

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La macchina della verità alle frontiere dell'Europa...
by Maurizio Borghi Sept. 11, 2023

Sept. 11, 2023

WIRED *La macchina della verità alle frontiere dell'Europa è stata un assegno in bianco * *I documenti su iBorderCTRL dimostrano la Commissione europea era a conoscenza dei rischi di sperimentare un algoritmo per identificare le bugie analizzando i volti. Ma ha finanziato lo stesso il progetto * _____________ Mentre *assegnano 4,5 milioni di euro del programma di ricerca Horizon 2020 a iBorderCTRL*, una *sorta di macchina della verità da usare alle frontiere*, gli esperti della *Commissione europea sanno già che questa tecnologia* di *analisi dei micro-movimenti del volto* e d*i identificazione delle bugie*, una sorta di *Lie to me*, la serie tv con Tim Roth, in versione algoritmo, potrà porre dei grossi problemi. Tanto che nello stesso documento con cui finanziano il progetto, datato 18 gennaio 2016, scrivono che “*la proposta si affida pesantemente a un sistema automatico di rilevazione delle bugie, che pone una serie di rischi che non sono adeguatamente affrontati**”.* ..... [Continua qui] https://www.wired.it/article/iborderctrl-macchina-verita-europa/ -- _______________ *Maurizio Borghi* Università di Torino https://www.dg.unito.it/persone/maurizio.borghi Co-Director Nexa Center for Internet & Society <https://nexa.polito.it/>

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‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon
by Daniela Tafani Sept. 9, 2023

Sept. 9, 2023

A genre of AI-generated books on Amazon is scaring foragers and mycologists: cookbooks and identification guides for mushrooms aimed at beginners. Amazon has an AI-generated books problem<https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7b774/ai-generated-books-of-nonsense-are-a…> that’s been documented by journalists<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/05/ai-spam-websites-books…> for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe. The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) warned on social media that the proliferation of AI-generated foraging books could “mean life or death.” https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-mushroom-foraging-books-amazon/

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"Web rot is erasing our images and videos"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 7, 2023

Sept. 7, 2023

*Finer Points: Web rot is erasing our images and videos** * Published Aug 31, 2023 | Shaminder Dulai The Internet is in the midst of a midlife crisis. Its age is anywhere from 33 to 40 years old, the ripe age for contemplating past misses and successes, its legacy and an overbearing questioning of choices, behaviors and goals. At nearly 40 years, the Internet has grown from a wacky idea of connecting the world's knowledge centers to aid sharing of scientific research, and evolved into our modern omnipresent world of screens. Its presence is so great we now define generations generally by those who remember the birth of the Internet (millennials), those who grew up with the expansion into mobile Internet (Generation Z), and those who will not know a time before the Internet (Generation Alpha). [...] https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/0517674260/web-rot-is-erasing-our-images-a…

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Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption
by Daniela Tafani Sept. 6, 2023

Sept. 6, 2023

Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption The UK government has admitted that the technology needed to securely scan encrypted messages sent on Signal and WhatsApp doesn’t exist, weakening its controversial Online Safety Bill. Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption. The so-called “spy clause” in the UK’s Online Safety Bill<https://www.wired.com/story/the-uk-is-poised-to-force-a-bad-law-on-the-inte…>, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government admitted the technology to securely scan encrypted messages for signs of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, without compromising users’ privacy, doesn’t yet exist. Secure messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, had threatened to pull out of the UK if the bill was passed. “It’s absolutely a victory,” says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, which operates the Signal messaging service. Whittaker has been a staunch opponent of the bill, and has been meeting with activists and lobbying for the legislation to be changed. “It commits to not using broken tech or broken techniques to undermine end-to-end encryption.” The UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport did not respond to a request for comment. The UK government hadn’t specified the technology that platforms should use to identify CSAM being sent on encrypted services, but the most commonly-cited solution was something called client-side scanning. On services that use end-to-end encryption, only the sender and recipient of a message can see its content; even the service provider can’t access the unencrypted data. Client-side scanning would mean examining the content of the message before it was sent—that is, on the user’s device—and comparing it to a database of CSAM held on a server somewhere else. That, according to Alan Woodward, a visiting professor in cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, amounts to “government-sanctioned spyware scanning your images and possibly your [texts].” In December, Apple shelved its plans<https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-communication-safety-…> to build client-side scanning technology for iCloud, later saying<https://www.wired.com/story/apple-csam-scanning-heat-initiative-letter/> that it couldn’t make the system work without infringing on its users’ privacy. Opponents of the bill say that putting backdoors into people’s devices to search for CSAM images would almost certainly pave the way for wider surveillance by governments. “You make mass surveillance become almost an inevitability by putting [these tools] in their hands,” Woodward says. “There will always be some ‘exceptional circumstances’ that [security forces] think of that warrants them searching for something else.” Although the UK government has said that it now won’t force unproven technology on tech companies, and that it essentially won’t use the powers under the bill, the controversial clauses remain within the legislation, which is still likely to pass into law. “It’s not gone away, but it’s a step in the right direction,” Woodward says. James Baker, campaign manager for the Open Rights Group, a nonprofit that has campaigned against the law’s passage, says that the continued existence of the powers within the law means encryption-breaking surveillance could still be introduced in the future. “It would be better if these powers were completely removed from the bill,” he adds. But some are less positive about the apparent volte-face. “Nothing has changed,” says Matthew Hodgson, CEO of UK-based Element, which supplies end-to-end encrypted messaging to militaries and governments. “It’s only what’s actually written in the bill that matters. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Scanning bypasses the encryption in order to scan, exposing your messages to attackers. So all ‘until it’s technically feasible’ means is opening the door to scanning in future rather than scanning today. It’s not a change, it’s kicking the can down the road.” Whittaker acknowledges that “it’s not enough” that the law simply won’t be aggressively enforced. “But it’s major. We can recognize a win without claiming that this is the final victory,” she says. The implications of the British government backing down, even partially, will reverberate far beyond the UK, Whittaker says. Security services around the world have been pushing for measures to weaken end-to-end encryption, and there is a similar battle going on in Europe over CSAM, where the European Union commissioner in charge of home affairs, Ylva Johannson<https://www.wired.com/story/europes-moral-crusader-lays-down-the-law-on-enc…>, has been pushing similar, unproven technologies. “It’s huge in terms of arresting the type of permissive international precedent that this would set,” Whittaker says. “The UK was the first jurisdiction to be pushing this kind of mass surveillance. It stops that momentum. And that’s huge for the world.” https://www.wired.com/story/britain-admits-defeat-online-safety-bill-encryp…

