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Leaning Toward 2050
by Giuseppe Attardi Sept. 9, 2021

Sept. 9, 2021

Segnalo questo evento, il 12 settembre, sul tema: Leaning Toward 2050 https://www.tedxlungarnomediceo.com <https://www.tedxlungarnomediceo.com/> in cui farò un intervento dal titolo: Distopia o Utopia: l’Intelligneza Artificiale nel 2050 I biglietti sono esauriti ma l’evento verrà trasmesso in streaming su: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpEEKiTRZgE Aproveche — Beppe

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Tecnologia, capitalismo e/o democrazia: la lezione di Luciano Gallino
by VETRO' ANTONIO Sept. 9, 2021

Sept. 9, 2021

https://www.economiaepolitica.it/il-pensiero-economico/tecnologia-capitalis… Un articolo pubblicato online quasi un anno fa ma che ho scoperto solo ora, e che mi sembra di potenziale interesse per la lista. E’ scritto dal Prof. Lelio Demichelis, che ripercorre il volume postumo di Luciano Gallino “Tecnologia e Democrazia” e prova a continuarne il pensiero nella direzione di una maggiore partecipazione alle decisioni sullo sviluppo della tecnologia, che necessiterebbero -secondo l’autore- maggiore conoscenza diffusa e non solo competenze, e una riflessione collettiva sui fini, per contrastare la palese irresponsabilità (anche nel senso di non-“accountability”) della grande impresa tecnologica moderna (soprattutto digitale). Riporto qui i paragrafi conclusivi dello scritto di Demichelis. "Ed è quindi questa razionalità strumentale/calcolante-industriale ad essere anti/a-democratica in sé e per sé. Oltre ad essere razionalmente irrazionale. Cercare una democratizzazione della tecnica è forse impossibile anche se comunque necessaria (si resterebbe però nel positivismo/pragmatismo del problem solving ex post), ma prima (ex ante) occorre uscire antropologicamente non tanto dal tecno-capitalismo quanto da questa razionalità strumentale/calcolante-industriale totalitaria e nichilistica in termini sociali e ambientali; occorre abbandonare cioè un pensiero solo calcolante recuperando invece e soprattutto un pensiero meditativo e un’etica della responsabilità alla Jonas– richiamata anche da Gallino – come forma e norma dell’agire in vista di fini che siano umani".

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Revealed: LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop | Los Angeles | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 9, 2021

Sept. 9, 2021

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/08/revealed-los-angeles-police…> The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian. A lawsuit charges that the Rodeo Drive task force has been stopping and arresting Black people without cause. Copies of the “field interview cards” that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions”, and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete. The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification. “There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center, noting that the information was probably stored in a database that could be used for a wide range of purposes. The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD’s social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter. [...]

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Bosses turn to ‘tattleware’ to keep tabs on employees working from home | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 8, 2021

Sept. 8, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/05/covid-coronavirus-work-home… [...] Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack. I signed up to manage their digital marketing, not to livestream my living room According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it’s not the solution for those folks,” Currie says. “But there’s also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together.” For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. “I signed up to manage their digital marketing,” he tells me, “not to livestream my living room.” Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance– and one that’s poised to become a standard feature of life on the job. Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as “tattleware” or “bossware”, represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google queries for “remote monitoring” were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they’d continued to surge by another 243%. One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers – or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff – which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market – have all seen similar growth from prospective customers. I want this pandemic to end – yet I secretly pine for another lockdown Read more These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring workers’ online activity and assessing their productivity: from screenshotting employees’ screens to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing. But in the fast-growing bossware market, each platform potentially brings something new to the table. There’s FlexiSpy, which offers call-tapping; Spytech, which is known for mobile device access; and NetVizor, which has a remote takeover feature. Tattleware platforms are hardly the sole culprits of expanded workplace surveillance. Employers are reportedly drawing on in-house IT departments to monitor emails for flagged phrases at an increased rate compared with before the pandemic. By receiving alerts when certain employees are discussing “recruiter” or “salary”, for example, management hopes to know when employees are looking to up sticks for greener pastures. Big-name tech companies have also dipped their toes into the spy game, with varying degrees of success. In April 2020, Zoom quickly backtracked on a short-lived “attention tracking” setting, which alerted a call host when a participant was focused away from the meeting for more than 30 seconds. And in December, Microsoft bowed to tech experts’ outcry over the release of a “productivity score” feature for its 365 suite, which rated individuals on criteria that included email use and network connectivity; the tool no longer identifies users by name. Despite controversy, tattleware and remote monitoring are not going away any time soon, even as employees shift back to in-house and hybrid work models. The statistics seem to bear out that we are inured to the idea of some layer of surveillance in our work lives. Photograph: Hayley Blackledge/Alamy Stock Photo “There’s no real sign of this trend slowing down,” says Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne. “No sign of legislative change in any jurisdiction I can name, and no sign of pushback from employees, even when they’re aware of it happening.” ‘Many are all too content to let it slide’ Whether all of this amounts to corporate snooping, or just plain accountability, depends largely on which side of the fence you sit on. White-collar workers around the world have long taken it for granted that their emails are monitored on the job; warehouses, offices, and shops, meanwhile, are regularly monitored by CCTV. The statistics seem to bear out that we are inured to the idea of some layer of surveillance built into our professional lives. In a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of workers said their productivity wouldn’t be affected even if they knew their employer was monitoring them. And while the jury’s still out on whether there’s any benefit to remote monitoring, Elizabeth Lyons, an associate professor of management at the University of California San Diego, is willing to play devil’s advocate. “A study we conducted found people doing data collection work out of the office were more productive when they were made aware they were being monitored, compared to their colleagues who weren’t told they were being tracked,” says Lyons. Surveillance even increased worker satisfaction, she adds, noting that remote employees appreciate signals that their performance is integral to the organization. Yet Lyons acknowledges that when monitoring becomes overbearing, employee morale will take a hit. “In other studies we’ve looked at, the workers were essentially saying, ‘If the manager is going to watch everything I do, then I’m not going to do anything above and beyond what they expect of me,’” says Lyons. Then there’s the question of privacy. Carloz, the digital researcher, is concerned that the boom in tattleware has tipped the scales too heavily in favor of the employer. “Prior to the pandemic, the line between work and play was [clearer] – surveillance, in other words, stopped at the door,” says Carloz. But the rise of tattleware changes the game. If an employee uses a spy-enabled, work-sponsored computer outside of hours, their employer could easily access their personal data, down to internet banking passwords and Facebook messages. Carloz concedes that most employers are probably not interested in collecting their workers’ personal information. They want to know what websites employees are on, and what tasks they’re dividing their time on, during the workday. However, if a boss does feel like snooping around off-hours, Carloz points out, there are “essentially no legal protections afforded to [those employees] in most western nations”. “But since, rightly or wrongly, [surveillance software] is being framed as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it slide,” says Carloz. Which brings us back to David. In the weeks after boldly departing his first post-college job, the young digital marketer secured a post with a new, Sneek-free firm. He says he’s much happier for it. “But one of the first things they asked me to do was sign up for Hubstaff,” he laughs.

