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6G
by Diego Giorio Aug. 5, 2021

Aug. 5, 2021

Oramai il 5G è una realtà e si guarda avanti Buona estate a tutti D. https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/finnish-led-6g-programme-finds-partners-in-… [https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/network_over_cit…]<https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/finnish-led-6g-programme-finds-partners-in-…> Finnish-led 6G programme finds partners in Japan, Singapore<https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/finnish-led-6g-programme-finds-partners-in-…> Representatives of the research, development and innovation programme announced a technology partnership with Singapore at Asia Tech x Singapore in July, saying the goal is to work on mutually beneficial themes and contribute notably to the global standardisation and regulatory development of 6G. www.goodnewsfinland.com

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OGGI: Bernard Stiegler Memorial Lecture 2021 (on Zoom)
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 4, 2021

Aug. 4, 2021

*Bernard Stiegler Memorial Lecture 2021 (on Zoom)* Thursday, 5 August 2021 20:00-21:30 (Beijing), 14:00-15:30 (Paris) The Research Network for Philosophy and Technology together with the China Academy of Art launches an annual memorial lecture dedicated to Bernard Stiegler (1 April 1952-5 August 2020). Stiegler has been an advisor to the Network since its establishment in 2014, and has been a distinguished professor at the China Academy of Art from 2015-2019, where he developed a new agenda of research for art, philosophy and technology. The inaugural memorial lecture in 2021 starts with an opening address by Professor Gao Shiming, the president of the China Academy of Art, followed by a lecture by Professor Yuk Hui. Please register to join: http:// <http://philosophyandtechnology.network/5000/lecture-5>philosophyandtechnology.network/5000/lecture-5 <http://philosophyandtechnology.network/5000/lecture-5> Gao Shiming 高世名 President @China Academy of Art Gao Shiming is the President of China Academy of Art. He is an art historian, theorist and curator of the Farewell to Post-colonialism, the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, 2008; and Rehearsal, the 8th Shanghai Biennale, 2010. He is the founding chair of CAA’s Curatorial Studies Department (the first curatorial program in China), and founding director of the School of Inter-Media Art, and China Institute for Visual Studies. He is also one of the initiators of Inter-Asia School and Bandung School. Yuk Hui 許煜 Associate Professor @City University of Hong Kong Yuk Hui is the initiator of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology. He wrote his doctoral thesis under Bernard Stiegler at the Goldsmiths College in London and completed his Habilitation at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Since 2015, he has been a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art, where he taught a master class with Bernard Stiegler every spring. He currently teaches at the City University of Hong Kong. He is author of several monographs, including Recursivity and Contingency (2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021).

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Limes: "Internet sovrano"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 4, 2021

Aug. 4, 2021

*INTERNET SOVRANO* [di Mirko Mussetti] La corte del distretto centrale di Taganskij (Mosca) nella Federazione Russa ha multato per 3 milioni di rubli (41 mila dollari) il gigante statunitense dell’informatica Google per non aver archiviato i dati degli utenti russi sui server locali. Stessa sorte potrebbe toccare alla piattaforma di messaggistica WhatsApp (Facebook), verso la quale è stato aperto un procedimento amministrativo per le medesime ragioni. Perché conta: Ben inquadrata nella nuova Strategia per la sicurezza nazionale 2021-27, la legge per la tutela della privacy prevede la localizzazione dei dati personali in server ubicati nel territorio della Federazione. Dunque nelle immediate disponibilità dei servizi segreti russi. L’accesso diretto ai dati della cittadinanza non permette solo un maggior controllo sociale e quindi la perduranza della verticale del potere, ma inibisce le potenze straniere dalla profilazione degli internauti russi per l’organizzazione esogena di moti sovversivi (rivolte colorate). Il dispositivo cibernetico diventa dunque essenziale per la tenuta del tessuto sociale e per l’individuazione di agenti stranieri attivi e ostili entro i propri confini. [...] continua qui: https://www.limesonline.com/notizie-mondo-oggi-2-agosto-tensioni-medio-orie…

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On line il sito Italia Domanni
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 3, 2021

