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HERBERT LIN - Op-Ed: What a house cat can teach us about cybersecurity - Los Angeles Times
by Diego.Latella Dec. 10, 2021

Dec. 10, 2021

;-) https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-11-07/op-ed-what-a-house-cat-can… D -- 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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DECISIONE DELLA COMMISSIONE del 8.12.2021 relativa alla concessione di licenze open source e al riutilizzo dei software della Commissione
by Marina Caporale Dec. 9, 2021

Dec. 9, 2021

salve, segnalo DECISIONE DELLA COMMISSIONE del 8.12.2021 relativa alla concessione di licenze open source e al riutilizzo dei software della Commissione https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/IT/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:JOC_2021_495_I_… Marina Caporale http://www.unibo.it/docenti/marina.caporale [cid:7bcc16bd-72d0-4840-9190-3c2d2e9f8a72]

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The Commission adopts new rules for open source software distribution
by Guido Noto La Diega Dec. 9, 2021

Dec. 9, 2021

On 8 December the European Commission adopted a decision <https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/detail?ref=C(2021)8759…> on new rules for Open Source Software distribution that will enable the Commission services to publish the software source code they own in much shorter time and with less paperwork. https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/commission-adopts-new-rules-open-source-soft… *Guido Noto La Diega*, PhD FHEA Avv *Assoc Prof of Intellectual Property & Privacy Law @stirlaw <https://twitter.com/StirLaw>* Visiting Prof @unimc <http://giurisprudenza.unimc.it/it/dipartimento/dipartimento-di-eccellenza/b…> | Chair @LawScottish <https://www.scotlin.org/> <https://twitter.com/italiot> | Fellow @nexacenter <https://nexa.polito.it/about-en> E: notoladiega(a)gmail.com T: @guidonld <https://twitter.com/guidonld> For updates and open access to my research visit my website <https://guidonotoladiega.wordpress.com/>

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Apple reaches quiet truce over iPhone privacy changes
by db Dec. 9, 2021

Dec. 9, 2021

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/apple-reaches-quiet-truce-over-ipho… <start> Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from its 1 billion iPhone users for targeted advertising, in an unacknowledged shift that lets companies follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy. In May Apple communicated its privacy changes to the wider public, launching an advert that featured a harassed man whose daily activities were closely monitored by an ever-growing group of strangers. When his iPhone prompted him to “Ask App Not to Track,” he clicked it and they vanished. Apple’s message to potential customers was clear—if you choose an iPhone, you are choosing privacy. But seven months later, companies including Snap and Facebook have been allowed to keep sharing user-level signals from iPhones, as long as that data is anonymised and aggregated rather than tied to specific user profiles. For instance Snap has told investors that it plans to share data from its 306 million users—including those who ask Snap “not to track”—so advertisers can gain “a more complete, real-time view” on how ad campaigns are working. Any personally identifiable data will first be obfuscated and aggregated. Similarly, Facebook operations chief Sheryl Sandberg said the social media group was engaged in a “multiyear effort” to rebuild ad infrastructure “using more aggregate or anonymized data”. These companies point out that Apple has told developers they “may not derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.” This means they can observe “signals” from an iPhone at a group level, enabling ads that can still be tailored to “cohorts” aligning with certain behavior but not associated with unique IDs. This type of tracking is becoming the norm. Oren Kaniel, the chief executive of AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution platform that works with app developers, said that when his company introduced such a “privacy-centric” tool based on aggregated measurement in July 2020, “the level of pushback that we received from the entire ecosystem was huge.” But now such aggregated solutions are the default for 95 percent of his clients. “The market changed their minds in a radical way,” he said. It is not clear whether Apple has actually blessed these solutions. Apple declined to answer specific questions for this article but described privacy as its North Star, implying it was setting a general destination rather than defining a narrow pathway for developers. Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at customer data platform BlueConic, said Apple had to stand back from a strict reading of its rules because the disruption to the mobile ads ecosystem would be too great. “Apple can’t put themselves in a situation where they are basically gutting their top-performing apps from a user-consumption perspective,” she said. “That would ultimately hurt iOS.” For anyone interpreting Apple’s rules strictly, these solutions break the privacy rules set out to iOS users. Lockdown Privacy, an app that blocks ad trackers, has called Apple’s policy “functionally useless in stopping third-party tracking.” It performed a variety of tests on top apps and observed that personal data and device information is still “being sent to trackers in almost all cases.” But the companies aggregating user-level data said the reason apps continue to “leak” information such as a user’s IP address and location was simply because some require such information to function. Advertisers must know certain things such as the user’s language or the device screen size, otherwise the app experience would be awful. The risk is that by allowing user-level data to be used by opaque third parties so long as they promise not to abuse it, Apple is in effect trusting the very same groups that chief executive Tim Cook has lambasted as “hucksters just looking to make a quick buck.” Companies will pledge that they only look at user-level data once it has been anonymized, but without access to the data or algorithms working behind the scenes, users won’t really know if their data privacy has been preserved, said Munchbach. “If historical precedent in adtech holds, those black boxes hide a lot of sins,” she said. “It’s not unreasonable to assume it leaves a lot to be desired.” <end>

