- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Come finirà il mondo (digitale)
by Diego Giorio April 28, 2021

April 28, 2021

Non mi sembra sia gia passata in lista la segnalazione di questo libro: https://www.agendadigitale.eu/sicurezza/cyber-war-siamo-davvero-vicini-al-p… [https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVF.8OhascjePjBogG%2fw%2bS%2fw2w&pid=Api]<https://www.agendadigitale.eu/sicurezza/cyber-war-siamo-davvero-vicini-al-p…> Cyber war, l'Occidente rischia un nuovo 11 settembre: ecco perché | Agenda Digitale<https://www.agendadigitale.eu/sicurezza/cyber-war-siamo-davvero-vicini-al-p…> www.agendadigitale.eu Buon fine settimana a tutti D.

2 1

Revealed: The UK government campaign to force Julian As...
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 28, 2021

April 28, 2021

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-04-28-revealed-the-uk-governme… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

2 1

Why Apppl's new privacy feature is such a big deal
by Giuseppe Attardi April 27, 2021

April 27, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracking-transparency…

1 0

Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster
by Giacomo Tesio April 27, 2021

April 27, 2021

Hey! If you write a comment about this article online, disclose your stake in cryptocurrency. I will explain why later in this post. For my part, I held <$10,000 USD worth of Bitcoin prior to 2016, plus small amounts of altcoins. I made a modest profit on my holdings. Today my stake in all cryptocurrency is $0. [...] Over the past several months, everyone in the industry who provides any kind of free CPU resources has been dealing with a massive outbreak of abuse for cryptocurrency mining. The industry has been setting up informal working groups to pool knowledge of mitigations, communicate when our platforms are being leveraged against one another, and cumulatively wasting thousands of hours of engineering time implementing measures to deal with this abuse, and responding as attackers find new ways to circumvent them. Cryptocurrency has invented an entirely new category of internet abuse. CI services like mine are not alone in this struggle: JavaScript miners, botnets, and all kinds of other illicit cycles are being spent solving pointless math problems to make money for bad actors. [...] Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are a bunch of script kiddies. There are large, talented teams of engineers across several organizations working together to combat this abuse, and they’re losing. [...] The integrity and trust of the entire software industry has sharply declined due to cryptocurrency. It sets up perverse incentives for new projects, where developers are no longer trying to convince you to use their software because it’s good, but because they think that if they can convince you it will make them rich. I’ve had to develop a special radar for reading product pages now: a mounting feeling of dread as a promising technology is introduced while I inevitably arrive at the buried lede: it’s more crypto bullshit. [...] Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it. [..] That’s what cryptocurrency is all about: not novel technology, not empowerment, but making money. [...] And those few failed economies whose people are desperately using cryptocurrency to keep the wheel of their fates spinning? Those make for a good headline, but how about the rural communities whose tax dollars subsidized the power plants which the miners have flocked to? People who are suffering blackouts as their power is siphoned into computing SHA-256 as fast as possible while dumping an entire country worth of CO² into the atmosphere? No, cryptocurrency does not help failed states. It exploits them. [...] Every comment online about cryptocurrency is tainted by the fact that the commenter has probably invested thousands of dollars into a Ponzi scheme and is depending on your agreement to make their money back. [..] Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency. Per una volta, non sono parole mie: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html Giacomo Full Disclosure: non ho mai "posseduto" alcuna criptovaluta. (ma di bit ve ne posso dare quanti ne volete lo stesso! :-D)

1 0

serie di documentari "Invisibili: I Proletari del Clic"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2021

