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Big tech, big government: Courts having a hard time balancing privacy with traceability, but don’t forget individual rights
by Giacomo Tesio Oct. 18, 2019

Oct. 18, 2019

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/big-tech-big-govern… In India, and in other advanced societies, governments and courts are beginning their reckoning with the extraordinary difficulties posed by presently existing centralised “social media” and the “platform” companies that, by operating these media, are changing human civilisation. These social media or platform companies surveille the daily social behaviour of billions of individuals – reading their mail, spying on their social interactions, presenting them edited news feeds and personalised advertising, keeping track of everything they read and watch. The companies have acquired a breadth and depth of social power over our impulses and behaviour patterns that exceeds any similar form of influence, private or public, in human history. This has happened in the blink of an eye on the timescale of history, barely more than a decade. For context, the first Apple iPhone was launched in 2007. The power of these “technology companies” to amplify human emotions; to generate outrage and stoke anger; to channel aggression; above all, to move goods and merchandise, leaves the more traditional powers of law and government staggering, deeply unsure how to respond. [...] The platform companies, under pressure to respect the privacy rights of their users, have integrated “end to end” encryption into services such as WhatsApp. Because the platform intermediary cannot see the content of the messages it handles, it cannot trace a message as it is forwarded, redistributed or transferred among parties. Any regulation requiring the intermediary company to render messages traceable, destroying parties’ anonymity, will inevitably also break the company’s laudable attempts to protect the confidentiality of users’ conversations. [...] Moreover, it is hardly appropriate to regard the platform companies, powerful as they are, as the sole source of the problem of social media misuse. All of the world’s largest democracies (including Brazil and the United States as well as India) have experienced unsettling transformations of political campaigning practices in the last half decade. Political parties and other actors have adopted large-scale disinformation and influence campaigns based around opaque social media messaging. A recent global report on computational propaganda, published by Oxford University researchers, shows the comparative sophistication and intensity of governments to shape and control public opinion by these means. Treating the problem of social media misuse as though it were primarily a problem of private defamation, that can be fully resolved by regulating the platform companies, ignores the much larger problems that are caused by governments, political parties and their supporters. These can only be remedied by strengthening individual rights and limiting governmental power, not by the reverse. The problems we face are as complex as the changes our technology has wrought. There are no simple answers or quick fixes. [...] ___ L'unica vera risposta, l'unica soluzione che permette di rafforzare i diritti individuali e restituire autonomie alle comunità è l'educazione storica e informatica. Non c'è alternativa. L'ignoranza è troppo pericolosa. Fintanto che un insegnante di scuola media può arrivare a minacciare 4 agli studenti che non si iscrivono a Edmodo, diffondendo ignoranza e sottomettendo gli studenti (e i genitori) culturalmente inermi ad una piattaforma di sorveglianza o all'altra, non c'è speranza che la Democrazia possa funzionare. Giacomo

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AI and Climate Change: How they’re connected, and what we can do about it
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 18, 2019

Oct. 18, 2019

https://medium.com/@AINowInstitute/ai-and-climate-change-how-theyre-connect… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue and Other Stories About AI - Los Angeles Review of Books
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 17, 2019

Oct. 17, 2019

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-technologists-fail-to-think-of-mode… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Workshop sulla datavisualization e sulle questioni socio-economiche-politiche del lavoro sui Big Data
by Anita Botta Oct. 17, 2019

