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Report: CIA received more offensive hacking powers in 2018
by Giacomo Tesio July 20, 2020

July 20, 2020

US President Donald Trump gave broad powers to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2018 to carry out offensive cyber operations across the globe. In an exclusive today, Yahoo News reported that the agency used its newly acquired powers to orchestrate "at least a dozen operations" across the world. [..] NSC oversight previously kept US intelligence agencies like the CIA in check when it came to orchestrating and approving cyber operations on foreign ground, making sure agencies like the NSA and CIA went through a due process that would sometime take years from the planning to the execution phase. However, Yahoo News sources said that some intelligence officials were ecstatic at Trump's decision, calling it "a needed reform" in order to make the CIA more agile and speed up response times to foreign attacks. The locations of these foreign CIA cyber operations are currently classified, along with operational details, but former US officials who have seen the presidential finding said the document listed Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as targets, but also left the door open for the CIA to carry out operations in other countries at its discretion. https://www.zdnet.com/article/report-cia-received-more-offensive-hacking-po…

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Report: "Digital Trade Rules"
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 20, 2020

July 20, 2020

*Digital Trade Rules* / //Jul 8th, 2020// // //Deborah James/ A disastrous new constitution for the global economy written by and for Big Tech The largest corporations in the history of the world – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft – are seeking to use ‘trade’ rules to rig the rules of the global (digital) economy to enable them to collect more data, exercise more control over our lives and their workers, and amass ever more profit. More than 80 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are currently negotiating a new agreement on digital trade based on these proposals. This paper seeks to explain how these corporations operate in order to achieve their goals; what the potential impacts of the rules would be on workers, citizens, communities, developing countries, public services, safety and security, and democracy itself; what the alternatives are; and what we can do to stop this mass corporate takeover. This paper was written towards the end of 2019. Today, in 2020, the world seems a different place, as we collectively experience the coronavirus crisis and new awareness about issues of racism and policy brutality. The crises have brought about new, and highlighted existing, urgent problems – often exacerbated by Big Tech’s iron grip on our economic and social lives. *Emerging challenges in 2020* The WTO itself is in serious crisis. The 12th WTO Ministerial Conference was due to be held in June 2020, but has been postponed – possibly for another year. WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo has said he will step down on 31 August 2020, a year before the completion of his term of office. The United States is still blocking the appointment of new Appellate Body Members to the WTO, which means the judicial function is not operational. At the same time, many countries have had to take measures to deal with the coronavirus that are inconsistent with their WTO obligations. This is leading to a re-thinking of whether the WTO model – which left many countries short on domestic productive capacity and locked in rules that put foreign corporate rights over the domestic public health emergency – are really fit for purpose. Thus, there is a need for countries to have greater flexibility to depart from existing trade rules. This could well lead to a fundamental re-think of the WTO and its model of extreme liberalisation – an urgent and welcome outcome. Online commerce is booming, but many technology start-ups and thousands of small businesses have been hit hard by the coronavirus economic shutdowns. On the contrary, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have seen their market shares and profits explode during the crisis. At the same time, there is growing concern about the control that Big Tech exerts over so many aspects of public life, especially through anti-competitive behaviour. Members of the US Congress and several federal agencies have joined European Union leaders in growing calls to break up vertically integrated roll-up corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook. A key provision of US tech policy which shields platforms from liability is coming under political scrutiny in the United States. As science deniers circulated inaccurate information about COVID-19 on social media, some tech corporations began to take steps to remove or flag erroneous content from their platforms. The Trump administration claimed a political bias, and Republicans are looking into rescinding the platforms’ immunity. At the same time, Democrats are concerned about some of the platforms’ policies of not taking down false or misleading political advertising that could jeopardise our elections. There is growing recognition on the part of many countries that digital corporations should pay their fair share of taxes. The EU is proposing this as a fiscal support measure in the wake of the crisis, but the Trump administration has just abandoned the efforts towards a multilateral solution at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Dependence on essential workers during the coronavirus crisis has also led to a greater understanding of the need for hazard pay and social protections, especially in sectors with sectoral bargaining agreements. But so-called ‘gig’ workers, such as Uber drivers, GrubHub deliverers, and Instacart shoppers, still do not enjoy basic labour rights as workers, not ‘contractors’. In the United States, pressure campaigns have successfully targeted the use of facial recognition software powered by artificial intelligence (AI), since studies have demonstrated the racist impacts of such software: AI gives false positives for blacks more often than for whites. At the same time, WTO members have undertaken multiple rounds of negotiations with a view to drafting a new ‘plurilateral’ agreement on digital trade. They have negotiated draft texts in secret on 13 different provisions on data collection, liability, market access rights, non-discrimination, source code disclosure, taxes, cybersecurity and more – as described in this paper. During these times of crisis, uncertainty, and rapid transformation, we need our governments to be able to respond more proactively to emerging problems. We need public interest concerns about economic rights, racial justice and fairness, and human, civil and political rights to be the focus of conversations about rewriting the rules governing data and technology. To accomplish this, however, we need to ensure that corporations are unable to acquire new WTO ‘trade’ disciplines designed by Big Tech to consolidate their power over our economy and to limit democratic oversight in the public interest. *Read the full text: https://www.rosalux.eu/kontext/controllers/document.php/528.5/c/01b5be.pdf*