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Cfp : Content Moderation on Digital Platforms: Beyond States and Firms
by Nicolas Jullien Sept. 6, 2023

Sept. 6, 2023

Cari, un "call" della rivista "Internet Policy Review" che potrebbe essere interessante per qualcuno di voi: " "Content Moderation on Digital Platforms: Beyond States and Firms" https://policyreview.info/node/1717" ------ Call for papers: Content moderation on digital platforms: beyond states and firms Special issue of the Internet Policy Review Content regulation on digital platforms has attracted growing interest from scientists and regulators in recent years. In Europe, new legal initiatives at the national and European level, such as the NetzDG in Germany, the Law on fake news in France or the Digital Services Act, transform the power relation between public authorities and private platforms. At the academic level, these developments are seen primarily through the lens of state-platform relationship, focusing in particular on the role of nation states in Internet governance. However, content regulation on digital platforms goes far beyond this dual relationship. It encompasses a wide diversity of actors who develop their own practices of content regulation, apart from, in partnership with, or against public authorities and firms. Journalists build up fact-checking procedures to limit the spread of fake news. Activists put pressure on advertisers in order to cut sources of funding for hate groups. Marketing agencies monetize blacklists of sites, groups and channels to avoid reputation backlash while advertising online. Social media users put in practice counter-speech strategies in order to stem hate speech or circumvent restrictions on social media. Even researchers develop their own transparency and accountability indicators to assess platform policies related to content regulation. Besides, these actors are gradually associated with the evolution of content regulation through formal partnerships and multi-stakeholder organizations. All these actors, and many others, who could be grouped together under the banner of "civil society", are now actively contributing to content moderation and regulation on digital platforms. However, their precise role, their strategies and means of action remain little studied. Following recent works published in Internet Policy Review, such as calls for studying content regulation issues beyond the scope of relationships between states and platforms (Gillespie et al., 2020), this special issue intends to illustrate the role of “civil society” in the global governance of speech online, and map the variety of social groups involved in content moderation. Drawing on existing work on multistakeholderism that have discussed the participation of civil society in the global internet governance (Massit-Folléa, 2014; Raymond, DeNardis, 2015), this special issue aims at pushing forward the understanding of non-state actors’ contribution in the current internet regulatory framework. It calls for empirical studies that provide an insight on the social conditions and materiality of civil society’s contribution to content regulation. Scope of the special issue For this special issue we invite contributions that analyze the role of users, non-profit organizations, media, technical and professional groups, researchers and other actors from civil society in moderating and regulating contents on digital platforms, while potentially discussing their articulation with public authorities and platform initiatives. Three axes of contribution are envisioned. First of all, this special issue aims at moving beyond the state-platform scope of analysis by gathering papers that describe the complex configurations of actors involved in the moderation of contents. Contributors are invited to study the various social and institutional arrangements informing moderation policies and notably the extent of civil society’s involvement in this process – from the orientation of moderation policy to the detection of illegal content. Such contributions could also enlighten the role of users’ protests and mobilizations in shifting the scope and focus of moderation (Gillespie, 2018; Myers-West, 2017), notably how sexual minority and race-based groups try to voice their concern regarding the specific discrimination and censorship they face online (Nakamura, 2013). Secondly, we would like to identify papers that contribute to the study of technologies and design in offering new forms of regulation. Although many works have focused on algorithmic content detection by the platforms (Yeung, 2018; Gorwa, Binns, Katzenbach, 2020), in articulation with their business of data collection, we would like to attract papers that discuss alternative design and standards developed by tech communities to promote more diverse and distributed types of moderation. For example, platforms such as Mastodon emphasize the role of users in defining alternative moderation rules and mechanisms. Such a discussion may also include new strategies developed by activists to document algorithmic censorship and inform shadowbanning practices. Thirdly, we would like to include in this special issue papers that study the circulation and distribution of practices and knowledge across civil society organizations. Global fora on content moderation are key loci to observe exchanges between organizations as well as conflicting interpretation of moderation principles. Far from a homogenous ensemble, civil society is a broad concept that gathers various groups with conflicting interest and unequally distributed resources. Such papers could contribute to a global mapping of power relations within civil society as well as shed new light on the “Brussel effect” (Bradford, 2020) from third parties perspectives. More broadly, it would offer a critical assessment of “civil society” as a regulatory entity and the way it is endorsed or instrumentalized by governments and platforms. Special issue editors Romain Badouard, Associate Professor, University Paris Panthéon-Assas Anne Bellon, Associate Professor, University of Technology of Compiègne Important dates 750-1000 words abstracts should be sent to romain.badouard(a)u-paris2.fr and anne.bellon(a)utc.fr by 31 October 2023. The abstracts should delineate the research question to be discussed, the case study to be analysed and an indication of the expected findings or conclusions. Decisions will be sent to the authors by 30 November 2023. Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by 17 March 2024. Submissions must be around 6,000 words in length and have to follow the submission guidelines of the Internet Policy Review. They will be peer-reviewed between March and July. The planned publication date of this special issue is Q4 2024.

