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La legge ammazza foto che soffocherà Wikipedia e il diritto alla conoscenza
by Francesco Macchia July 3, 2025

July 3, 2025

Buonasera a tutti. Riporto questo articolo di riepilogo sulla proposta di legge Amorese, nata per fare un favore ai fotografi e agli editori a scapito dei cittadini L’allarme serpeggia in questi giorni, per una proposta di legge che mira a > estendere la durata del diritto d’autore sulle cosiddette “fotografie > semplici” da 20 a 70 anni dopo la morte dell’autore. Ecco perché è un > attacco inaudito ai nostri diritti Qui il link all'articolo: https://www.agendadigitale.eu/mercati-digitali/la-legge-ammazza-foto-che-so… Qui invece il link per chi vuole evitare di cedere troppi dati personali: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.agendadigitale.eu/merc… Un saluto a tutti, Francesco Macchia

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Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy
by Daniela Tafani July 3, 2025

July 3, 2025

Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy Alan Macleod It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see. Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says. Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video. Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins. In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks. Trust me, bro In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets. There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields. Deborah Berman, for example, spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Little is known about what she did at the agency, but her pre-agency publications indicate she was a specialist on Syria. Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. Directly after that, he became a diplomat (underlining how close the line is between those two professions), and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta. Meanwhile, the LinkedIn profile of Cameron Harris – a CIA analyst until 2019 – notes that he is now a Meta trust and safety project manager. Harris Embed Individuals from other state institutions abound as well. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and is now a director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua. Since 2020, Meta has employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager. Others have similar pasts. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, is vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager. Joey Chan currently holds the same trust and safety post as Kamal. Until last year, Chan was a U.S. Army officer commanding a company of over 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region. None of this is to say that any of those named are not conscientious, that they are bad people or bad at their job. Vacher, for example, helped design Facebook’s amber alert program, notifying people to missing children in their area. But hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power. Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state. Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, “woke” organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial. It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of “black sites” where prisoners are repeatedly tortured. Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate. One of these critics is Elizabeth Murray, who, in 2010, retired from a 27-year career at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations. “This is insidious,” Murray told MintPress, adding, I see it as part of the gradual and sinister migration of ambitious young professionals originally trained (with CIA’s virtually unlimited, U.S.-taxpayer funded pot of resources) to surveil and target ‘the bad guys’ during the so-called Global War on Terror of the post-9-11 era.” MintPress also contacted Facebook/Meta for comment but has not received a response. Arm’s length control Some may ask what the big fuss is. There is a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cybersecurity fields, and many of them come from government institutions. Casinos, after all, regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves. But there is little evidence that this is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario; Facebook is certainly not hiring whistleblowers. The problem is not that these individuals are incompetant. The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight. In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability. The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s. And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes. Again, this article is not claiming that any of the named individuals are nefarious actors, or even that they are anything but model employees. This is a structural problem. Put another way, if Facebook were hiring dozens of managers from Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or GRU, everybody would recognize the inherent dangers. It should be little different when it hires individuals from the CIA, an organization responsible for some of the worst crimes of the modern era. >From state intelligence to private intelligence Facebook has also hired a plethora of ex-national security state officers to run its intelligence and online security operations. Until 2013, Scott Stern was a targeting officer at the CIA, rising to become chief of targeting. In this role, he helped select the targets for U.S. drone strikes across South and West Asia. Today, however, as a senior manager of risk intelligence for Meta, “misinformation” and “malicious actors” are his targets. Hopefully he is more accurate at Facebook than at the CIA, where the government’s own internal assessments show that at least 90% of Afghans killed in drone strikes were innocent civilians. Other former CIA men at Facebook include Mike Torrey, who left his job as a senior analyst at the agency to become Meta’s technical lead of detection, investigations and disruptions of complex information operations threats, and former CIA contractor Hagan Barnett, who is now head of harmful content operations at the Silicon Valley giant. BarnettMeta’s intelligence and online security team includes individuals from virtually every government agency imaginable. In 2015, Department of Defense intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow left her post to become director of global security intelligence for Meta. The FBI is represented by threat investigations manager Ellen Nixon and head of cyber espionage investigations Mike Dvilyanski. Facebook’s influence operations policy manager Olga Belogolova had stints at the State Department and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Before Meta, David Agranovich and Nathaniel Gleicher both worked for the National Security Council. Agranovich is director of global threat disruption at Facebook while Gleicher is head of security policy. Hayley Chang, director and associate general counsel for cybersecurity and investigations, worked formerly for both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. And Meta’s global head of interaction operations, David Hansell, was once an Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency man. One of Meta’s most outwardly-facing employees is its global threat intelligence lead for influence operations, Ben Nimmo, a character MintPress has covered before. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that Facebook never seems to find U.S. government influence operations online – they are part of one! Cyber war, cyber warriors While Meta has not unmasked any nefarious U.S. government action, it regularly uncovers what it claims are foreign disinformation campaigns. According to a recent Facebook report, the top five locations of coordinated inauthentic behavior between 2017 and 2020 on its platform are Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine. However, it was at pains to note that American operations were driven by fringe far-right elements, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, and not the government. This is despite the fact that it is now well-established that the Pentagon fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority of them doing so from their keyboards. A Newsweek exposé from last year called it “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” adding, The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.” Newsweek warned that this army was likely breaking both U.S. and international law by doing so, explaining that, These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.” As far back as 2011, The Guardian was reporting on this enormous cyber force, whose job it was to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” Yet the ex-military and ex-CIA officials Facebook employs do not seem to have found any trace of their former colleagues’ at work on the platform. <https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-…>