Oct. 17, 2019

Gentilissimi, vi segnalo un workshop intensivo sulla datavisualization e sulle questioni socio-economiche-politiche del lavoro sui Big Data, orientato alla progettazione di un modello di start-up dedicata alla datapoiesis, che si terrà a Ivrea presso le Fabbriche ex Olivetti in data 25-30 novembre. Il tutto sarà anticipato il 28 ottobre ad una tavola rotonda in cui si parlerà, appunto, di datapoiesis (qui il link) con Arcagni, Bollo e la Ciampolini al TOP-IX Consortium (Via Maria Vittoria 38). Si riportano qui tutte le informazioni relative all’iniziativa: DATAPOIESIS FALL SCHOOL 25/30 November 2019 Fabbriche ex Olivetti (Ivrea, Italy) http://bit.ly/DatapoiesisFallSchool The project, financed by a grand of Compagnia di San Paolo, aims to create new types of artistic and design objects animated by data sources, which allow the public to establish new relationships with the major issues of our contemporary world: poverty, energy, climate, migration and more. In the first phase “Obiettivo”, the first datapoietic artistic prototype, was created: a lamp which will turn off only when extreme poverty in the world will get below a certain threshold. Premiered in April, the artwork was acquired in July by the permanent Farnesina Contemporary Art Collection (here the article in Italian), thanks to its ability to engage the general public on societal issues and stimulate solidarity, uniting art, design and research - And of course making us proud and further confident in the potential of this project. In the second phase, inspired by Obiettivo, the main objective of the Fall School is to collectively design the first start-up dedicated to the phenomenon of Datapoiesis, its business model, communication strategy and the first datapoietic design line: for five days we will think, act and work as the the team of the future organisation, performing all of it in an immersive environment. The results will be: transformed into an open exhibit, placed in the extraordinary location of the Fabbriche ex-Olivetti, heart of the new Unesco site "Ivrea Industrial City of the XX Century" reviewed by the Scientific Committee and a group of potential investors in the final event of the school. The Fall School is free and open to a maximum of 25 people with different backgrounds: from art, to design, to business, law, social science, innovation, data and more. It is mandatory to register by November 10, 2019: participants will have the opportunity to join the team of the future datapoietic start-up. You find all the information to register here: http://bit.ly/DatapoiesisFallSchool Cordialmente, Anita Botta Responsabile Comunicazione web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: anita.botta(a)polito.it Tel. 011 090 7219

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The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You
by Giacomo Tesio Oct. 17, 2019

Oct. 17, 2019

For years, users of these technologists’ products—from Google Street View to Pokémon Go—have been questioning how far they’re going with users’ information and whether those users are adequately educated on what they’re giving up and with whom it’s shared. In the process, those technologists have made mistakes, both major and minor, with regards to user privacy. As Niantic summits the world of augmented reality, it’s engineering that future of that big-money field, too. Should what Niantic does with its treasure trove of valuable data remain shrouded in the darkness particular to up-and-coming Silicon Valley darlings, that opacity might become so normalized that users lose any expectation of knowing how they’re being profited from. [...] In his GDC talk, Hanke continued on to describe another one of Niantic’s goals, one that may read as innocuous to starry-eyed ‘90s kids who wanted nothing more than a Poké-pal to travel with: “to build stuff that brings the digital and physical world together.” Depending on how you’re looking at it, that can mean an immersive Pokémon experience or, in Hanke’s terms, “ubiquitous computing,” which he said in 2016 meant adding “computing interfaces to everything you encounter in the physical world.” [...] Ubiquitous computing isn’t sitting at your desktop playing World of Warcraft for 13 hours, or even using your phone to navigate from your friend’s house to the nearest liquor store. It’s the seamless integration of the digital world into the physical one, anywhere, at any time. Also referred to as “mediated reality,” ubiquitous computing, to some, is the science fiction fantasy of Star Trek, where tasks are mediated by an objective, neutral computation system. It was the vision of Google Glass, the $1,500 device that, through voice commands, could take photos, search on Google, view your calendar or receive travel alerts. Google Glass never caught on, although in his talk, Hanke was adamant that the future of AR is wearable technology. At 2019’s GDC, Hanke showed a video titled “Hyper-Reality,” by the media artist Keiichi Matsuda. It’s a dystopian look at a future in which the entire world is slathered with virtual overlays, an assault on the senses that everyone must view through an AR headset if they want to participate in modern society. In the video, the protagonist’s entire field of vision is a spread of neon notifications, apps, and advertisements, all viewed from a seat at the back of a city bus. Their hands swipe across a game they’re playing in augmented reality, while in the background an ad for Starbucks Coffee indicates they won a coupon for a free cup. Push notifications in their periphery indicate three new messages and directions for where to exit the bus. Walking through the aisle, where digital “get off now!” signs indicate it’s their stop, and onto the street, the physical world is annotated with virtual information. The more tasks they accomplish, the more points they receive. The whole world is now one big game. It showed a definitively dystopian vision of a world in which the barriers between IRL and URL have been fully collapsed. [...] “Some people would say AR is a bad thing because we’ve seen this vision of how bad it can be,” Hanke said. “The point I want to make to you all is, it doesn’t have to be that way.” [...] Hanke described a world where people can better navigate public transit and understand their surroundings because of digital mapping initiatives like Niantic. He talked about the possibility of hologram tour guides in San Francisco, and how they’d rely on a digital map to navigate their surroundings, and about designing shared experiences of Pokémon games in a Pokémon-augmented world. Cute, nice things for nice people who love cute things. Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing. [...] After a brief post-college stint with the U.S. Foreign Service, Hanke joined the game developer Archetype Interactive and shipped Meridian 59, the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game with 3D graphics. [...] The CIA’s venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, took a particular interest in Keyhole. According to a 2003 press release, within two weeks of In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole’s tech was implemented to support Pentagon initiatives in Iraq. [...] The February 2005 launch of Google Maps, soon followed by the launch of Google Earth, were met with falling-over-itself fanfare from the California techies. [...] Foreign governments trembled, citing concerns that private military facilities would be discovered. (“They ought to have asked us,” said India’s surveyor general to the New York Times.) [...] It cost Google a lot of money to acquire all this data. It paid an army of telemarketers to pester tens of millions of businesses worldwide for up-to-date information on their operations and locations. It paid tens of millions of dollars to organizations like Digital Globe for their satellite imagery of cities. When Google launched Street View in 2007, bringing eye-level perspectives of major cities to users with smartphones or computers, its data collection methods were a little different, and a little more controversial. [...] In 2010, Germany’s data protection commission noticed something shady about Google’s fleet of image-vacuuming vans. Their sensors were eating, or “sniffing,” traffic from wireless networks that were unencrypted, and in the process, scooping up emails, medical information, financial records, audio and video files, and passwords. Hanke, still in charge of Google Geo, said he didn’t know anything about it. Google later apologized, saying it had “mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks.” [...] In five days of gameplay, Niantic kept 2304 location records for one player. By looking at the timestamps and frequency with which this user would return to particular areas, we were able to correctly identify their employer and address of residence. Furthermore, by plotting these data points on a map we could correctly discern the routes the user took from work to home, their daily schedule, and even their eating habits. When we asked them about their propensity to eat Burger King for lunch, they were surprised that we knew that, saying afterwards that they were “addicted to fast food.” [...] In this computational future, all of this detail comes collectively from us, and relies on turning over a great deal of information to companies with business interests that are often at odds with our own. As one former Niantic employee put it: “It is almost irrelevant to talk about the company’s original intent [...] Continua su https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1… Lunga ma interessantissima lettura. Giacomo