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Can the EU Digital Services Act contest the power of Big Tech’s algorithms? - EDRi
by Diego.Latella Sept. 8, 2021

Sept. 8, 2021

Interessa? Can the EU Digital Services Act contest the power of Big Tech’s algorithms? https://edri.org/our-work/can-the-eu-digital-services-act-contest-the-power… D -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it) 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, mob: +39 348 8283101, fax: +390506212040 ===================

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The European Center for Digital Competitiveness publishes the Digital Riser Report 2021
by don Luca Peyron Sept. 8, 2021

Sept. 8, 2021

Numeri sempre utili per fare valutazioni serie buona lettura dl https://digital-competitiveness.eu/digitalriser/ -- _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Aisa premia le migliori tesi sulla scienza aperta
by Maria Chiara Pievatolo Sept. 8, 2021

Sept. 8, 2021

Salve. I dettagli sul bando, che riguarda le tesi discusse nel 2019, nel 2020 e nella prima parte del 2021, sono visibili qui: https://aisa.sp.unipi.it/premio-per-tesi-sulla-scienza-aperta-bando-2021/ Grazie per l'attenzione, MCP -- Maria Chiara Pievatolo Dipartimento di Scienze politiche Università di Pisa Via Serafini 3 56126 Pisa (Italy) +39 050 2212479 https://btfp.sp.unipi.it https://twitter.com/@MCPievatolo https://people.unipi.it/mariachiara_pievatolo/

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With A.I., business leaders must prioritize safety over speed
by don Luca Peyron Sept. 7, 2021

Sept. 7, 2021

Considerazioni interessanti Buona lettura dl https://fortune.com/2021/09/03/artificial-intelligence-business-benefits-sa… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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RIUSO: Study about the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) Sept. 6, 2021

Sept. 6, 2021

Study about the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/study-about-impact-open-so… * "Case studies revealed that by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, the public sector could not only reduce the total cost of ownership but could also reduce or prevent vendor lock-in. Overall, the benefits of Open Source greatly outweigh the costs associated with it." * " It is recommended to establish a right to repair," * " It is recommended to consider Open Source explicitly in competition and platform policies” Fabio

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Memento | 143° Mercoledì di Nexa | 8 Settembre 2021
by Nexa Media Sept. 6, 2021

Sept. 6, 2021

Gentilissimi, vi ricordiamo che **mercoledì *8 settembre,**dalle ore 18.00 alle ore 20.00,* si svolgerà il 143° Mercoledì di Nexa, con un incontro dal titolo: /*"Digital storytelling. Nuove forme di narrazioni digitali: un panorama"*/ Ospite://*Simone Arcagni* (Università di Palermo e Faculty Associate Centro Nexa)/./ / / Sarà possibile partecipare al seminario connettendosi al seguente indirizzo: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent <https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent> Maggiori informazioni sull'incontro sono disponibili alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-143 <https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-143> 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/ <https://nexa.polito.it/> _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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