Aug. 3, 2021

Il portale ufficiale dedicato al PNRR italiano, lo strumento per costruire l’Italia del futuro e affrontare le sfide ambientali, tecnologiche e sociali del nostro tempo. Così come lo definisce il ministero. Un punto per avere in un unico punto molti dei temi che ci interessano. Buon tutto dl https://italiadomani.gov.it/it/home.html _________________________ 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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FSF-funded call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 2, 2021

Aug. 2, 2021

Microsoft's GitHub recently announced a new service known as Copilot. This service uses machine learning to help suggest code snippets to developers as they write software. GitHub trained this neural network with the code hosted on GitHub; while the Free Software Foundation (FSF) urges free software developers not to host their code on GitHub, many do, and even many who don't have their work mirrored there by others. [...] The Free Software Foundation has received numerous inquiries about our position on these questions. We can see that Copilot's use of freely licensed software has many implications for an incredibly large portion of the free software community. Developers want to know whether training a neural network on their software can really be considered fair use. Others who may be interested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elements copied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyright infringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work. With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software. We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem. We will provide a monetary reward of $500 for the papers we publish. # Areas of interest While any topic related to Copilot's effect on free software may be in scope, the following questions are of particular interest: - Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? - How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? - How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot? - Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL? - If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL? - If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work? - Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training? - Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright? - Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions? Per chi fosse interessato la scadenza è il 23 Agosto (ore 14 UTC). https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-white-papers-on-phi… Giacomo

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How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 2, 2021

Aug. 2, 2021

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/sectors/2021/07/how-google-quietly-fu… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 2, 2021

Aug. 2, 2021

In June, the Turing Institute, the UK’s national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against covid. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-fai… _________________________ 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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Can Fake Accounts Save the Internet? - The New York Times
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 2, 2021

Aug. 2, 2021

<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/style/anonymity-pseudonymity-online-iden…> In early July, when England’s soccer team lost the European Championship final to Italy on its home turf, the crushing defeat was followed by a torrent of racist abuse on social media directed at the team’s Black players. The messages — part of an ongoing pattern of social media bigotry — were condemned by politicians, platforms, teammates and fans. They were also blamed, in part, on a familiar figure: the masked troll. He’s been popping up a lot lately. Depending who you are, he may be the source of all political disinformation; one of an army of bots; the leader of an online mob; a hacker or a scammer. He has a mascot — the guy in a hoodie at his keyboard, face obscured in the shadows, except for a little smirk. In the popular imagination, this figure, operating under a name concealed or chosen, is almost always up to no good. That could explain why people so often push for unmasking him. In England, this episode renewed calls for tech companies to enforce identity verification for their users. A petition of the British government demanding that it make “verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account” has more than 688,000 signatures. “We have rights to free speech and association, but as real people, not fake people,” wrote Paul Mason, a columnist for The New Statesman. One optimistic assumption behind these ideas is that racism is so stigmatized, people wouldn’t dare espouse such things under their own names (a curious read of politics, British or otherwise, circa 2021). It implies that to adopt a new identity is to become “fake.” But it is also pretty close to how things already work. After a decade in which online identity came under increasingly centralized control, in which various digital and offline identities were mingled, and during which personal data became a hot global commodity, control over one’s identity is starting to look more like a threatened privilege than a right. To exist online is to be constantly asked to show yourself. Whose Space Is This? Online anonymity and pseudonymity have survived accusations of ruining the internet for as long as people have been logging on; they have been abused by bad actors. They’re also widely misunderstood. A lot of common assumptions about anonymity are complicated by the literature on how people actually behave online, as noted by researcher K. Nathan Matias. In studies, for example, anonymous actors tend to be more, not less, sensitive to group norms. More than half of victims of online harassment already know their harassers. While there is scant evidence that “real name” policies mitigate abuse, there is plenty suggesting that asking people to expose more private information can intensify it. Researchers have found that, in some contexts, the most aggressive commenters have been observed to be more likely to reveal their identities. An analysis of nearly two decades of British press by Thais Sardá, a researcher at Loughborough University, however, found that coverage of anonymous spaces, often and imprecisely called the “dark web,” was “underpinned by a sharply negative characterization” of anonymity. When represented at all, positive uses of anonymity and pseudonymity are portrayed as narrow and exceptional; it makes sense for dissidents, for instance, but what does everyone else have to hide? [...]

