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Monopoly power is running wild. We need tough competition laws to rein it in | Corporate governance | The Guardian
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/28/monopoly-power-compet… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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L’insostenibile leggerezza dell’essere troppo poco trasparenti
by Antonio Iacono Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

Un bell'articolo di Sonia Montegiove (non so se è iscritta a questa lista). https://www.techeconomy2030.it/2020/09/22/linsostenibile-leggerezza-delless… Lo segnalo anche perché fa riferimento a persone e cose su cui abbiamo discusso ultimamente. Antonio

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Corte di Giustizia EU su neutralità della rete
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

Comunicato stampa in allegato. URL: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-807/18 jc

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Infighting, ‘Busywork,’ Missed Warnings: How Uber Wasted $2.5 Billion on Self-Driving Cars — The Information
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Elenco Endpoint Linked Open Data (LOD)
by Antonio Iacono Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

Scusate se torno di nuovo sull'argomento. Dato che non ho trovato in giro elenchi di endpoint italiani ne sto creando uno io. In seguito vorrei scrivere pure una piccola guida sull'utilizzo base delle query SPARQL. L'elenco è qui: https://www.blia.it/lod/ Ringrazio fin da ora chi volesse segnalarmene altri (anche in privato). Antonio

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Nature: “Online learning cannot just be for those who can afford its technology”
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 28, 2020

Sept. 28, 2020

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02709-3 (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Shirking from home? Staff feel the heat as bosses ramp up remote surveillance | Surveillance | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 27, 2020

Sept. 27, 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/shirking-from-home-staff-feel…> For many, one of the silver linings of lockdown was the shift to remote working: a chance to avoid the crushing commute, supermarket meal deals and an overbearing boss breathing down your neck. But as the Covid crisis continues, and more and more employers postpone or cancel plans for a return to the office, some managers are deploying increasing levels of surveillance in an attempt to recreate the oversight of the office at home. “It has really ramped up,” says Dr Claudia Pagliari, a researcher into digital health and society at the University of Edinburgh. “People are home working, and many organisations are beginning to want to track what they’re doing.” Such surveillance comes in many forms. “Some of it is as simple as ‘checking in’,” Pagliari says, “stamping your timecard in a digital sense. You might have to do your work over the cloud, and it knows when you’ve logged on, for instance.” Tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams report when an employee is “active”, and failure to open apps first thing in the morning is often taken by managers as the same as being late for work. Working from home was the dream but is it turning into a nightmare? | John Naughton Read more Other workers have reported more intense supervision. One communications worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said that her employer had recently started to require all staff to join a videoconference every morning, with their webcams switched on. Employees were told the move was to reduce the number of meetings, but many feel as though its true purpose is to ensure that they stay at their desks all day. David Heinemeier Hansson, a co-founder of the collaboration startup Basecamp, which provides a software platform for companies to coordinate their remote workers, says he regularly has to turn down requests from potential clients for new methods of spying on their employees. “There is a depressing amount of demand and it’s mostly coming from dinosaur companies who have been forced through Covid to go remote,” he says. “They think that they have to replicate – or even increase – what they do in the office. “We went so far as to say that our API [interface which allows other developers to build additions to Basecamp] cannot be used for any form of employee surveillance.” Silkie Carlo, director of the anti-surveillance charity Big Brother Watch, says the trend is the natural progression of surveillance in the workplace. “Now that is morphing into home surveillance it takes on a new shape and is more worrying, because some employers aren’t realising that yes, some employees are working from home, but the home still remains a private space,” she said. “It’s important for people’s sense of autonomy and dignity, and their mental health, that the home remains a private space and we don’t go down the route of this really invasive constant monitoring of people’s homes.” Some employers say that the monitoring they have forced on employees is required for oversight or compliance reasons. But many employers are simply aiming for “workforce optimisation”, something Pagliari warns could have the opposite effect of that intended. “There’s not really any evidence that workers are more productive when they’re monitored,” she says. “But what we do know is that the sense of being in a panopticon can actually depress you, and make you less productive.” Earlier this year, the consultancy PwC came under fire for developing a facial recognition tool that logs when employees are away from their computer screens while working from home. [...]