April 27, 2021

Rilancio quanto l'amico Antonio Casilli ha appena pubblicato su Facebook (con accesso pubblico al post). jc ---- Car* amic* italian*, cosa unisce i riders nostrani, i moderatori di Facebook e il lavoratori che in Africa addestrano gli algoritmi? La risposta la trovate nella nostra serie di documentari "Invisibili: I Proletari del Clic", regia Henri Poulain, sceneggiatura di Julien Goetz, basata sulle mie inchieste sul lavoro delle piattaforme, ora disponibile sottotitolata in italiano e in altre 5 lingue sul sito della rete televisiva europea ARTE. https://www.arte.tv/it/search/?q=invisibili+proletari+del+clic&page=1

3 2

Guida pratica agli NFT – Arte & Diritto al tempo dei Non Fungible Token (gratuita)
by Matteo G.P. Flora April 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

Gli NFT sono artefatti digitali, in gergo “token non fungibili” che utilizzano la tecnologia blockchain per creare unicità e dare valore agli oggetti digitali, oppure per certificare ed autenticare oggetti fisici. Sono anche uno dei fenomeni del momento, con migliaia di autori al mondo che hanno saputo approfittare delle peculiarità di questo nuovo strumento per creare valore nelle loro opere. *La guida è liberamente scaricabile (pdf, epub, mobi) qui » https://guidanft.it <https://guidanft.it>* Inizialmente, gli NFT hanno investito il mondo delle arti visive, creando nuove modalità di creazione e fruizione delle opere d’arte e stravolgendo il mercato, ma la vera rivoluzione della “tokenizzazione” deve ancora dispiegare i suoi effetti: offrirà una maggiore personalizzazione dei diritti e permetterà interazioni che prima non erano immaginabili. Con i colleghi di 42 Law Firm, e con la collaborazione dei suoi partner tecnologici, abbiamo voluto raccogliere in una guida pratica tutto ciò che sappiamo ad oggi sugli NFT, per offrire uno strumento immediato e pratico che consenta a chiunque di comprendere questo nuovo fenomeno e di muovere anche in autonomia i primi passi in un fiorente e variegato mercato. La guida si propone istruire il lettore alla creazione e messa in vendita di semplici NFT, ma offre al contempo anche una prima disamina degli aspetti tecnici e legali di maggiore interesse, mettendo queste informazioni a disposizione di tutti coloro che sono incuriositi da questo nuovo strumento di gestione della proprietà e dei diritti connessi. *La guida è liberamente scaricabile (pdf, epub, mobi) qui » https://guidanft.it <https://guidanft.it>* Un saluto a tutti! M. -- *Matteo G.P. Flora* *Professor (adj.) *in *'**Corporate Reputation <http://matteoflora.com/#prof>** and Storytelling' *in University of Pavia Founder and co-ceo » *THE FOOL <http://matteoflora.com/#aziende> *- *Customer Insights for Reputation and Value Strategy* Co-founder » *LT42 <http://matteoflora.com/#aziende> *- *Legal-Automation and Legal-Tech* Partner » *42 LAW FIRM <http://matteoflora.com/#aziende> *- *Lawyers for Digital Transformation* M. +39.347.9676430 - mf(a)thefool.it <http://matteoflora.com/#ci>

8 12

How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency
by Giovanni Biscuolo April 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

