- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Facebook vs. Australia
by Stefano Quintarelli May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-havoc-in-australi… Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say – WSJ Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.” Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke. Facebook documents and testimony filed to U.S. and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that the social-media giant deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to take down pages—allowing swaths of the Australian government and health services to be caught in its web just as the country was launching Covid vaccinations. The goal, according to the whistleblowers and documents, was to exert maximum negotiating leverage over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the first law in the world that would require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content. … After five days that caused disorder throughout the country, Australia’s Parliament amended the proposed law to the degree that, a year after its passage, its most onerous provisions haven’t been applied to Facebook or its parent company, Meta Platforms Inc. “We landed exactly where we wanted to,” wrote Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of partnerships, who pressed for the company’s aggressive stance, in a congratulatory email to her team minutes after the Australian Senate voted to approve the watered-down bill at the end of February 2021. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg chimed in with congratulations as well, with Ms. Sandberg praising the “thoughtfulness of the strategy” and “precision of execution.”

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Googling for Abortion: How Google Mediates Access to Abortion Services— and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

*Googling for Abortion: How Google Mediates Access to Abortion Services— and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever* /Yelena Mejova/ Access to abortion in the United States is now hanging by a thread. But how do most people find abortion services? By searching for them online. In our study published earlier this year in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Social Media with Tatiana Gracyk, director of the Bioethics Program at the Cleveland State University and Ronald E. Robertson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory, we showed that the locations returned to Google’s search results reflect current inequalities in abortion access. If these inequalities are to drastically change, the information (and lack of thereof) returned to people living in states that may outlaw this medical service could further impact already stressful, life-changing decisions. […] Continua qui: https://medium.com/@msthing/googling-for-abortion-how-google-mediates-acces…

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WSJ: Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

Facebook Deliberately Caused Havoc in Australia to Influence New Law, Whistleblowers Say When Facebook blocked news pages last year to pre-empt Australian legislation that would force it to pay for content, it also took down hospitals, emergency services and charities. The company says that was inadvertent; whistleblowers allege it was a negotiating tactic. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-havoc-in-australi… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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congratulazioni!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
by Angelo Raffaele Meo May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

carissimo Marco, ti ringrazio per la bellissima conferenza di ieri. Benchè io sia negato per le questioni giuridiche ho compreso molte cose, non tutte, ahimè. Comunque, il mio intervento di ieri era finalizzato a chiderti una cosa diversa da quella che ti ho chiesta. Ma, essendo io prolisso, ho perso tempo sulla questione del brevetto e mi sono reso conto che non potevo più sottrarre tempo al dibattito (interessante anche lui). Allora pongo ora a te e ai Nexiani, e al mio coparrocchiano Ciurcina, la domanda che volevo porre ieri. Quasi tutte le scuole usano per la didattica a distanza Google o Zoom o Microsoft. A me è parso di capire che le leggi vietino l'uso di questi prodotti (esempi: l'art.68 del CAD, le norme comunitarie per la sicurezza, le norme nazionali per la protezioone dei dati personali). Ma mi ha spiegato l'altro Marco giuridico che non è reato. Non mi aspetto da Renato Brunetta &C. alcuna iniziativa a favore del software libero, ma non è proprio possibile produrre norme diverse per evitare la colonizzazzione della nostra scuola? Conto su te. Grazie!!!! Raf

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Cook: "The persecution of Julian Assange" (recensione libro di Melzer)
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

*The persecution of Julian Assange** * Jonathan Cook 4 May 2022 16:43 UTC /According to UN torture expert, the UK and US have colluded to publicly destroy the WikiLeaks founder – and deter others from exposing their crimes/ // The British home secretary, Priti Patel, will decide this month whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to 175 years <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61162908> – served most likely in strict, 24-hour isolation in a US super-max jail. He has already spent three years in similarly harsh conditions in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison. The 18 charges laid against Assange in the US relate to the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of leaked official documents, many of them showing that the US and UK were responsible for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been brought to justice for those crimes. Instead, the US has defined Assange’s journalism as espionage - and by implication asserted a right to seize any journalist in the world who takes on the US national security state - and in a series of extradition hearings, the British courts have given their blessing. The lengthy proceedings against Assange have been carried out in courtrooms with tightly restricted access and in circumstances that have repeatedly denied journalists the ability to cover the case properly. Despite the grave implications for a free press and democratic accountability, however, Assange’s plight has provoked little more than a flicker of concern from much of the western media. Few observers appear to be in any doubt that Patel will sign off on the US extradition order – least of all Nils Melzer <https://www.geneva-academy.ch/masters/ll-m/faculty/profile/47-nils-melzer>, a law professor, and a United Nations’ special rapporteur. In his role as the UN’s expert on torture, Melzer has made it his job since 2019 to scrutinise not only Assange’s treatment during his 12 years of increasing confinement – overseen by the UK courts – but also the extent to which due process and the rule of law have been followed in pursuing the WikiLeaks founder. Melzer has distilled his detailed research into a new book, The Trial of Julian Assange <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697240/the-trial-of-julian-assange…>, that provides a shocking account of rampant lawlessness by the main states involved – Britain, Sweden, the US, and Ecuador. It also documents a sophisticated campaign of misinformation and character assassination to obscure those misdeeds. [...] continua qui: https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/show-trial-julian-assange-book