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The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music | The New Yorker
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 27, 2020

Sept. 27, 2020

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-hidden-costs-of-stre… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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How Signal Became the Private Messaging App for an Age of Fear and Distrust
by Federico Guerrini Sept. 27, 2020

Sept. 27, 2020

DI Signal si è già detto molto, ma questo (imho) è un ottimo pezzo che va più in profondità del solito: allarmante, fra l'altro, l'idea del nuovo bill che richiederebbe alle aziende che offrono crittografia end-to-end, di inserire delle backdoor. "Signal, by contrast, cannot comply with law enforcement even if it wanted to. (It’s not clear that it does: in early June, Signal’s founder and CEO Moxie Marlinspike tweeted <https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1267486874441932800?lang=en> “ACAB” — All Cops Are Bastards — in response to allegations that police had stockpiled personal protective equipment amid the pandemic.) In 2016, a Virginia grand jury subpoenaed Signal for data about a user, but because it encrypts virtually all its metadata, the only information Signal was able to provide in response was the date and time the user downloaded the app, and when they had last used it. “Signal works very, very hard in order to protect their users by limiting the amount of metadata that is available in the event of a subpoena,” Holmes says. The approach has not won Signal fans in the Justice Department, which is supporting a new bill that would require purveyors of encrypted software to insert “backdoors” to make it possible for authorities to access people’s messages. Opponents say the bill would undermine both democracy and the very principles that make the app so secure in the first place. Ironically, Signal is commonly used by senior Trump Administration officials and those in the intelligence services, who consider it one of the most secure options available, according to reporters in TIME’s Washington bureau.(...) It’s impossible to know how much user data WhatsApp alone provides to authorities, because Facebook only makes such data <https://transparency.facebook.com/government-data-requests/country/US/jul-d…> available for all its services combined — bundling WhatsApp together with Instagram and the Facebook platform itself. (WhatsApp’s director of communications, Carl Woog, declined to provide TIME with data relating to how often WhatsApp *alone* provides user data to authorities.) Still, those aggregate data show that in the second half of 2019, Facebook received more than 51,000 requests from U.S. authorities for data concerning more than 82,000 users, and produced “some data” in response to 88% of those requests. By contrast, Signal tells TIME it has received no requests from law enforcement for user data since the one from the Virginia grand jury in 2016. “I think most governments and lawyers know that we really don’t know anything,” a Signal spokesperson tells TIME. “So why bother?” https://time.com/5893114/signal-app-privacy/ Ciao, F. -- <http://www.bol.it/libri/Vivere-social.-Manuale/Federico-Guerrini/ea97888971…>

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Why Computing Belongs Within the Social Sciences
by Stefano Zacchiroli Sept. 27, 2020

Sept. 27, 2020

On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan, the Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was testifying before Congress in the immediate aftermath of the September 2008 financial crash. Undoubtedly the high point of the proceedings occurred when Representative Henry Waxman pressed the Chair to admit "that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right," to which Greenspan admitted "Absolutely, precisely." Fast forward 10 years to another famous mea culpa moment in front of Congress, that of Mark Zuckerberg on April 11, 2018. In light of both the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Zuckerberg also admitted to wrong: "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy." As far as mea culpas go, Greenspan's was considerably more concise, but also much more insightful as to the root problem. Greenspan admitted the problem was not due to misguided user expectations, or to poorly worded license agreements, or to rogue developers. Instead he recognized the problem lay in a worldview that seemed to work for a while ... until it didn't. In the immediate after-math of the financial crisis, there were calls for reforms, not only of the financial services industry, but also within universities, where it was thought that unrealistic models and assumptions within economics departments and business schools were also responsible for inculcating a worldview that led to the crisis. It is time for us in computing departments to do some comparable soul searching. Continua qui: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/8/246368-why-computing-belongs-within-t… (mi pare e spero senza paywall) Ciao -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack(a)upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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