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AGCM: sanzione ad Amazon per 1.128.596.156 € (1 _MILIARDO_ e passa...)
by Damiano Verzulli Dec. 9, 2021

Dec. 9, 2021

La notizia ufficiale (che non mi pare sia ancora passata) è questa: A528 - Sanzione di oltre 1 miliardo e 128 milioni di euro ad Amazon per abuso di posizione dominante => https://agcm.it/media/comunicati-stampa/2021/12/A528-chiusura L'importo mi sembra rilevante... e interessante. Vedremo come andra' a finire.... Saluti, 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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The end of nation-states
by Giuseppe Attardi Dec. 7, 2021

Dec. 7, 2021

Se volete approfondire il concetto di Digital Utopia di cui accennavo in precedenza, guardate questo seminario, che apparirà sul canale YouTube https://youtube.com/channel/UC3ouVBKcYMqvnYLjpOu8EjA Pueyo li chiama community-states o virtual nations. Tomas Pueyo: The End of Nation-States It’s 2050. The US government just defaulted on its debt and isn't making social security payments. Hospitals are failing since they can’t operate without Medicare and Medicaid. People who invested in dollars have seen their savings decimated. Countries around the world are saddled with US debt. What happened? The Internet and Blockchain. Tomas Pueyo talks about how new technologies will shake up the political order and cause the end of nation-states. Questo blog riporta quanto detto nella prima parte del seminario: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/internet-blockchain-kill-nati… — Beppe

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Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets - Open Letter: The EU Needs an Effective Digital Markets Act
by Stefano Zacchiroli Dec. 6, 2021

Dec. 6, 2021

Un ampio gruppo di SME europee (in larga parte con business model attinenti a FOSS) si esprime su temi ampiamente discussi in lista, quali la sovranità digitale, il ruolo dei GAFAM nel "cloud sovrano", etc. Più dettagli ed il testo di una lettera aperta alle EU qui: https://competitivedigitalmarkets.eu/ -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack(a)upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack _. ^ ._ Full professor of Computer Science o o o \/|V|\/ Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris o o o </> <\> Co-founder & CTO Software Heritage o o o o /\|^|/\ Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director '" V "'

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Testo di Meredith Whittaker
by Antonio Casilli Dec. 6, 2021

Dec. 6, 2021

Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions. The steep cost of capture https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-… "Big tech’s control over AI resources made universities and other institutions dependent on these companies, creating a web of conflicted relationships that threaten academic freedom and our ability to understand and regulate these corporate technologies." (...) "In addition to punishing dissent and denigrating research they find threatening, tech companies are working to co-opt and neutralize critique. They do this in part by funding and elevating their weakest critics, often institutions and coalitions that focus on so-called AI ethics, and frame issues of tech power and dominance as abstract governance questions that take the tech industry's current form as a given and AI's proliferation as inevitable. In parallel, tech firms also champion technocratic remedies such as "AI bias bounties" and fairness fixits that stage tech-enabled discrimination as a problem of bad code and "buggy" engineering [15]. Such approaches make great PR. They also serve to cast elite engineers as the arbiters of "bias," while structurally excluding scholars and advocates who don't have computer science training, but whose focus on the racialized power asymmetries and political economy of AI are essential for understanding and addressing AI harms." (...) "To begin, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who produce and rely on tech-critical work must confront and name the dynamic of tech capture, co-optation, and compromise head-on, and soon. This means incorporating reflexive critiques of the conditions and of knowledge creation, and the compromises and trade-offs faced by knowledge workers over whom interested institutions have power. Given the politics of collegial proximity that inform academic prestige networks while working to blur the lines between academic and industry workers, this is certain to be uncomfortable. But naming these dynamics is the only way to address them and to stage questions that allow us to envision and demand alternative futures." -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris-Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (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. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.*

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Tecnologie per il controllo delle frontiere in Italia
by Carlo Blengino Dec. 6, 2021

Dec. 6, 2021

[image: 32.png] https://protecht.hermescenter.org/ Davvero un lavoro notevole, che rende concrete e tangibili molte delle criticità che emergono spesso dai temi affrontati in questa lista. <<È importante ...che qualunque discorso sulla tecnologia racchiuda in sé una più ampia riflessione politica e sociologica, che cerchi di cogliere la differenza tra chi agisce la tecnologia e chi la subisce>>. Una missione per NEXA. Un grazie davvero all' *Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights <https://www.hermescenter.org/it/home/> * e a Laura Carrer e Riccardo Coluccini per il loro instancabile lavoro! Carlo *Avv. Carlo Blengino* *Via Duchessa Jolanda n. 19,* *10138 Torino (TO) - Italy* *tel. +39 011 4474035 * Penalistiassociati.it

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"Hackers Are Spamming Businesses’ Receipt Printers With ‘Antiwork’ Manifestos"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 5, 2021

Dec. 5, 2021

*Hackers Are Spamming Businesses’ Receipt Printers With ‘Antiwork’ Manifestos* /Dozens of printers across the internet are printing out a manifesto that encourages workers to discuss their pay with coworkers, and pressure their employers./ Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai December 2, 2021, 10:17pm […] Continua qui: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbb9d/hackers-are-spamming-businesses-rece…

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