- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Police Want Your Smart Speaker—Here's Why | WIRED
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 26, 2020

Aug. 26, 2020

https://www.wired.com/story/star-witness-your-smart-speaker/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

3 3

Using Google's location tracking can put innocents in jail.
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 26, 2020

Aug. 26, 2020

Geofencing requests - despite violating privacy rights - are being issued more frequently in the US every year. [...] The most recent example is Zachary McCoy, who was the prime suspect in a case of burglary due to a bike ride. Data from his fitness app showed that he had passed a burglarized home in his neighborhood three times during the timeframe of the burglary. As police had no clue who might have been the burglar, they sent a geofencing warrant to Google. [...] Being scared, his parents dipped into their savings to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer to make sure their son would not go to prison for a crime that he never committed. The case against Zachary was eventually closed, but it shows that even when being innocent, you can still be in the wrong place at the wrong time - and in some cases you can even get jailed for being at the wrong place as another example from Arizona shows. # Being jailed because of Google data In 2018 an innocent man was jailed for six days in Avondale, Arizona, because his Google data showed that he had been at the scene of a shooting where one person was murdered. To make things worse his car had been spotted on surveillance cameras in the area as well. Later it turned out that the suspect's stepfather had used his car and had a device with him, on which the suspect's Google credentials where logged in. By now, the innocent suspect has filed a lawsuit against the authorities because while prosecutors never pursued charges against him, he lost his job, his car and his reputation due to the investigation, during which the police also released his full name in a press release. He was also unable to find a new job because a quick Google search showed that he had been investigated for murder so he did not pass background checks. # Tracking and geofencing The two cases show one thing very clearly: Al data that is accessible, is being used - whether you like it or not, even whether Google likes it or not. Google has to comply with warrants as any other company in the world. The problem is that today much more data about us exists than we can even imagine. The authorities are quickly learning how to get hold of this data, and despite the fact that general geofencing warrants are violating privacy rights, these are widely issued by judges in the US. # Fishing expeditions by the police Google said in a court filing last year that the requests from state and federal law enforcement authorities were increasing rapidly: by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and by 500 percent from 2018 to 2019. "This fishing expedition infringes on the privacy rights of so many possible people who had the misfortune of being in an area where a crime is alleged to be committed," said Jerome Greco, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society to Forbes. "We should not allow for such broad access to the data of so many on the mere speculation that a suspect may have used a cellphone near the location of the crime." Police officers described the data they obtained from Google as "incredible". People would not realize to what extent they are being tracked - not by the government, but by private companies such as Google. Continua su https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/google-tracking-suspect/ Giacomo

1 0

US Border Patrol Says They Can Create Central Repository Of Traveler Emails, Keep Them For 75 Years
by Giovanni Biscuolo Aug. 25, 2020

Aug. 25, 2020

Buongiorno, l'ennesimo capitolo della querelle in merito alla "Border Search Exeption" sulla perquisizione e copia integrale del contenuto dei dispositivi elettronici (fino a 100 miglia dal confine, all'interno ovviamente). [1] ...meno male che c'è "il cloud"! :-D «US Border Patrol Says They Can Create Central Repository Of Traveler Emails, Keep Them For 75 Years» https://viewfromthewing.com/us-border-patrol-says-they-can-create-central-r… --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- The U.S. government has taken the opportunity during the global pandemic, when people aren’t traveling out of the country much, to roll out a new platform for storing information they believe they are entitled to take from people crossing the border. A new filing reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol will store data from traveler devices centrally, keeping it backed up and searchable for up to 75 years. On July 30 the Department of Homeland Security published a privacy impact assessment detailing the electronic data that they may choose to collect from people crossing the border – and what happens to that data. * Border Patrol claims the right to search laptops, thumb drives, cell phones, and other devices capable of storing electronic information” and when they call it a ‘border search the can do this not just when you’re “crossing the U.S. border” in either direction (i.e. when you’re leaving, not just when you’re entering the country) but even “at the extended border” which generally means within 100 miles of the border, which encompasses where two-thirds of the U.S. population lives. * They needed an updated privacy impact assessment because of a new “enterprise-wide solution to manage and analyze certain types of information and metadata USBP collects from electronic devices” – and they they actually keep on file. Border Patrol will “acquire a mirror copy of the data on the device” they take from a traveler and store it locally. Before uploading it to their network they check to make sure there’s no porn on it (so they search your devices to find porn first). Then once they’ve determined it’s “clean” they transfer the data first to an encrypted thumb drive and then to the Border Patrol-side system called PLX. Examples of what they plan to keep from travelers’ devices include e-mails; videos and pictures; texts and chat messages; financial accounts and transactions; location history; web browser bookmarks; tasks list; calendar; call logs; contracts. Information is stored for 75 years although if it’s not related to any crime it may be deleted after 20 years. The government emphasizes they’ve been collecting this information, what’s changed is simply that they’ll be storing it in a central system where everything “will now by accessible to a larger number of USBP agents with no nexus” to suspected illegal activity. They promise, though, to restrict access and train staff not to do anything they aren’t supposed to. And they don’t see risk to privacy because they’ve published a notice (that I’m now writing about) telling you how your privacy may be violated. Electronic device searches have been on the rise. Between October 2008 and June 2010 6500 devices were searched. In 2016 there were 10,000 device searches, and 30,200 in 2017. It’s not clear though that these searches are all actually legal. In November 2019 a federal judge in Boston ruled that forensic searches of cell phones require at least reasonable suspicion “that the devices contain contraband.” --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Saluti, Giovanni. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception#Searching_of_electron… -- Giovanni Biscuolo