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China Supreme Court issues regulations against misuse of facial recognition technology - JURIST - News - Legal News & Commentary
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 1, 2021

Aug. 1, 2021

<https://www.jurist.org/news/2021/08/china-supreme-court-issues-regulations-…> The Supreme People’s Court of China issued regulations Wednesday for use of facial recognition technology by private businesses. The guidelines require private businesses to receive consent from customers before collecting and processing their facial information. Under the new regulations, individuals have the right to reject the use of facial recognition technology for identity verification. They must be offered a reasonable alternative form of access to the building or service. The Supreme Court’s regulations treat violation of the law as a personal rights infringement and enable the aggrieved individual to file a claim for compensation. The regulations also state that businesses must notify customers with a specific clause to obtain explicit and “independent” consent before carrying out a scan. Hence, they cannot stow away their use of facial recognition in the general terms of use or through bundled consent, a method of obtaining consent for multiple requests with a single swipe. The regulations cover civil disputes involving private players and the Chinese government. The government’s nationwide surveillance system, which has widespread ramifications on civil liberties, remains outside the regulations’ purview for public security reasons. There is also an exception for services that cannot function without facial recognition information. The first facial recognition lawsuit in China was brought in 2019 in a court of Hangzhou by a law professor, Guo Bing, who sued the Hangzhou Safari Park. Bing alleged Hangzhou Safari Park refused entry to visitors who did not submit to the facial recognition and that it had not taken adequate precautions to protect visitors’ biometric information. Earlier this year, the Hangzhou court ruled in favor of Bing. However, its decision was based on a breach of contract and not the legality of data use in facial recognition.

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France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes two lab workers | Science | AAAS
by Alberto Cammozzo July 31, 2021