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China Orders Government, State Firms to Replace Foreign Computers - Bloomberg
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

China Orders Government, State Firms to Dump Foreign PCs Beijing aims to drive foreign PCs out of government, SOEs Campaign could kick out at least 50 million foreign-made PCs Bloomberg News 6 May 2022, 04:25 CEST Updated on6 May 2022, 05:08 CEST https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-06/china-orders-government-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Weapon that Mistook a School Bus for an Ostrich - D. Amoroso, D. Garcia, and G. Tamburrini - Science & Diplomacy
by Diego.Latella May 5, 2022

May 5, 2022

Un bell'articolo di G. Tamburrini et al. https://www.sciencediplomacy.org/article/2022/weapon-mistook-school-bus-for… 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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I built a life on oversharing – until I saw its costs, and learned the quiet thrill of privacy | Moya Lothian-McLean | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo May 5, 2022

May 5, 2022

I have grown up in a generation that overshares in order to be heard. Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to be private am I really beginning to listen to myself. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/02/life-oversharing-cost…> I’m part of a generation used to living their life in full view – our collective adolescence measured in a succession of messaging apps and social networks. Each of them encouraged increasing levels of openness and entrenched the message: sharing prompts caring or, better yet, attention. For much of my life, almost everything became fodder to be shared online. Funny texts from friends, videos of strangers on the street, stray thoughts about sexual proclivities. Privacy, both mine and that of the people I came into contact with, was a mythical concept. If I had experienced something, surely that made it my anecdote, to do with as I pleased? This approach caused problems. A man I was dating texted me to ask if a particular rant about bad communicators was about him (yes). A colleague warned me about sharing pictures in my underwear, prompting a furious reaction. Family fractures resulted from drunk tweets. But why, I would think defiantly, should I censor myself? Over the past two years, though, something has changed: I’ve started to properly pull back, prompted by the ongoing presence in my life of someone I love very deeply, whose attitude to privacy is the antithesis of mine. I had learned to see sharing as widely as possible as an act of pride. To me, posting a candid photograph to 10,000 followers was akin to loudly claiming my beloved for the world to see. He took a different view: attention from faceless avatars meant nothing to him. Why, he asked, did I feel compelled to perform my life for these people? It was a good question and one I wasn’t quite able to articulate an answer to, becoming defensive at first. Even now, I’m not sure there’s a single way to understand the drive to broadcast every facet of my existence. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that oversharing was a behaviour I learned early – as a toddler, my mother tells me I would run around, pointing at people and announcing what genitalia I surmised they had, informed by the iconic 1973 kids’ sex education book Where Did I Come From? – and engaging in it resulted in an incredible amount of positive reinforcement as I grew older. There are other reasons of course: realisations and breakthroughs I’ve had since beginning the process of redrawing my boundaries. But I’ll keep those to myself. Another factor was starting out as a lifestyle journalist in the twilight of the 2010s. A first-person essay boom was in full swing and leveraging your personal life was one of the few routes to get noticed if you lacked contacts or journalism qualifications. Young women desperate to stand out from the crowd were coaxed into sharing intimate, and often traumatic, details about their lives for clicks. In this arena, to lay yourself bare was an act of ambition – one, we later discovered, that can be difficult to scrub from the internet. Meanwhile, a new crop of digital-first and reality TV celebrities had emerged, defined by their “authenticity’” and willingness to present their entire existence for public consumption. Positive reinforcement for laying it all on the metaphorical table was high. Reprogramming yourself is a fascinating exercise. The urge to share is most insistent when I’m alone, prompting the horrific realisation that somewhere along the way, my brain has been trained to process reality through an audience. Sharing became how I made my own life real; if a tree fell in a forest, and I didn’t tweet about it, did it even happen? At times, I feel like something terrible and irreversible has taken place; that I’ll never be able to walk down a street listening to a beautiful piece of music and not get the urge to convert the sheer joy of the experience into a social media post, or a text to a friend to make it real. But every time I resist that grubby pull, there’s a small rush of triumph – and liberation. Now I’ve had a taste of what keeping things close feels like, I crave it. It’s a delicious secret, a reclamation of power I wasn’t aware I’d surrendered. Choosing what to share, with who and when, prompts necessary pauses – do I really need to mention this detail? Is this information I want out there long term? Do I even have the necessary consent to trumpet a certain story to all and sundry? None of this means I’ve stopped sharing altogether. That would be a lonely life indeed. But I have become far more selective about exactly what information reaches an audience wider than my inner circle (and I’m not alone; there is a burgeoning backlash against oversharing, counting Taylor Swift and some UK teens among its converts). Last year, I read the playwright Joe Orton’s diaries, published after his 1967 murder. As detailed in John Lahr’s introduction to The Orton Diaries, Orton always intended for posthumous publication of the work and believed “the value of a diary was its frankness”. His entries are the last word in confessional writing. But they were penned safe in the knowledge that the public would only read them after Orton was long gone. As a result, the man who jumps off the page feels utterly free, for better or worse. I’m now realising that complete openness was limiting. Privacy is a cloak, under which we are at liberty to explore the intricacies of the self, beholden to no audience other than ourselves. I have grown up in a generation that overshares in order to be heard. Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to be private am I really beginning to listen to myself.