1 0

Uber and the lawlessness of 'sharing economy' corporates | Uber | The Guardian
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 25, 2020

Aug. 25, 2020

Uber and the lawlessness of ‘sharing economy’ corporates Companies including Airbnb and Google compare themselves to civil rights heroes, while using their popularity among consumers to nullify federal law Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan Tue 28 Jul 2015 07.00 BST https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/28/uber-lawlessness-sharing… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

1 1

How I helped fix Canadaʼs COVID Alert app
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 25, 2020

Aug. 25, 2020

<https://seancoates.com/blogs/how-i-helped-fix-canadas-covid-alert-app> On July 31st, Canada's COVID Alert app was made available for general use, though it does not have support for actually reporting a diagnosis in most provinces, yet. In Quebec, we can run the tracing part of the app, and if diagnosis codes become available here, the app can retroactively report contact. It uses the tracing mechanism that Google and Apple created together, and in my opinion—at least for now—Canadians should be running this thing to help us all deal with COVID-19. I won't run it forever, but for now, it seems to me that the benefits outweigh the "government can track me" fear (it's not actually tracking you; it doesn't even know who you are), and it's enabled on my phone. But, before I decided to take this position and offer up my own movement data, I wanted to be sure the app is doing what it says it's doing—at least to the extent of my abilities to be duly diligent. (Note: it's not purely movement data that's shared—at least without more context—but it's actual physical interactions with other people whose phones are available within the radio range of Bluetooth LE.) Before installing the app on my real daily-carry phone, I decided to put it on an old phone I still have, and to do some analysis on the most basic level of communication: who is it contacting? In 2015, I gave a talk at ConFoo entitled "Inspect HTTP(S) with Your Own Man-in-the-Middle Non-Attacks", and this is exactly what I wanted to do here. The tooling has improved in the past 5 years, and firing up mitmproxy, even without ever having used it on this relatively new laptop, was a one-liner, thanks to Nix: nix-shell -p mitmproxy --run mitmproxy This gave me a terminal-based UI and proxy server that I pointed my old phone at (via the Wifi Network settings, under HTTP proxy, pointed to my laptop's local IP address). I needed to have mitmproxy create a Certificate Authority that it could use to generate and sign "trusted" certificates, and then have my phone trust that authority, by visiting http://mitm.it/ in mobile Safari, and doing the certificate acceptance dance (this is even more complicated on the latest versions of iOS). Worth noting also, is that certain endpoints such as the Apple App Store appear to use Certificate Pinning, so you'll want to do things like install the COVID Alert app from the App Store before turning on the proxy. Once I was all set up to intercept my own traffic, I visited some https:// URLs and saw the request flows in mitmproxy. I fired up the COVID Alert app again, and noticed something strange… something disturbing: shows that the app is accessing clients.google.com In addition to the expected traffic to canada.ca (I noticed it's using .alpha.canada.ca, but I suspect that's due to the often-reported unbearably-long bureaucratic hassle in getting a .canada.ca TLS certificate, but that's another story), my phone, when running COVID Alert, was contacting Google. HEAD https://clients4.google.com/generate_204 A little web searching helped me discover that this is a commonly-used endpoint that helps developers determine if the device is behind a "captive portal" (an interaction that requires log-in or payment, or at least acceptance of terms before granting wider access to the Web). I decided that this was probably unintended by the developers of COVID Alert, but it still bothered me that an app, designed for tracking interactions between people['s devices], that the government wants us to run is telling Google that I'm running it, and disclosing my IP address in doing so: shows that the User Agent header identifies the app as (Note that the app clearly identifies itself in the User-Agent header.) A bit more quick research turned up a statement by Canada's Privacy Commissioner: An Internet Protocol (IP) address can be considered personal information if it can be associated with an identifiable individual. For example, in one complaint finding, we determined that some of the IP addresses that an internet service provider (ISP) was collecting were personal information because the ISP had the ability to link the IP addresses to its customers through their subscriber IDs. It's not too difficult to imagine that Google probably has enough data on Canadians for this to be a real problem. I discovered that this app is maintained by the Canadian Digital Service, and that the source code is on GitHub, but that the code itself didn't directly contain any references to clients3.google.com. [...]