July 31, 2021

<https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/france-issues-moratorium-prion-rese…> *PARIS—*Five public research institutions in France have imposed a 3-month moratorium on the study of prions—a class of misfolding, infectious proteins that cause fatal brain diseases—after a retired lab worker who handled prions in the past was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the most common prion disease in humans. An investigation is underway to find out whether the patient, who worked at a lab run by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), contracted the disease on the job. If so, it would be the second such case in France in the past few years. In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named Émilie Jaumain died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs. The aim of the moratorium, which affects nine labs, is to “study the possibility of a link with the [new patient’s] former professional activity and if necessary to adapt the preventative measures in force in research laboratories,” according to a joint press release <https://www.inrae.fr/actualites/suspension-provisoire-travaux-prions-labora…> issued by the five institutions yesterday. “This is the right way to go in the circumstances,” says Ronald Melki, a structural biologist at a prion lab jointly operated by the French national research agency CNRS and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). “It is always wise to ask questions about the whole working process when something goes wrong.” “The occurrence of these harsh diseases in two of our scientific colleagues clearly affects the whole prion community, which is a small ‘familial’ community of less than 1000 people worldwide,” Emmanuel Comoy, deputy director of CEA’s Unit of Prion Disorders and Related Infectious Agents, wrote in an email to Science. Although prion research already has strict safety protocols, “it necessarily reinforces the awareness of the risk linked to these infectious agents,” he says. In Jaumain’s case, there is little doubt she was infected on the job, according to a paper <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2000687> published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2020. She had variant CJD (vCJD), a form typically caused by eating beef contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. But Europe’s BSE outbreak ended after 2000 and vCJD virtually disappeared; the chance that someone of Jaumain’s age in France would contract food-borne vCJD is “negligible or non-existent,” according to the paper. A scientist with inside knowledge says the new patient, a woman who worked at INRAE’s Host-Pathogen Interactions and Immunity group in Toulouse, is still alive. French authorities were apparently alerted to her diagnosis late last week. The press release suggests it’s not yet clear whether the new case is vCJD or “classic” CJD, which is not known to be caused by prions from animals. Classic CJD strikes an estimated one person per million. Some 80% of cases are sporadic, meaning they have no known cause, but others are genetic or contracted from infected human tissues during transplantations. The two types of CJD can only be distinguished through a postmortem examination of brain tissue. Lab infections are known to occur with many pathogens, but exposure to CJD-causing prions is unusually risky because there are no vaccines or treatments and the condition is universally fatal. And whereas most infections reveal themselves within days or weeks, CJD’s average incubation period is about 10 years. For Jaumain, who worked at INRAE’s Molecular Virology and Immunology Unit in Jouy-en-Josas, outside Paris, that long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a cryostat—a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures—that she used to slice brain sections from transgenic mice infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE. She pierced two layers of latex gloves and drew blood. “Émilie started worrying about the accident as soon as it had happened, and mentioned it to every doctor she saw,” says her widower, Armel Houel. In November 2017, Jaumain developed a burning pain in her right shoulder and neck that worsened and spread to the right half of her body over the following 6 months, according to the NEJM paper. In January 2019, she became depressed and anxious, suffering memory impairment and hallucinations. “It was a descent into hell,” Houel says. She was diagnosed with “probable vCJD” in mid-March of that year and died 3 months later. A postmortem confirmed the diagnosis. The occurrence of these harsh diseases in two of our scientific colleagues clearly affects the whole prion community. Emmanuel Comoy, French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission INRAE only recently admitted the likely link between Jaumain’s illness and the accident. “We recognize, without ambiguity, the hypothesis of a correlation between Emilie Jaumain-Houel’s accident … and her infection with vCJD,” INRAE chair and CEO Philippe Mauguin wrote in a 24 June letter to an association created by friends and colleagues <http://www.association-emilys.com/> to publicize Jaumain’s case and lobby for improvements in lab safety. (Science has obtained a copy of the letter, which has not been made public.) Jaumain’s family has filed both criminal charges and an administrative suit against INRAE, alleging a range of problems at Jaumain’s lab. She had not been trained in handling dangerous prions or responding to accidents and did not wear both metal mesh and surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien Bensimhon, the family’s lawyer. The thumb should have been soaked in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, Bensimhon adds. Independent reports by a company specializing in occupational safety and by government inspectors have found no safety violations at the lab; one of them said there was a “strong culture” of risk management. (Bensimhon calls the reports “biased.”) The government inspectors’ report concluded that Jaumain’s accident was not unique, however. There had been at least 17 accidents among the 100 or so scientists and technicians in France working with prions in the previous decade, five of whom stabbed or cut themselves with contaminated syringes or blades. Another technician at the same lab had a fingerprick accident with prions in 2005, but has not developed vCJD symptoms so far, Bensimhon says. “It is shocking that no precautionary measures were taken then to ensure such an accident never happened again,” he says. In Italy, too, the last person to die of vCJD, in 2016, was a lab worker with exposure to prion-infected brain tissue, according to last year’s NEJM paper, although an investigation did not find evidence of a lab accident. That patient and the lab they worked at have not been identified. After Jaumain’s diagnosis, “We contacted all the research prion labs in France to suggest they check their safety procedures and remind staff about the importance of respecting them,” says Stéphane Haïk, a neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital who helped diagnose Jaumain and is the corresponding author on the paper. Many labs tightened procedures, according to the government inspectors’ report, for instance by introducing plastic scissors and scalpels, which are disposable and less sharp, and bite and cut-resistant gloves. A team of experts from the five research agencies is due to submit proposals for a guide to good practice in prion research to the French government at the end of this year. The scientific community has long recognized that handling prions is dangerous and an occupational risk for neuropathologists, says neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of the University of Zurich. Aguzzi declined to comment on the French CJD cases, but told Science his lab never handles human or bovine prions for research purposes, only for diagnostics. “We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have never been shown to be infectious to humans,” Aguzzi says. In a 2011 paper <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020930/>, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols, at least in mice, which “may warrant re-thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic laboratories,” they wrote. Aguzzi says he was “totally shocked” by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little attention elsewhere. The moratorium will “obviously” cause delays in research, but given the very long incubation periods in prion diseases, the impact of a 3-month hiatus will be limited, Comoy says. His research team at CEA also works on other neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, and will shift some of its efforts to those. Although Jaumain’s diagnosis upset many in the field, it hasn’t led to an exodus among researchers in France, Haïk says: “I know of only one person who resigned because they were so worried.”

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