- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

SW Opex ? - Japan’s Creaking Computer Systems Are Hampering Its Economic Recovery
by gabriele elia Aug. 28, 2020

Aug. 28, 2020

Interessante che in Giappone le spese per SW sono … “opex” non “investimenti” e questo è tra i fattori che rallentano il processo di digitalizzazione … tralasciamo dove sta l'italia nell'indice dell'IMD (hint: dietro il Kazakistan ...) https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/japan-s-creaking-computer-syst… Japan’s Creaking Computer Systems Are Hampering Its Economic Recovery “Japan is behind the world by at least 20 years” when it comes to administrative technology. Bloomberg<https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/author/--14> | Aug 24, 2020 Yuko Takeo (Bloomberg) -- The coronavirus crisis may have finally forced Japan’s government to get serious about fixing its computer systems. Before the pandemic, the problems might have been merely annoying, but now they’re impeding an economic recovery. Japan’s aging administrative pipeline has delayed aid money getting to where it’s needed during the pandemic. To fix that, the government last month included a “digital new deal” in its annual policy goals, calling for a year of concentrated investment to boost data-sharing between ministries and update websites, although no price tag has been given yet. conomists say the shoddy state of the government’s digital services has damped the benefits from fiscal stimulus and is hurting the country’s broader competitiveness by holding back technological progress in the private sector. “Japan is behind the world by at least 20 years” when it comes to administrative technology, said economist Yukio Noguchi, author of several books about tech and Japan’s economy. “The country needs to escape its system of using paper and physical stamps as soon as it can.” Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, but when it comes to digital competitiveness it ranks just 23rd out of 63 nations surveyed by the Institute for Management Development. While the government wants to make electronic signatures easier to use on its systems, physical stamps are still required for many official documents, making many transactions hard to do online. For some people, it’s also made working from home difficult during the pandemic. The bureaucracy’s failure to spend more on computer software is partly a result of the way it finances investments, according to economist Takuya Hoshino at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. Software is classed as a “non-material” investment in government accounting. That means it’s funded by debt-covering bonds, which require a more arduous approval process than do the construction bonds used to build roads or bridges, Hoshino said. It’s easy to imagine how that technicality might discourage officials from making expensive proposals, given that Japan already has the developed world’s heaviest public debt burden. Still, the coronavirus has made the cost of having old computer systems much clearer. “It’s entirely possible we’ll have crises like this every decade going forward,” Hoshino said. “But without supporting infrastructure, the government can’t make the most of its own policies.” #end

1 0

Tech giants push back on forced Uyghur labour claims
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

A proposito di ingiustizia. Buona lettura dl https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-giants-push-back-on-forced-uyghur-labour… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

1 0

The Age of Cyber Sovereignty? - War on the Rocks
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

<https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/the-age-of-cyber-sovereignty/> Elliott Zaagman The White House’s approach to managing the potential security threats posed by TikTok, WeChat, and other Chinese-owned apps is hardly a model of procedural justice. Without a clear legal or regulatory framework, the Trump administration has issued executive orders banning transactions with the apps’ respective parent companies (Bytedance and Tencent). China’s leaders have not minced words in expressing their displeasure with U.S. actions, referring to those against TikTok as a “smash and grab” in a China Daily editorial, vowing retaliation, and even going so far as to suggest that Beijing could block a future sale. Yet despite its displeasure, Beijing seems to be witnessing the global adoption of a norm that it has long advocated. Ironically, it may do China more harm than good. For years, China has promoted the concept of “cyber sovereignty.” Although somewhat nebulous in definition, the term has been used to legitimize censorship, surveillance, and localized control of data that make up what is often referred to as China’s “Great Firewall.” Broadly put, it is the notion that the government of a sovereign nation should have the right to exercise control over the internet within its own borders, including political, economic, cultural, and technological activities. Beijing’s advocacy of the norm of cyber sovereignty has grown only more pronounced over time. Its annual World Internet Conference, which has drawn attendees such as Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai as recently as 2017, has consistently offered a venue through which Chinese officials could lobby the movers and shakers of the tech world to see the value in this approach. China has also sought to advance this notion through international bodies such as the United Nations. For the Chinese Communist Party, cyber sovereignty has proved beneficial in a number of ways. While enabling the party to both moderate and gauge public discourse and sentiment, the technological barriers also provided space for Chinese companies to develop into some of the world’s largest, while impeding the entry and success of foreign internet platforms in China. China’s model has worked out so well that other countries have begun adopting elements of it. And it is now Chinese companies that seem to be suffering most. Spurred by a recent escalation of border tensions, India has been purging Chinese apps from the country’s internet. In addition to its pressure on TikTok, the Trump administration has recently announced the Clean Network program, a comprehensive tech stack that, if fully implemented, would almost entirely exclude Chinese technology firms. The adoption of cyber sovereignty as a global norm could now prove to be one of the greatest impediments to China’s peace, prosperity, and development. As China has few allies and worsening relations with the majority of the world’s most prosperous nations, its firms are finding a shrinking list of attractive overseas markets in which they are welcome. What’s more, China’s robust application of the cyber sovereignty principle over the past decade and a half has left it with few options through which to take reciprocal action when its firms are excluded from other nations’ digital spheres. After all, Beijing cannot go about banning apps that it already banned years ago. This reality is already being acknowledged by leaders in China’s technology industry. In an article on Sina.com that was later deleted, James Liang, co-founder of the online travel agency Ctrip, advocated that his country adopt a more open approach to its domestic internet in order to counter what he views as U.S. diplomatic aggression. “If we simply adopt a tit-for-tat strategy and implement the same xenophobic barriers, we will leave matters in the hands of the U.S.,” Liang wrote, adding, “our countermeasures should be to open up further … The United States wants to block WeChat and TikTok, so we can do the opposite.” Whether or not Liang’s prescription is correct, such an opening up would be a dramatic reversal of the direction that China and its digital sphere have been heading in, and starkly clashes with what appears to be President Xi Jinping’s vision for the Chinese internet. What does seem clear is that after years of lobbying the world to accept the notion of cyber sovereignty, China has gotten its wish. To which the axiom applies: Be careful what you wish for — you just might get it.