1 0

Who’s been editing the Ripple CEO’s Wikipedia page?
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 24, 2020

Aug. 24, 2020

Ripple is a cutting-edge Silicon Valley tech start-up with ambitions to one day be “to payments as Amazon was to books”. [...] Spanish bank Santander, a Ripple investor and what the company calls “one of our largest and most important customers”, recently chose not to use Ripple’s XRP currency for its new international payment network. [...] ..it’s come to FT Alphaville’s attention recently that some Wikipedia users — two in particular — have been repeatedly editing Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s Wikipedia page to remove some less positive aspects of the entry. Specifically, these two users have been removing text under the “Controversies” section of the page, and one of them in fact removed the whole section entirely, before it was reinstated by a different Wikipedia editor. The Controversies section includes the fact that Garlinghouse had claimed multiple times that the published error rate for SWIFT messaging was at least six per cent (a claim that has been proven to be false in a great piece by Martin Walker published by the London School of Economics Business Review); the fact that he’d been personally named in a group of class actions against Ripple that claim the company has breached various securities laws; and the fact he’d admitted that, without sales of the XRP cryptocurrency, Ripple would be lossmaking [...] # Crypto propaganda wars So there’s been something of an “edit war” on the page, with multiple removals and reinstatements of text since May. [...] Continua su https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/08/20/1597909956000/Who-s-been-editing-the… o su https://technocodex.com/whos-been-editing-the-ripple-ceos-wikipedia-page/ La questione è interessante non tanto per le manomissioni di Wikipedia a fini propagandistici (piuttosto consueti nel mondo politico in prossimità delle elezioni) ma perché Ripple è spesso citato come esempio di blockchain "enterprise", addirittura uno strumento b2b per banche, un esempio "virtuoso" a riprova della serietà della fuffa blockchain. Giacomo

1 0

Re: [nexa] ARM
by Giuseppe Attardi Aug. 24, 2020

Aug. 24, 2020

Dietro mia sollecitazione, Hauser ha scritto questa lettera al Financial Times. ARM, a British company, headquartered in the UK, has provided the design for over 160 billion processors via its 500+ licensees, making it the world’s most valuable IP Company. The proposed sale of ARM to Nvidia the dominant American graphics processor company would have disastrous consequences for Cambridge, the UK and Europe for three main reasons. - Firstly, it will lead to inevitable job losses in Cambridge, where 2500 people are employed, as the HQ will move to Silicon Valley. Nvidia bought the Bristol based company Icera in 2011 and subsequently in 2015 sacked all 300+ UK based staff. - Secondly, it will destroy ARM’s neutrality and even handedness to over 500 hundred licensees all over the world, many of which, including European companies are competitors of Nvidia. - Thirdly, and most seriously it will make ARM a division of an American company to which the US CFIUS regulations apply. This means that the American president can decide which companies ARM is allowed to sell to worldwide. This raises the vital issue of technology sovereignty which the UK and Europe have suffered from for many years. The dominance of Silicon Valley companies in search (Google), social media (Facebook), films (Netflix), e-commerce (Amazon) has become a pressing issue, fostering the belatedly debate on how we could have allowed this dominance to happen. Now we are about to witness one of our last great European technology companies with a dominant position in mobile phones becoming part of the US trade armoury. Whether we are allowed to use our own British designed microprocessors in the UK and Europe will be decided in the White House rather than in Downing Street. This is a major step towards the UK becoming an American vassal state. It must be stopped. A viable alternative to provide the cash to Softbank, ARM’s current owner, is to list ARM on the LSE and make it a UK based company again. If the LSE does not have enough firepower for an estimated $40bn IPO they will be happy to work with the NYSE, Shanghai Star or Euronext. This will be a crucial test of whether the UK government is serious about an industrial strategy. > On 20 Aug 2020, at 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 11:37:30 +0200 > From: Giuseppe Attardi <attardi(a)di.unipi.it <mailto:attardi@di.unipi.it>> > To: nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] ARM > Message-ID: <472D9C85-EA5B-498A-884A-BE8CECFCE308(a)di.unipi.it <mailto:472D9C85-EA5B-498A-884A-BE8CECFCE308@di.unipi.it>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > ARM è la società di Cambridge creata da Herman Hauser come spinoff di Acorn. > Quando Acorn venne acquisita da Olivetti, Hauser divenne direttore di ricerca Olivetti e interagii con lui sullo sviluppo di software per ARM, tra cui il port del linguaggio Lisp che comprendeva un innovativo sistema di parallelismo a thread. > Oggi ARM progetta i chip a basso consumo usati nei cellulari ed è stata acquistata dall?investitore giapponese SoftBank, che ora la vuole vendere. > SMT e Samsung producono i chip ARM. > ARM ha anche una divisione che progetta coprocessori GPU da usare per AI. > BTW: 30 anni fa aiutai SMT a realizzare una GPU per cellulari Nokia, evitando che questa si rivolgesse a Texas Instrument, che ne aveva una già pronta. > > ARM è oggi un asset strategico per l?Europa, visto che è l?unica azienda di processori e GPU in grado di competere con Intel, almeno nel settore dei chip a basso consumo. > > All?acquisto di ARM è interessata NVIDIA, la principale ditta che produce GPU per applicazioni sia grafiche tradizionali, che industriali (visione e AI), avendo introdotto la libreria CUDA, che consente di programmare le GPU per svolgere calcoli tensoriali ad alto parallelismo. > Oggi tutta l?AI di punto viene sviluppata su GPU NVIDIA. > > Herman Hauser stesso è contrario all?acquisto di ARM da parte di NVIDIA, che mette a rischio non solo l?esistenza della divisione GPU ma di lasciare agli USA il dominio totale dei processori. > > STM potrebbe essere l?acquirente ideale. > Ho provato a sondare gli attuali dirigenti di STM che conosco, ma mi hanno risposto che l?acquisto non sarebbe possibile per motivi antitrust. > Non mi sembra sia questo il caso: ci sono altri ben agguerriti produttori di chip, ben più monopolisti di una eventuale STM+ARM ed NVIDIA+ARM sarebbe avrebbe un più invadente dominio nel settore dei chip per AI. > > Bisognerebbe promuovere una cordata di grandi imprenditori europei del settore dei chip, comprendente ad esempio Herman Hauser, Federico Faggin, Pasquale Pistorio, che col sostegno dei politici europei, si proponga a per l?acquisto di ARM al fine di farla restare in mani europee. > > ? Beppe >