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INDL-6 Conference Unveils Program: A Deep Dive into Digital Labor Post-Pandemic
by Antonio Casilli Sept. 6, 2023

Sept. 6, 2023

Dear all, >From October 9 to 11, 2023, researchers, activists, artists, and policymakers will gather in Berlin for the sixth annual conference of our International Network on Digital Labor. INDL-6 "Digital Labor in the Wake of Pandemic Times" will feature over 100 presentations and contributions from 150 speakers from around the world. Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic that has accelerated digital transformations, the INDL-6 Conference promises to be an invaluable source of insights and discussion. A special focus will be placed on speakers from the global South, as well as on original empirical findings and theoretical perspectives. Please, find the program online on the INDL website: https://www.indl.network/indl-6-conference-unveils-program-a-deep-dive-into…. Registration is free and open to anyone (subject to availability). Just click here to register: https://tickets.weizenbaum-institut.de/conference-organizer/INDL-6/. INDL-6 is hosted by the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and co-organized by the International Labor Organization (ILO), Digital Platform Labor (DiPLab), and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB). The keynote speakers will include Kylie Jarrett (Maynooth University, Ireland), a pioneering researcher in the field of digital labor studies, and the author of "Digital Labor" (Wiley, 2022). In light of the concept of "workers' assetization", she will discuss commodification and class in the platform economy. The author of "Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition" (University of Illinois Press, 2016) Jack Linchuan Qiu (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) will delve into labor-capital relations in the Softbank Empire. The topic of artificial intelligence and European labor regulation will be analyzed in light of recent changes in legislation by Aida Ponce del Castillo (ETUI, Belgium). Also scheduled are two exciting plenary panels. The first one is the documentary film "VO (Vehicle Operator)," directed by Nicolas Gourault. This short film takes us on an immersive journey into the lives of those who train self-driving cars. During the second panel, "Irresponsible technologies?", a group discussion will explore the social responsibility associated with AI production within global supply chains. It will feature Dr. Lukas Sonnenberg (GIZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, Germany), Prof. Baptiste Delmas (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France), Dr. Fabian Stephany, Dr. Fabian Braesemann (Oxford Internet Institute, UK). The panel will be chaired by Uma Rani (Senior Economist, ILO, Switzerland). You are welcome to forward this information to all persons who may be interested. Cheers, Antonio -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris | Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-LAP (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. My workflow efficiency accounts for this email send time. Taking action or responding outside of office hours is not mandatory*

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National Academies - Testing, Evaluating, and Assessing Artificial Intelligence–Enabled Systems Under Operational Conditions for the Department of the Air Force Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief
by Diego.Latella Sept. 5, 2023

Sept. 5, 2023

Per chi fosse interessat* Testing, Evaluating, and Assessing Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Systems Under Operational Conditions for the Department of the Air Force Proceedings of a Workshop--in Brief National Academies https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26885/testing-evaluating-and-asse… Buona lettura 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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