Buongiorno, considerato che di tanto in tanto straparlo di GNU Taler, mi permetto di segnalarvi: https://taler.net/papers/cbdc2021en.pdf --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency By David Chaum (a), Christian Grothoff (b), and Thomas Moser (c) (a) xx Network (b) Bern University of Applied Sciences and GNU Project (c) Swiss National Bank This version: January 2021 First version: May 2020 Abstract With the emergence of Bitcoin and recently proposed stablecoins from BigTechs, such as Diem (formerly Libra), central banks face growing competition from private actors offering their own digital alternative to physical cash. We do not address the normative question whether a central bank should issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or not. Instead, we contribute to the current research debate by showing how a central bank could do so, if desired. We propose a token-based system without distributed ledger technology and show how earlier-deployed, software-only electronic cash can be improved upon to preserve transaction privacy, meet regulatory requirements in a compelling way, and offer a level of quantum-resistant protection against systemic privacy risk. Neither monetary policy nor financial stability would be materially affected because a CBDC with this design would replicate physical cash rather than bank deposits. I. Introduction Ever since the rise of personal computers in the 1980s, and especially since the National Science Foundation removed its restrictions on using the Internet for commercial purposes in 1991, there has been a quest to create digital cash for online payments. The earliest proposal was by Chaum (1983). Even though such schemes were implemented, they did not catch on; instead, credit card systems became the dominant online payment method. Nakamoto’s (2008) proposal for a purely peer-to-peer version of digital cash and the subsequent successful launch of Bitcoin have unleashed a new era of digital cash research and development. CoinMarketCap lists over 5,000 cryptocurrencies. Recently, central banks have started to consider, or at least study, the issuance of digital currencies (see Auer et. al. 2020, Boar et al. 2020, Kiff et al. 2020, and Mancini-Griffoli et al. 2018). [...] The token-based CBDC proposed here also allows the preservation of a key feature of physical cash: transaction privacy. It is usually argued that cryptographic privacy protections are so computationally demanding that the high resource requirements make their use on mobile devices infeasible (see Allen et al. 2020). While this may be true in the context of DLT, where public traceability of transactions is necessary to prevent double spending (Narayanan et al. 2016), it is not true for the Chaum-style blind-signature protocol with a central bank proposed in the present paper. Our CBDC, based on blind signatures and a two-tier architecture, guarantees perfect, quantum-resistant transaction privacy while providing anti-money laundering (AML) and counter terrorism financing (CFT) protections for society that are actually stronger than those of banknotes. [...] --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- É dal 1983 che è tutto chiaro. Saluti, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Biscuolo Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché.

1 0

Riforma fiscale (ipocrita, n.d.r.): lotta all’evasione con l’intelligenza artificiale
by Giovanni Biscuolo April 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