2 1

Earth Overshoot Day 2020: 20 giorni in più “grazie” al COVID
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 23, 2020

Aug. 23, 2020

Impronta ecologica e tecnologia. Buona lettura e buona domenica dl https://www.techeconomy2030.it/2020/08/22/earth-overshoot-day-2020-20-giorn… _________________________ 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

MusashiAI: World-First Technological Advances and Proof of Concept Agreements in Commercial Launch of Robotic Employees
by don Luca Peyron Aug. 23, 2020

Aug. 23, 2020

Mutazioni ed adattamenti Buona lettura e buona domenica dl https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200727005009/en/MusashiAI-World-Fi… _________________________ 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

sull'impossibilità dell'esistenza dell'AI "Strong" (o AGI)
by Giovanni Biscuolo Aug. 22, 2020

Aug. 22, 2020

Buongiorno, Voglio condividere con voi questa citazione di Adorno che trovo tanto impegnativa (almeno per me) quanto efficace nell'illustrare l'impossibilità dell'esistenza dell'AI "Strong" [1] (detta anche AGI "Artificial General Intelligence") Parto, per evidenziarla, dalla conclusione: «Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand.» http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno_formalism.html --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Adorno on Philosophy, Formalism, & Artificial Intelligence [...] It is certainly better—as in prephilosophical knowledge so in philosophy—not to proceed without a measure of autonomy of thought in relation to its subject matter. The logical apparatus owes its immeasurable improvement beyond primitive consciousness to this autonomy. It contains, intensified, at the level of content, the force of enlightenment that marks the historical development of philosophy. Yet as it became autonomous and developed into an apparatus, thinking also became the prey of reification and congealed into a high-handed method. Cybernetic machines are a crude example of this. They graphically demonstrate to people the nullity of formalized thinking abstracted from its contents insofar as such machines perform better than thinking subjects much of what used to be the proud achievement of the method of subjective reason. Should thinking subjects passively transform themselves into the instruments of such formalization, then they virtually cease being subjects. They approach the machine in the guise of its imperfect replica. Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand. The humane significance of computers would be to unburden the thinking of living beings to the extent that thought would gain the freedom to attain a knowledge that is not already implicit. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Tratto da: Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), extract, pp. 127-128. Saluti, Giovanni [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artificial-intelligence/#StroVersWeakAI “Strong” AI seeks to create artificial persons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including phenomenal consciousness. “Weak” AI, on the other hand, seeks to build information-processing machines that appear to have the full mental repertoire of human persons (Searle 1997). -- Giovanni Biscuolo

1 0