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Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts
by Giacomo Tesio July 20, 2020

July 20, 2020

A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts. On Wednesday, a spike of high profile accounts including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Uber, and Apple tweeted cryptocurrency scams in an apparent hack. "We used a rep that literally done all the work for us," one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. [...] The panel is a stark example of the issue of insider data access at tech companies. Whereas in other cases hackers have bribed workers to leverage tools over individual users, in this case the access has led to takeovers of some of the biggest accounts on the social media platform and tweeted bitcoin related scams in an effort to generate income. Continua, con frasi di circostanza da Twitter che però censura chi ne evidenzia i problemi sulla sua piattaforma, su https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-access-panel-acco… D'altronde, già durante l'attacco sembrava piuttosto ovvio un insider. https://twitter.com/giacomotesio/status/1283519269741920257 Gli hacker, questa volta, hanno voluto farsi notare. E le altre? ;-) La copia dei dati non lascia traccia... Illudersi che la firma di un contratto possa proteggere veramente libertà e democrazia è piuttosto ingenuo. L'unico "privacy shield" efficace nel mondo reale è il controllo fisico e competente dell'hardware che detiene ed elabora i dati degli utenti. Giacomo

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Competenze digitali dei cittadini
by don Luca Peyron July 20, 2020

July 20, 2020

Come imparare a nuotare nell’oceano #digitale con 8 livelli di padronanza ed esempi di utilizzo. Un lavoro dell'Agenzia per l'Italia digitale interessante https://www.agid.gov.it/sites/default/files/repository_files/digcomp2-1_ita… Buona lettura dl _________________________ 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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Reminder | 80° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 22 Luglio 2020
by Nexa Media July 20, 2020

July 20, 2020

Gentilissimi, vi ricordiamo che *mercoledì 22 luglio, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00*, si svolgerà l'80° Nexa Lunch Seminar, con un incontro dal titolo: **"Bambini e digital literacy, durante e oltre l'emergenza COVID-19"*.* Ospite: /Fabio Nascimbeni//(Fellow Centro Nexa)./ L'incontro si svolgerà in *modalità telematica*, utilizzando il software open source di conference call *Jitsi Meet*. Per chi vorrà partecipare live al seminario sarà possibile accedere alla conference call attraverso il seguente link: https://meet.nexacenter.org/LunchSeminar Maggiori informazioni sull'incontro sono disponibili alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-80 Cordiali saluti,   -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino _web:_ https://nexa.polito.it/ _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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Cloudflare outage on July 17, 2020
by Giacomo Tesio July 18, 2020