Buongionro nexiane, abbiamo appena commentato in merito ai problemini delle centinaia di persone ingiustamente condannate (e rovinate) "dal software" (Post Office UK) che già si intravedono i radiosi frutti dell'intelligenza articifiale per /prevenire/ l'evasione fiscale... sempre con 'sto sottofondo di insopportabile *ipocrisia* di /questioni di privacy/ :-O Ebbene sì, nella riforma fiscale nella quale il governo italiano si è impegnato verso l'EU esiste anche questo: https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/04/26/riforma-fiscale-limpegno-con-lu… «Riforma fiscale, l’impegno con l’Ue per “l’equilibrio dei conti pubblici”. Flat tax verso lo stop e lotta all’evasione con l’intelligenza artificiale (ma con l’incognita privacy)» di Chiara Brusini, 26 APRILE 2021 --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- [...] Rafforzata, poi, la parte sul contrasto all’evasione: per l’Agenzia delle Entrate sono previste 2mila assunzioni aggiuntive ma soprattutto c’è il via libera a strumenti innovativi di analisi dei dati: intelligenza artificiale, machine learning, text mining. Pratiche previste da tutte le best practice internazionali sulla valutazione del “rischio fiscale” ma finora frenate, in Italia, anche da interpretazioni restrittive delle norme sulla privacy. [...] Sul fronte della lotta all’evasione fiscale le intenzioni, nonostante il primo provvedimento dell’esecutivo sia stato un condono, sembrano bellicose. L’Italia, si legge, “ha intenzione di intensificare l’attività di analisi dei dati a disposizione dell’Agenzia delle entrate che consenta di individuare preventivamente o tempestivamente posizioni da sottoporre ad accertamento fiscale“. Per aggredire gli oltre 100 miliardi l’anno di mancati versamenti si punta dunque non solo sull’incrocio dei dati “storici” per individuare i contribuenti che presentano “sintomi” di scarsa fedeltà tributaria, ma anche su strumenti come l’intelligenza artificiale e l’analisi delle relazioni, in grado addirittura di predire comportamenti futuri in materia di rapporti con il fisco. Tutte attività che richiedono ovviamente di potenziare l’Agenzia, impoverita (e invecchiata: l’età media è salita a 55 anni) da uscite e blocco del turnover. Oltre al concorso per 4.113 persone già bandito, verranno selezionate altre 2mila professionalità. Tra cui data scientist, informatici, esperti di fiscalità internazionale, ingegneri. Il primo intervento in ordine di tempo sarà però la ridefinizione della disciplina sulla riscossione dei tributi, oggi molto inefficace. Nel decreto che ha previsto il condono delle cartelle fino a 5mila euro datate 2000-2010 il governo ha dato 60 giorni al Tesoro per preparare una relazione con i criteri per rivedere il farraginoso iter. La scelta è tra due strade: o la cancellazione automatica dei ruoli dopo cinque anni dall’affidamento all’ex Equitalia – il risultato sarebbe nei fatti un condono permanente – oppure un’operazione chirurgica che miri a eliminare via via dal magazzino i soli crediti davvero inesigibili. Sarà una prima operazione verità per valutare in concreto l’impegno ad affrontare l’evasione di massa. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Machine learning, text mining (eh? siete seri?), analisi delle relazioni, predizione del comportamento fiscale *futuro*? .../best/ practices internazionali? ...non voglio sapere quali sono le worst. Sapete che in confronto il Social Credit Sistem della Repubblica Popolare Cinese rischia di essere più trasparente ed equo [1] di quello all'occidentale? Quindi fateci capire: non siete capaci di esigere i crediti già accertati e /pretendete/ di risolvere il tutto _preventivamente_ divinando in merito a chi evaderà, usando i "Big Data"?!? Volete essere più cool dei GAFAM eh? ...come se già non lo sapeste chi evade o elude le tasse, sfruttando /esattamente/ tutti quei complicati meccanismi fiscali internazionali che voi avete messo in piedi ad arte... o volete convincerci che Amazon EU & Co. sono soggetti a tassazioni adeguate ai loro guadagni? Siete ipocriti, potentissimi sì ma sempre sfacciatamente ipocriti. Il sistema di pagamento per tracciare chi riceve denaro, e qundi deve dichiararlo, ma NON tracciare chi (e cosa) acquista con quel denaro ESISTE, c'è già da trent'anni, la sua implementazione (oggi) si chiama GNU Taler https://taler.net/en/ A voi invece piacciono le tecnologie cool, frega niente se per usarle dovete passare sopra la privacy *e* i diritti dei cittadini con lo schiacciasassi (oppure vi frega e lo fate apposta, sperando di non essere beccati)· Noi (plurale majestatis) saremo anche ignoranti, ma non siamo del tutto cretini e non è il caso che approfittate in questo modo della nostra pazienza. La fiducia sta per esaurirsi definitivamente, persa quella vedremo cosa riuscirà a tenerci assieme. Saluti, Giovanni. [1] il mio non è un endorsement, è una constatazione: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System date almeno un'occhiata alla comparazione con gli SCORING SYSTEMS di alcune altre nazioni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#Comparison_to_other_coun… -- Giovanni Biscuolo Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché.

1 0

Our customers received 40 billion more emails in February of 2021 than in February of 2020.” ...
by gianlucaquaglia＠gmail.com April 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