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CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 5, 2022

May 5, 2022

*CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders* /Newly released documents showed the CDC planned to use phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for many non-COVID-19 purposes, too./ by Joseph Cox The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes. [...] continua qui: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-location-data-cur…

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Google lancia "feature" che garantiscono "controlli sovrani"... (inclusa la cifratura "client-side")
by Damiano Verzulli May 5, 2022

May 5, 2022

Ho appena letto questo annuncio (del 04/05/2022): => "Announcing Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace" di Javier Solter, Vice President and General Manager, Google Workspace - https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/announcing-sovereign-contr… nel quale leggo che "/....//Today, we’re announcing Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace, which will provide digital sovereignty capabilities for organizations, both in the public and private sector, to control, limit, and monitor transfers of data to and from the EU starting at the end of 2022, with additional capabilities delivered throughout 2023..../" Google, quindi, strizza l'occhio all'EU e fa un passo avanti dicendo: "/Ok, cara EU! Utilizzateci tranquillamente... dato che restererete 'sovrani' dri vostri dati, esattamente come desiderate/". Rispetto alla crittografia, leggo anche: "/...This commitment builds on our existing Client-side encryption, Data regions, and Access Controls capabilities..../" Quel "Client-side encryption" mi ha incuriosito e... ho cercato di approfondire. Scopro che sarebbe una "feature" gia' disponibile da tempo [*]: -------- /Google Workspace already uses the latest cryptographic standards to encrypt all data at rest and in transit between our facilities. We’re taking this a step further by giving customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service they choose to access those keys. With Client-side encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google, while users can continue to take advantage of Google’s native web-based collaboration, access content on mobile devices, and share encrypted files externally.../ -------- Ho anche capito che questa gestione "client-side" della chiave di cifratura è, di fatto, possibile _A_CONDIZIONE_ di utilizzare determinati servizi: "/enabling Client-side encryption requires you to choose a key access service partner: Flowcrypt, Fortanix, Futurex, Thales, or Virtru. Each of these partners have built tools in accordance with Google’s specifications and provide both key management and access control capabilities. /" ....ed allora mi si confondono le idee. Come faccio a gestire "client-side" la chiave, se questa gestione deve passare per un terzo? Ripeto: ho le idee confuse... Forse con il dire: "/With Client-side encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google/" intendono che tali dati restano inaccessibili a loro (Google), ma comunque accessibili a chi detiene le chiavi (il partner terzo)? ...non capisco. Il punto che vorrei sollevare in questa sede, pero', è un altro: credo occorra fare un po' di chiarezza su questo punto, capendo esattamente cosa viene proposto e argomentando la discussione affinche' i decision-maker possano (...ammesso che lo vogliano) comparare cio' che dice Google rispetto a cio' che interessa veramente (in termini di "Sovranita' Digitale"). Insomma: se non si fa nulla.... scommetto che tutti (i decision-maker) si fermeranno al titolo e diranno: "/Oh! Finalmente abbiamo risolto. Procediamo a spron battuto, ora, con la migrazione totale dei servizi.... D'altronde loro sono compliant!/" Bye, DV [*] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/new-google-workspace-secur… -- Damiano Verzulli e-mail:damiano@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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