July 18, 2020

Today a configuration error in our backbone network caused an outage for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 27 minutes. We saw traffic drop by about 50% across our network. Because of the architecture of our backbone this outage didn’t affect the entire Cloudflare network and was localized to certain geographies. The outage occurred because, while working on an unrelated issue with a segment of the backbone from Newark to Chicago, our network engineering team updated the configuration on a router in Atlanta to alleviate congestion. This configuration contained an error that caused all traffic across our backbone to be sent to Atlanta. This quickly overwhelmed the Atlanta router and caused Cloudflare network locations connected to the backbone to fail. The affected locations were San Jose, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. Other locations continued to operate normally. For the avoidance of doubt: this was not caused by an attack or breach of any kind. Continua su https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-july-17-2020/ Sia chiaro, un errore che può capitare a tutti. E sebbene sia improbabile accada ancora nello stesso modo, è chiaro a tutti che quanto accaduto ieri evidenzia un enorme problema infrastrutturale che diventa geopolitico. Il mercato (peraltro drogato dalle enormi sovvenzioni che da sempre gli Stati Uniti danno alle proprie aziende per distruggere la concorrenza internazionale) non è in grado di costruire una infrastruttura di comunicazione solida, ed anzi ne sta erodendo da anni la stabilità. La massimizzazione dei profitti è incompatibile con la ottimizzazione multidimensionale che può offrire resilienza del sistema, perché implica centralizzazione e fragilità. Giacomo

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Social media activists slam Google, Apple for removing Palestine from world map
by Giacomo Tesio July 18, 2020

July 18, 2020

Google and Apple have officially removed Palestine from their world maps and replaced it with Israel in a highly provocative move that has enraged Palestinians and social media activists supporting the cause of Palestine. The besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank are mentioned and marked on Google maps, but since Tuesday, the US-based multinational technology company has removed the name of Palestine from all of its maps, simply considering the two regions as parts of Israel. The move by Google and also by Apple in deleting Palestine from their world maps prompted Palestinians and others to support the two hashtags of #FreePalestine and #standwithpalestine on Twitter and other social media to express their strong dissent against the offensive move. Continua su https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/07/16/629750/Palestine-Google-world-map…

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Re: [nexa] nexa Digest, Vol 133, Issue 58
by Giuseppe Attardi July 18, 2020