1 0

What the A-level debacle teaches us about algorithms and government
by Antonio Vetro' Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

Alcune lezioni apprese dal recente pasticciaccio dell’algoritmo usato nelle scuole inglesi: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/a-level-students-… <https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/a-level-students-…> Inoltre, per gli amanti dei numeri, qui un’ottima ricostruzione di come ha lavorato l’algoritmo: https://rpubs.com/JeniT/ofqual-algorithm <https://rpubs.com/JeniT/ofqual-algorithm> E qui invece la versione sintetica e in “prosa” del Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/21/ofqual-exams-algorithm-wh… <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/21/ofqual-exams-algorithm-wh…> av

2 2

AI Watch - Artificial Intelligence in public services | EU Science Hub
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-resear… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

2 1

Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say, When They Phone Home?
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

<https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf> Abstract We measure the connections to backend servers made by six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser, during normal web browsing. Our aim is to assess the privacy risks associated with this back-end data exchange. We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex. [...] VIII. CONCLUSIONS We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser. For Brave with its default settings we did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details of web pages visited with backend servers. For all three this happens via the search autocomplete feature, which sends web addresses to backend servers in realtime as they are typed. In Chrome a persistent identifier is sent alongside these web addresses, allowing them to be linked together. In addition, Firefox includes identifiers in its telemetry transmissions that can potentially be used to link these over time. Telemetry can be disabled, but again is silently enabled by default. Firefox also maintains an open websocket for push notifications that is linked to a unique identifier and so potentially can also be used for tracking and which cannot be easily disabled. Safari defaults to a choice of start page that potentially leaks information to multiple third parties and allows them to preload pages containing identifiers to the browser cache. Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers. >From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.

1 0

Law, code and systems – Public Strategist
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

