- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

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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Selinger, "Did you protest recently? Your face might be in a database"
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 17, 2020

July 17, 2020

*Did you protest recently? Your face might be in a database* /In the United States, at least one in four law enforcement agencies // //are able to use facial recognition technology. The implications are troubling/ /Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn /Fri 17 Jul 2020 11.27 BST In recent weeks, millions have taken to the streets to oppose police violence and proudly say: “Black Lives Matter.” These protests will no doubt be featured in history books for many generations to come. But, as privacy researchers, we fear a darker legacy, too. We know that hundreds of thousands of photos and videos of protesters have been recorded and uploaded online. They could remain there indefinitely, only to be dredged up decades later. It is for this reason that we must ask whether those photos could end up in a facial recognition database. [...] continua qui: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/17/protest-black-lives-m…

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Digital Independence for Europe: how to get there
by don Luca Peyron July 17, 2020

July 17, 2020

Buona lettura, dl https://aspeniaonline.it/digital-independence-for-europe-how-to-get-there/ _________________________ 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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Fwd: Corte Ue: invalida la decisione della Commissione che ha ritenuto adeguata la protezione offerta dallo scudo UE-USA per la privacy (sent C-311/18)
by Marco Ciurcina July 17, 2020

July 17, 2020

Boom! La bomba attesa è arrivata. :-) Si riaprono scenari interessanti. C'è da studiare e riflettere, sia per chi se ne occupa professionalmente sia (soprattutto) per i decisori politici. m.c. --------- Messaggio inoltrato --------- Oggetto: Corte Ue: invalida la decisione della Commissione che ha ritenuto adeguata la protezione offerta dallo scudo UE-USA per la privacy (sent C-311/18) Data: giovedì 16 luglio 2020, 07:44:27 CEST Da: Presseinfo-IT <Presseinfo-IT(a)curia.europa.eu> A: Pappalettere Eleonora <Eleonora.Pappalettere(a)curia.europa.eu> La Corte dichiara invalida la decisione 2016/1250 della Commissione sull'adeguatezza della protezione offerta dal regime dello scudo UE-USA per la privacy Essa giudica, invece, valida la decisione 2010/87 relativa alle clausole contrattuali tipo per il trasferimento di dati personali a incaricati del trattamento stabiliti in Paesi terzi (Sentenza nella causa C-311/18 Data Protection Commissioner/Maximilian Schrems e Facebook Ireland) In allegato il comunicato stampa in italiano. Eleonora Montserrat Pappalettere e Sofia Aktipis Unità Stampa e Informazione – Sezione IT Direzione della comunicazione [cid:image002.png@01D52C0D.E2ED57E0] Rue du Fort Niedergrünewald L-2925 Luxembourg curia.europa.eu<https://www.curia.europa.eu/> Tél : +352 4303 8575/3552 [twitter_on]<https://twitter.com/eucourtpress?ref_src=twsrc%5etfw> [youtube_on] <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTfyrAlsJRZF1nGLLgnDiMA> [cid:image005.png@01D52C0D.E2ED57E0] <https://itunes.apple.com/lu/app/cvria/ id1099088434?l=fr&mt=8> [cid:image006.png@01D52C0D.E2ED57E0] <https:// play.google.com/store/apps/details? id=eu.europa.publications.cjeu&hl=en&pcampaignid=MKT-Other-global-all-co- prtnr-py-PartBadge-Mar2515-1> ------------------------------------------

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Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking
by Giacomo Tesio July 17, 2020

July 17, 2020

In two videos IBM showed to WIRED on the condition that they not be published, the hackers demonstrate the workflow for siphoning data out of a hacked account. In one video, the hacker logs into a compromised Gmail account—a dummy account for the demonstration—by plugging in credentials from a text document, and links it to the email software Zimbra, designed to manage multiple accounts from a single interface, using Zimbra to download the account's entire inbox to the hacker's machine. Then the hacker quickly deletes the alert in the victim's Gmail that says their account permissions have been changed. Next the hacker downloads the victim's contacts and photos from their Google account too. A second video shows a similar workflow for a Yahoo account. The most telling element of the video, Wikoff says, is the speed the hacker demonstrates in exfiltrating the accounts' information in real time. The Google account's data is stolen in around four minutes. The Yahoo account takes less than three minutes. In both cases, of course, a real account populated with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data would take far longer to download. But the clips demonstrate how quickly that download process is set up, Wikoff says, and suggest that the hackers are likely carrying out this sort of personal data theft on a mass scale. "To see how adept they are at going in and out of all these different webmail accounts and setting them up to exfiltrate, it is just amazing," says Wikoff. "It’s a well-oiled machine." [...] In other videos the IBM researchers declined to show to WIRED, the researchers say the hackers appeared to be combing through and exfiltrating data from real victims' accounts, rather than ones they created for training purposes. One victim was a member of the US Navy, and another was a two-decade veteran of the Greek Navy. The researchers say the APT35 hackers appear to have stolen photos, emails, tax records, and other personal information from both targeted individuals. Continua su http://web.archive.org/web/20200717040312/https://www.wired.com/story/iran-… Personalmente credo che in IBM si siano anzitutto sorpresi delle implicazioni economiche del video. Negli States questo tipo di operazioni è del tutto automatizzata. In Iran può essere fatta manualmente. Giacomo

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