July 18, 2020

Ho assistito a un seminario di Bengio sul suo progetto e ne avevo riferito in ista il 9 aprile. Bengio dice di aver utilizzato un “sintetizzatore” per produrre nuovi esempi di apprendimento, da aggiungere a quei pochi “inizialmente" a disposizione. "the ML model is initially trained with synthetic data to a degree that provides a moderately effective risk predictor, the model requires training on real data in order to yield a risk predictor with the level of accuracy needed to reduce the spread of Covid-19" È una tecnica consolidata di ML ampliare i dati annotati gold con dati prodotti in modo artificiale, anche se imprecisi. Una delle tecniche più comuni è di aggiungere i dati predetti da un primo modello per costruire il successivo. Non sono stati usati annotatori manuali per questi dati. Bengio spiega che con la app in funzione, sarà possible ottenere ulteriori dati reali, chiedendo a un certo numero di utilizzatori volontari della app di fornire informazioni ulteriori, rispetto allo stretto necessario per il tracing, al fine di migliorare l’accuratezza delle previsione diella app. "While the information collected for the purpose of training the machine learning model is necessary, it is only necessary that a certain quantity of such information be collected. For any given user, it is not necessary that information be collected from that user. As such, in recognition of the privacy preserving nature of the application, the application allows individuals to opt-in to allowing COVI Canada to access and use this information notwithstanding its necessity. The potentially sensitive analytics data obtained here is brought under this opt-in consent for similar reasons. As necessary as it is to provide the best possible recommendations, we do not need to track the correlations between recommendations made and risk levels over time for each and every user in order to assess the efficacy of the recommendations made. Naturally, we hope that many Canadians will choose to volunteer their data so that we can build better risk prediction and better recommendations into the app, and create better epidemiological models to guide public policy." — Beppe > On 19 May 2020, at 21:39, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Tue, 19 May 2020 12:44:37 +0200 (CEST) > From: Antonio Casilli <antonio.casilli(a)telecom-paris.fr <mailto:antonio.casilli@telecom-paris.fr>> > To: nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it>> > Subject: [nexa] L'app magica di Yoshua Bengio > Message-ID: > <1627638310.27764937.1589885077844.JavaMail.zimbra(a)enst.fr <mailto:1627638310.27764937.1589885077844.JavaMail.zimbra@enst.fr>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > > Notizia dal Québec: Yoshua Bengio ha finalmente presentato la sua applicazione di contact tracing che è doppiamente magica, perché è anonima e in più c'è anche l'IA. > > "COVI utilizza l'intelligenza artificiale per dare ai cittadini la possibilità di proteggersi, limitare la diffusione del virus e facilitare l'allentamento sicuro e informato delle misure di distanziatione sociale da parte delle autorità sanitarie". > https://www.indexsante.ca/nouvelles/845/yoshua-bengio-et-ses-collaborateurs… <https://www.indexsante.ca/nouvelles/845/yoshua-bengio-et-ses-collaborateurs…> > > Il grosso dell'annuncio concerne la pubblicazione di un grosso documento LaTeX, ottimisticamente definito "libro bianco" che spiega come funziona l'applicazione. > https://mila.quebec/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/COVI-whitepaper-V1-1.pdf <https://mila.quebec/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/COVI-whitepaper-V1-1.pdf> > > La cosa interessante è che, a differenza della quasi totalità dei documenti di questo tipo, questo non è stato fatto da criptografi, quindi non parla solo ed esclusivamente di anonimizzazione e privacy, come se i dati smettessero di esistere una volta raccolti. Qui c'è un minimo di approfondimento sui modelli epidemiologici usati per valutare lo score di rischio delle persone tracciate. > > Ed è proprio qui che ho incontrato un po' di difficoltà e se qualcuno della lista potesse aiutarmi a capire meglio la parte di ABM/ML, gliene sarei grato. > > "We have trained a machine learning predictor in a supervised way using data generated from the simulator, > using a simple contact tracing heuristic to generate the messages. To obtain preliminary results measuring the > impact of using machine learning to predict contagiousness and obtain risk level messages, we have then > used that predictor inside the simulator to influence the behavior of the agents according to four levels of > recommendations associated with different thresholds of risk levels. This has allowed us to simulate (with > different random seeds than those used for generating training data), how the ML predictor would impact the > reproduction number Rt of the disease and the growth of infections in a small pilot population of 1000 (it is > indexed by time t because it can evolve over time, depending on the recommendations received by citizens > from public health authorities and their app). The simulation was performed with the assumption that 60% of > the population was using the app and users at the strongest level of recommendation (quarantine level) got > tested. " > > In parole povere, un gruppo di scienziati ha progettato una simulazione multi-agenti piena di bias e di assunzioni legate alla loro percezione non-specialistica della realtà sociale, ha fatto annotare i dati così ottenuti da micro-lavoratori le cui condizioni di lavoro sono sconosciute, ha utilizzato il predittore così ottenuto all'interno della stessa simulazione di prima, assumendo un livello di adozione (60%) mai osservato in un contesto empirico. Perché dovremmo fidarci dell'app magica di Yoshua Bengio? > > Cheers, > > ---a > > -- > Antonio A. Casilli > Professor, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris > Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) > Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) > Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society > > *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.*

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Will Zuckerberg dump Trump, or continue to serve him? | Rashad Robinson | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo July 18, 2020