<https://www.publicstrategist.com/2017/11/law-code-and-systems/> Should law which results in the creation of new public administrative systems receive different parliamentary scrutiny from law which doesn’t? That’s the question raised in a recent blog post by Gordon Guthrie which caught my eye for a number of reasons, not least a typically thought provoking recent conversation with John Sheridan. As so often, apparently simple questions quickly get complicated when you dig into them a bit, and the first complication is to work out what question this special scrutiny is intended to answer. As a first approximation, there are three very different dimensions to this: How law is translated into code How law is translated into systems What role legislative scrutiny has in improving the way in which the first two are done. Law and code On the surface, law doesn’t look much like code. Despite heroic efforts by parliamentary counsel in recent years, it mostly looks like arcane wordplay. Looking just a little below the surface, though, patterns start to emerge which look intriguingly like code. Data elements are defined. Conditions are identified and tested for. The test leads execution down distinctive paths. A single text is unlikely to be self-contained but will refer to and draw on other legislative elements – calling functions if you will. But there is a deeper level still where the analogy breaks down again. The compiler or interpreter is not immediately deterministic – it can take years and many levels of the judicial system to work out the correct output from given inputs. Particularly, but not only, in a common law system, many functions are called by interpretation without it ever being explicit that they are being called at all. The idea that law can be some kind of pseudo code is attractive but insubstantial.1 That’s not to say that there is no connection at all. As one example, Richard Pope suggested a few years ago that there might be scope for using software testing techniques to provide some insight into whether regulations are being applied. More generally, there are many contexts where rules defined in law need to become rules applied in practice, and rules defined in code will almost always be a vital intermediate step. Law and systems Law may be a necessary component of an administrative system, but it is never a sufficient one. Data needs to be collected, cases need to be managed, help needs to be offered, processes and roles need to be understood, edge cases need to be identified, transitional arrangements need to be put in place – and the list goes on. In the implementation of a legal change, the capturing of the legal element itself is likely to be one of the smaller and more straightforward aspects of what needs to be done. That doesn’t mean that the project within which such a change is embedded will be small or straightforward – and government is littered with examples of projects which are anything but. It does though suggest that the extent of legislative change may not be the best indicator and certainly isn’t the only indicator of the level of risk in developing or redeveloping a system. Legislative scrutiny Law is the responsibility of legislators. They are both the primary decision makers about what the law should be and the primary means by which the executive is held to account for its implementation and application.2 Legislative debate is normally strongly focused on the merits of ideas and policies; there is rarely much attention given to the practical questions of implementation, partly because that is rarely specified within the legislation, partly because there is limited scope for preliminary work to have been considered during its passage,3 and partly because that doesn’t tend to be what legislators focus on. The result is that, as things currently work, legislative approval almost necessarily precedes any point at which it is possible to assess the likelihood of successful delivery. It’s certainly possible to see a model in which legislatures took a more active and more structured role in monitoring whether what was being developed had the characteristics of success, but however that were to work, it wouldn’t be a fundamentally legislative role. So perhaps the question is less whether legislatures should do more of this, and more whether there is a shortfall in the external challenge and oversight of programme management, and if so whether that shortfall is best addressed by legislators.4 Back to code I remain strongly of the view that thinking about law as code (or perhaps better, law as system) prompts interesting ideas and insights. At a more mundane level, it can prompt attention to language being used not just not in line with its natural meaning, but in flat contradiction to it. But that’s not because law is code; it’s because the parallels are strong enough and the differences clear enough that the cross-fertilisation of ideas is useful. The greater engagement of legislators with that debate might have some very interesting consequences.

1 0

Quanto costa affidare a Microsoft le email della scuola italiana - Wired
by Antonio Vetro' Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/08/27/microsoft-email-scuola-costi/ av

2 1

Wired.it: Quanto costa affidare a Microsoft le email della scuola italiana
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 27, 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

Buona lettura, Dl Wired.it: Quanto costa affidare a Microsoft le email della scuola italiana. https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/08/27/microsoft-email-scuola-costi/

1 0

How to destroy Surveillance Capitalism
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 26, 2020