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[Responsible AI] BRIO: A Bias and Risk Assessment Tool for Fair ML Systems
by Daniele Quercia July 3, 2025

July 3, 2025

Title: BRIO: A Bias and Risk Assessment Tool for Fair ML Systems Giuseppe Primiero, University of Milan Join the meeting <https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZWE1MDUyMWItM2Q2MC00…> Abstract: Phenomena of bias by AI systems based on machine learning methods are well known, and largely discussed in the literature. A variety of tools are being developed to assess these undesirable behaviours. In this talk I present BRIO, a bias and risk assessment tool developed by MIRAI (https://mirai.systems) The tool is based on a combination of formal and statistical methods and works on the I/O data of a ML system remaining agnostic on the model itself. The result of the analysis is a set of all the features and combinations thereof that produce violations with respect to a given target distribution. These values can be fed into a risk function which computes an overall value weighting them on parameters such as size of the population and number of features involved, mapping naturally into notions of group and individual fairness. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02191>Bio: Giuseppe Primiero is Professor of Logic with the Logic, Uncertainty, Computation and Information Lab (luci.unimi.it) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy. He acts as Scientific Director for PHILTECH, Research Center for The Philosophy of Technology (https://philtech.unimi.it/) and as Programme Leader for the Master's Degree in Human-Centered AI (https://hcai.cdl.unimi.it/en) He is co-founder and Chief Research Officer of MIRAI (https://mirai.systems) Giuseppe works in the formal modeling and verification of multi-agent systems. His preferred tools are proof-systems, modal and computational logics. Giuseppe's formal research is applied to AI systems and their deployment for resolving issues of misinformation and disinformation online, as well as computable approaches to the evaluation of trustworthiness of information sources, bias and fairness. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the Projects “BRIO: Bias, Risk and Opacity in AI” (https://sites.unimi.it/brio) and "SMARTEST: Simulation of probabilistic systems for the age of the digital twin" (https://sites.unimi.it/smartest/) both funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Full CV at https://work.unimi.it/chiedove/cv/giuseppe_primiero.pdf. Subscribe to future talk announcements: Anyone outside Bell Labs can receive talk announcements by subscribing to the mailing list. To subscribe, send an empty email with the subject line "Subscribe RAI" to daniele.quercia(a)polito.it<mailto:daniele.quercia@polito.it>

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concorso musicale
by alessandro marzocchi July 3, 2025

July 3, 2025

Do una mano ad organizzare un concorso per composizioni musicali. Servirà un sito, anche se economicamente e tecnicamente modesto chiedo aiuto a listanexa. Localmente, Grosseto, operano onesti professionisti che saranno interpellati ma non ci sono preclusioni. In argomento non vado oltre la richiesta di sw aperto e libero, ogni consiglio è gradito anche perché spero che una futura edizione, pur restando nell'ambito della composizione di musica cosiddetta "colta", possa essere dedicata al digitale nella composizione e/o esecuzione di musica. Grazie fin d'ora. Cordialmente. Duccio (Alessandro Marzocchi)

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War, peace and the world order
by Dario Guarascio July 2, 2025

July 2, 2025

Dear friends The call for the SNS Summer school on war and peace is out: https://www.sns.it/it/evento/war-peace-and-world-order Applications are encouraged, here is the form: https://forms.sns.it/rwe2/module_preview.jsp?MODULE_TAG=ISCRIZIONE_SUMMER_S… Please circulate to those who may be interested Best, Dario -- *Dario Guarascio* Dipartimento di Economia e Diritto, Sapienza Università di Roma <http://www.uniroma1.it/strutture/dipartimenti> Via del Castro Laurenziano n° 9, 00161 Roma Edificio A (6° piano) -ala B, stanza n° 606 E-mail: dario.guarascio(a)uniroma1.it <nome.cognome(a)uniroma1.it> *Sito web* italiano - https://sites.google.com/a/uniroma1.it/darioguarascio/ inglese - https://sites.google.com/a/uniroma1.it/darioguarascio-eng/ -- *Fai crescere le giovani ricercatrici e i giovani ricercatori*** *con il 5 per mille alla Sapienza* Scrivi il codice fiscale dell'Università *80209930587 **Cinque per mille <https://www.uniroma1.it/it/node/23149>*