July 18, 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/17/mark-zuckerberg-donal…> Facebook doesn’t take civil rights seriously. If I hadn’t heard it first-hand – with Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell me on one failed, inadequate excuse after another during our meeting last Tuesday – I could have read it in the first pages of the final version of Facebook’s civil rights audit. Delivering on civil rights just can’t compete with Facebook’s passion to deliver for Donald Trump. The truth is that Trump and Facebook need each other. Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, and its continuing weakness in the face of internationally driven election sabotage, contributed to Trump winning the 2016 election. In 2020, Facebook’s indulgent and laissez-faire policies have already enabled hateful harassment, rampant misinformation and disinformation, and the suppression of Black organizers. As a company, Facebook is incentivizing all the wrong behaviors. But that comes directly from Zuckerberg, who is feeding off of the Trumpian model of leadership. He acts as if he alone has all the answers and doesn’t need to listen to anyone else. He acts as if he alone should be all powerful, without any accountability, able to deny the reality of the very problems he causes. And he acts as if he alone is the sole arbiter of what’s true and what’s fake, and what’s just and unjust, despite alarms raised by countless social justice organizations (and a growing roster of corporations). What has he decided? That civil rights abuses are just part of the game of politics, another chip to play for profit. And that drives decision-making and policy across the entire corporation, just as Trump’s values and whims now cascade as perverse mandates and norms across our entire government. Trump and Zuckerberg are truly made for each other. Only Trump could say there are “very fine people on both sides” of a racist hate rally. And only Zuckerberg could say that there are two legitimate sides to calculated and manipulative lies, racially targeted voter suppression, and calls for violence against Black people. Whatever keeps you in power. But it’s a love triangle. Because Facebook also loves its advertisers, and they are increasingly joining the boycott over Facebook’s systemic and continuous fueling of online hate speech. (Let alone Facebook’s algorithmic amplification of hateful attacks and lies.) Even major corporate advertisers are fed up with having their ads show up next to white nationalist content, implying to the world that they’re sponsoring it, and then have their concerns go ignored by someone acting like a king. So who will Zuckerberg choose? What will show us that he’s not just the Silicon Valley version of Trump? When people like Zuckerberg partner with powerful people like Trump to help them become even more powerful, we all lose freedom. Facebook ushered in a new era of social expression, but when there are different rules for Trump and the powerful than there are for the rest of us, none of our freedoms are actually safe. Facebook has specifically written rules to accommodate Trump’s misinformation and instigation on its platforms (which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp). Zuckerberg may ask Trump to be nicer, or tone it down, after Trump violates the rules. But then he’ll decide to leave up his rule-violating and dangerous content. Zuckerberg, in fact, is one of the only friends Trump has left. The deep co-dependency between Facebook and the White House cannot be papered over by Facebook’s toothless promises to improve, or its empty messages of solidarity with Black people. Facebook has a record of stopping internal efforts to mitigate the growth of extremism on the platform Seeing Facebook cut the number of their content moderators is not an encouraging sign, especially given the hundreds of thousands of misses they make every day, the terrible conditions moderators work under already, and how some of the current moderation policies can serve to amplify white people’s hate speech while actually suppressing Black voices. Facebook has a record of stopping internal efforts to mitigate the growth of extremism on the platform. An internal report in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to the recommendation tools and that most of the activity came from Facebook’s ‘Groups You Should Join’ and ‘Discover’ algorithms.” Yet, two short years later, in the 2018 presentation referenced above, managers told employees that “the company’s priorities were shifting away from societal good to individual value,” meaning that Facebook would not regulate hostile posts as long as it “doesn’t violate the company’s rules”. Of course, the rules are often so vague as to even allow for someone as clumsy as Trump to weave right through them. And of course, all of this deliberate vagueness and all of these loopholes come right from the top. Zuckerberg sees white nationalism – and racism in general – as a political issue of right versus left, instead of a moral issue of right versus wrong. It should be no surprise, given the people Zuckerberg has chosen to fill his leadership ranks. Senior policy team members Joel Kaplan, Kevin Martin and Katie Harbath all have a track record of rightwing politics that can only lead to preferential decision-making within the government relations and public policy portfolios they oversee. These conservatives are weaponizing the company’s news process to allow rightwing outlets to dictate what is and isn’t truth. How else does Breitbart News become a “trusted news source” despite working with known white nationalists and neo-Nazis? How else does Facebook assign the Daily Caller – a notorious misinformation platform started (and, until recently, mostly owned) by Tucker Carlson – to be an official factchecker with the power to label stories false? While Zuckerberg may appeal to lofty ideas of free expression – ideas he quotes back to Black civil rights leaders without irony, let alone care for the routine suppression of their speech that he himself enables – the game is really about one thing. Keeping Trump happy. That is the standard that these leaders have systematized in terms of corporate practice, and only a new approach to leadership will change that system. There’s no way to reason or argue with Mark Zuckerberg. And it doesn’t matter how much the law is on the side of justice, or how much evidence shows that Facebook isn’t. The only thing we can do to protect ourselves from the Zuckerberg-Trump relationship is to make Facebook accountable for the side they’ve chosen.

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Economists on the Run
by Giuseppe Attardi July 18, 2020

July 18, 2020

OT, ma penso si debba riflettere su come la hyperglobalization abbia prodotto disuguaglianze e “distrutto più posti di lavoro di quanti ne creava” (Stigliz). Se va male agli USA, figuriamoci a noi. http://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-kru…

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