By Kate Morgan26th April 2021 Since the pandemic hit, we’ve been using more digital tools to work longer hours, creating a cognitive load that’s tough on our brains. How do we fix that? L Late last year, a tweet <https://twitter.com/delia_cai/status/1330597127131684870> from BuzzFeed trends editor Delia Cai went viral: “Another day of staring at the big screen while scrolling through my little screen so as to reward myself for staring at the medium screen all week,” she joked. It seems right on. More than a year into the pandemic, we are glued to our screens. And it’s not only about binging movies and scrolling through TikTok. As remote work has set in, we’re relying entirely on digital tools to keep in touch with each other and get our work done. This all-virtual-all-the-time nature of our everyday has led to a worrisome spike in ‘digital intensity’. It’s not just that we’re increasingly using digital tools to work; it’s that we’re also using digital tools more to /work more. /A new survey from Microsoft tracked the habits of more than 30,000 users in 31 countries <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work> over the last year, and the results are alarming. “People spend 148% more minutes in weekly Teams meetings,” says Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice-president. “An average user is sending 42% more chats after hours, and 200% more chats on weekends. Our customers received 40 billion more emails in February of 2021 than in February of 2020.” [...] continua qui https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210423-is-there-an-antidote-to-digit… --

1 0

Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life
by Alberto Cammozzo April 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

Da Liberationtech: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-addr… <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-addr…>> While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military. What happened next was stranger still. The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market. The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website. As listed in records, the company’s address in Plantation, Fla., outside Fort Lauderdale, is a shared workspace in an office building that doesn’t show Global Resource Systems on its lobby directory. A receptionist at the shared workspace said Friday that she could provide no information about the company and asked a reporter to leave. The company did not respond to requests for comment. The only announcement of Global Resources Systems’ management of Pentagon addresses happened in the obscure world of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — the messaging system that tells Internet companies how to route traffic across the world. There, messages began to arrive telling network administrators that IP addresses assigned to the Pentagon but long dormant could now accept traffic — but it should be routed to Global Resource Systems. Network administrators began speculating about perhaps the most dramatic shift in IP address space allotment since BGP was introduced in the 1980s. “They are now announcing more address space than anything ever in the history of the Internet,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company, who was among those trying to figure out what was happening. He published a blog post on the mystery Saturday morning. The long life of a quick ‘fix’: Internet protocol from 1989 leaves data vulnerable to hijackers The theories were many. Did someone at the Defense Department sell off part of the military’s vast collection of sought-after IP addresses as Trump left office? Had the Pentagon finally acted on demands to unload the billions of dollars worth of IP address space the military has been sitting on, largely unused, for decades? An answer, of sorts, came Friday. The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military. Created in 2015, the DDS operates a Silicon Valley-like office within the Pentagon. It has carried out a range of special projects in recent years, from developing a biometric app to help service members identify friendly and enemy forces on the battlefield to ensuring the encryption of emails Pentagon staff were exchanging about coronavirus vaccines with external parties. Brett Goldstein, the DDS’s director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a “pilot effort” publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon. “This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” Goldstein said. “Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities.” The Path Forward: Safeguarding Global Innovation Keith J. Krach and Gen. Stanley McChrystal join Washington Post Live on Thursday, April 22 (The Washington Post) Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department’s “many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.” The specifics of what the effort is trying to achieve remain unclear. The Defense Department declined to answer a number of questions about the project, and Pentagon officials declined to say why Goldstein’s unit had used a little-known Florida company to carry out the pilot effort rather than have the Defense Department itself “announce” the addresses through BGP messages — a far more routine approach. What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses. Madory said his monitoring showed the broad movements of Internet traffic began immediately after the IP addresses were announced Jan. 20. These hackers warned the Internet would become a security nightmare Madory said such large amounts of data could provide several benefits for those in a position to collect and analyze it for threat intelligence and other purposes. The data may provide information about how malicious actors operate online and could reveal exploitable weaknesses in computer systems. In addition, several Chinese companies use network numbering systems that resemble the U.S. military’s IP addresses in their internal systems, Madory said. By announcing the address space through Global Resource Systems, that could cause some of that information to be routed to systems controlled by the U.S. military. The data could also include accidental misconfigurations that could be exploited or fixed, Madory said. “If you have a very large amount of traffic, and someone knows how to go through it, you’ll find stuff,” Madory added. The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it. Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn’t sold any of it to a private party. [...]

2 2