Aug. 26, 2020

The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is. You can understand how, centuries ago, people who’d never gained a high-enough vantage point from which to see the Earth’s curvature might come to the commonsense belief that the flat-seeming Earth was, indeed, flat. But today, when elementary schools routinely dangle GoPro cameras from balloons and loft them high enough to photograph the Earth’s curve — to say nothing of the unexceptional sight of the curved Earth from an airplane window — it takes a heroic effort to maintain the belief that the world is flat. Likewise for white nationalism and eugenics: In an age where you can become a computational genomics datapoint by swabbing your cheek and mailing it to a gene-sequencing company along with a modest sum of money, “race science” has never been easier to refute. We are living through a golden age of both readily available facts and denial of those facts. Terrible ideas that have lingered on the fringes for decades or even centuries have gone mainstream seemingly overnight. When an obscure idea gains currency, there are only two things that can explain its ascendance: Either the person expressing that idea has gotten a lot better at stating their case, or the proposition has become harder to deny in the face of mounting evidence. In other words, if we want people to take climate change seriously, we can get a bunch of Greta Thunbergs to make eloquent, passionate arguments from podiums, winning our hearts and minds, or we can wait for flood, fire, broiling sun, and pandemics to make the case for us. In practice, we’ll probably have to do some of both: The more we’re boiling and burning and drowning and wasting away, the easier it will be for the Greta Thunbergs of the world to convince us. The arguments for ridiculous beliefs in odious conspiracies like anti-vaccination, climate denial, a flat Earth, and eugenics are no better than they were a generation ago. Indeed, they’re worse because they are being pitched to people who have at least a background awareness of the refuting facts. [...] Surveillance capitalism assumes that because advertisers buy a lot of what Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. But Big Tech’s massive sales could just as easily be the result of a popular delusion or something even more pernicious: monopolistic control over our communications and commerce. [...] To understand why you shouldn’t worry about mind-control rays — but why you should worry about surveillance and Big Tech — we must start by unpacking what we mean by “persuasion.” Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists promise their customers (the advertisers) that if they use machine-learning tools trained on unimaginably large data sets of nonconsensually harvested personal information, they will be able to uncover ways to bypass the rational faculties of the public and direct their behavior, creating a stream of purchases, votes, and other desired outcomes. The impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek. [...] Rather than finding ways to bypass our rational faculties, surveillance capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg mostly do one or more of three things: 1. Segmenting [...] 2. Deception [...] 3. Domination [...] 4. Bypassing our rational faculties This is the good stuff: using machine learning, “dark patterns,” engagement hacking, and other techniques to get us to do things that run counter to our better judgment. This is mind control. Some of these techniques have proven devastatingly effective (if only in the short term). The use of countdown timers on a purchase completion page can create a sense of urgency that causes you to ignore the nagging internal voice suggesting that you should shop around or sleep on your decision. The use of people from your social graph in ads can provide “social proof” that a purchase is worth making. Even the auction system pioneered by eBay is calculated to play on our cognitive blind spots, letting us feel like we “own” something because we bid on it, thus encouraging us to bid again when we are outbid to ensure that “our” things stay ours. Games are extraordinarily good at this. “Free to play” games manipulate us through many techniques, such as presenting players with a series of smoothly escalating challenges that create a sense of mastery and accomplishment but which sharply transition into a set of challenges that are impossible to overcome without paid upgrades. Add some social proof to the mix — a stream of notifications about how well your friends are faring — and before you know it, you’re buying virtual power-ups to get to the next level. [...] From the surveillance capitalist’s point of view, our adaptive capacity is like a harmful bacterium that deprives it of its food source — our attention — and novel techniques for snagging that attention are like new antibiotics that can be used to breach our defenses and destroy our self-determination. [...] Not everyone, of course. Some people never adapt to stimulus, just as some people never stop hearing the hum of the refrigerator. This is why most people who are exposed to slot machines play them for a while and then move on while a small and tragic minority liquidate their kids’ college funds, buy adult diapers, and position themselves in front of a machine until they collapse. [...] Zuboff puts enormous and undue weight on the persuasive power of surveillance-based influence techniques. Most of these don’t work very well, and the ones that do won’t work for very long. The makers of these influence tools are confident they will someday refine them into systems of total control, but they are hardly unbiased observers, and the risks from their dreams coming true are very speculative. By contrast, Zuboff is rather sanguine about 40 years of lax antitrust practice that has allowed a handful of companies to dominate the internet, ushering in an information age with, as one person on Twitter noted, five giant websites each filled with screenshots of the other four. [...] If our concern is that markets cease to function when consumers can no longer make choices, then copyright locks should concern us at least as much as influence campaigns. An influence campaign might nudge you to buy a certain brand of phone; but the copyright locks on that phone absolutely determine where you get it serviced, which apps can run on it, and when you have to throw it away rather than fixing it. [...] firms continue to over-collect and over-retain our data for three reasons: 1. They are locked in the aforementioned limbic arms race with our capacity to shore up our attentional defense systems to resist their new persuasion techniques. [...] 2. They believe the surveillance capitalism story. [...] 3. The penalties for leaking data are negligible. [...] Technology exceptionalism is a sin, whether it’s practiced by technology’s blind proponents or by its critics. Both of these camps are prone to explaining away monopolistic concentration by citing some special characteristic of the tech industry, like network effects or first-mover advantage. The only real difference between these two groups is that the tech apologists say monopoly is inevitable so we should just let tech get away with its abuses while competition regulators in the U.S. and the EU say monopoly is inevitable so we should punish tech for its abuses but not try to break up the monopolies. [...] the problem with monopolies is monopolism — the concentration of power into too few hands, which erodes our right to self-determination. If there is a monopoly, the law wants it gone, period. Sure, get rid of monopolies that create “consumer harm” in the form of higher prices, but also, get rid of other monopolies, too. Continua (a lungo) su https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744… (anche su https://archive.is/fJTvQ ) Si tratta sostanzialmente di una interessante serie di obiezioni alla prospettiva della Professoressa Zuboff sul capitalismo di sorveglianza che lo riconduce ad un problema economico: la tendenza del capitalismo globale a generare enormi monopoli planetari che erodono le libertà dei consumatori per concentrare sempre più potere in poche mani. Tale potere da un lato impedisce ogni forma di regolamentazione, dall'altro innalza enormi barriere di ingresso per limitare la concorrenza. Per quanto condivisibile, credo sia una visione parziale (e forse ingenua) della questione: come altri prima di lui, Doctorow non considera gli enormi vantaggi politici, economici e militari che questi monopoli planetari forniscono agli U.S.A. Giacomo

1 0