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From economy of occupation to economy of genocide
by Daniela Tafani July 1, 2025

July 1, 2025

A/HRC/59/23: From economy of occupation to economy of genocide - Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 The role of corporate entities in sustaining the illegal Israeli occupation and its ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza is the subject of the present investigative report, which is focused on how corporate interests underpin the Israeli settler-colonial twofold logic of displacement and replacement aimed at dispossessing and erasing Palestinians from their lands. The Special Rapporteur discusses corporate entities in various sectors: arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities and charities. These entities enable the denial of self-determination and other structural violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupation, annexation and crimes of apartheid and genocide, as well as a long list of ancillary crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, wanton destruction, forced displacement and pillage to extrajudicial killing and starvation. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-economy-occupat…>

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Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data | Nature Communications
by Antonio Vetro' July 1, 2025

July 1, 2025

Segnalo articolo apparso su Nature Communications nel 2024 e che si interseca con il tema delle tassazioni dei servizi digitali, di grande attualità in questi giorni. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49141-z Despite global efforts to harmonize international trade statistics, our understanding of digital trade and its implications remains limited. Here, we introduce a method to estimate bilateral exports and imports for dozens of sectors starting from the corporate revenue data of large digital firms. This method allows us to provide estimates for digitally ordered and delivered trade involving digital goods (e.g. video games), productized services (e.g. digital advertising), and digital intermediation fees (e.g. hotel rental), which together we call digital products. We use these estimates to study five key aspects of digital trade. We find that, compared to trade in physical goods, digital product exports are more spatially concentrated, have been growing faster, and can offset trade balance estimates, like the United States trade deficit on physical goods. We also find that countries that have decoupled economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions tend to have larger digital exports and that digital exports contribute positively to the complexity of economies. This method, dataset, and findings provide a new lens to understand the impact of international trade in digital products. Un saluto antonio -- Antonio Vetrò, Associate Professor Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino Nexa Center for Internet & Society<https://nexa.polito.it/> https://www.polito.it/en/staff?p=antonio.vetro

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La Danimarca prova a mettere la museruola alle AI
by Enrico Nardelli June 30, 2025

June 30, 2025

Dopo aver provato a recidere il cordone ombelicale che lega il Paese scandinavo a Microsoft, la Danimarca tenta di blindarsi alle conseguenze dell'AI "fotocopiatrice di esseri umani" con una curiosa norma che estenderebbe il copyright ai caratteri fisionomici di ogni individuo. E spera in una Europa pronta a fare gioco di squadra https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/la-danimarca-prova-a-mettere-la-museruo… Mi sembra un'iniziativa interessante... Ciao, Enrico -- -- EN https://www.hoepli.it/libro/la-rivoluzione-informatica/9788896069516.html ====================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Past President di "Informatics Europe" Direttore del Laboratorio Nazionale "Informatica e Scuola" del CINI Dipartimento di Matematica - Università di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma home page: https://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: https://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it online meeting: https://blue.meet.garr.it/b/enr-y7f-t0q-ont ====================================================== --

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185° Mercoledì di Nexa | 9 luglio 2025, ore 17.00
by Nexa - Media June 30, 2025

June 30, 2025

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare al 185° Mercoledì di Nexa, che si terrà mercoledì 9 luglio, alle ore 17.00, con un incontro dal titolo "Intelligenza artificiale e mondi reali". Ospite dell'incontro: Maurizio Tirassa (Università degli Studi di Torino). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono Portineria e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI<https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Di seguito maggiori dettagli: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-185 L'incontro si concluderà con un brindisi per salutarci in vista della pausa estiva. Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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per organizzazioni, su "Pay or OK"
by Claudio Agosti June 28, 2025

June 28, 2025

sperando di fare cosa gradita, Vi segnalo una consultazione pubblica aperta presso il garante privacy sulla questione: "dammi un click, così lo chiamiamo consenso, e in cambio della profilazione di questi mille sconosciuti potrai leggere il mio articolo gratis" eccola qui: https://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb… Abbiamo elaborato un contributo volto ad evitare che questa pratica continui. Vogliamo rappresentare più organizzazioni possibili in questa presa di posizione. Nel caso voi faceste parte di un'organizzazione che vuole supportare la lettera, c'è tempo fino al 9 luglio per raccogliere sottoscrizioni. questo il testo e il sito della campagna https://finto-consenso.hermescenter.org/lettera Grazie dell'attenzione, iniziativa della Rete Diritti Umani Digitali, si invita e si ringrazia l'inoltro di questa email 🙏

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