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Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'
by Giacomo Tesio Oct. 17, 2019

Oct. 17, 2019

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagged/ GitLab, a San Francisco-based provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work. The policy addition, created by co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and implemented as a git pull request, was merged (with no approval required) about two weeks ago. It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to doing business with "customers with values that are incompatible with our own values." Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations. But it's perhaps understandable given how, over the past few years, workers in the tech industry have become more vocal in objecting to business deals with entities deemed to be immoral or work that conflicts with declared or presumed values. At Google, for example, employees have protested the development of a censored search engine for China, the company's Project Maven AI protect for the Pentagon and its provision of cloud services to federal agencies like US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the US Office of Refugee Resettlement. And currently Googlers are sounding off on internal message boards about the company's decision to remove content supportive of democracy protests in Hong Kong. Meanwhile at Microsoft's GitHub, employees at both companies have objected to GitHub's business with ICE, not to mention Microsoft's government contracts. Employees at Amazon have also urged the company not to sell its facial recognition technology to police and the military. And recently workers at devops biz Chef raised similar objections to doing business with ICE. Three weeks ago, Chef, after refusing to bend, decided not to renew its contracts with CBP and ICE. In what appears to be an effort to avoid such protests, Sijbrandij amended his company's handbook to state: "We do not discuss politics in the workplace and decisions about what customer to serve might get political." And what reason does Sijbrandij's pull request provide to support this position? It says, "Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting." [...] Unsatisfied with Sijbrandij ducked his question, Blessing pressed for an answer. "Can you comment on this question, please?" he said. "Is the timing of this update coincidental or in response to what’s happening in the Chef community? Unless it’s entirely coincidental it seems like we’re signally that we would accept a similar contract and would hold our ground if people disagreed." Sijbrandij responded by stating, "as this [merge request] indicates we would do business with any entity that we're allowed to do business with." He also said the policy change wasn't a direct response to what happened at Chef "but that situation did cause me to think about it and make this [merge request] to explain the reasons better." [...] But as others point out, GitLab has made statements about its values. It has a Code of Conduct, in which it talks about empathy for others. Similar statements about values landed software biz NPM in hot water earlier this year after it fired several workers who sought to unionize, making a mockery of said values. As a commenter identified as "casiotone" observed, "If your values aren't used to inform who you're doing business with, why do you bother pretending to have values at all? This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.' ___ Pecunia non olet et data non olent, deinde software non olendum est. Un filo non troppo sottile lega questi fatti, il linciaggio di RMS e il movimento intorno alle licenze libere non "business-friendly". Giacomo

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L'autunno caldo della Corte di giustizia in materia di tutela dei diritti fondamentali in rete (editoriale su Federalismi)
by Oreste Pollicino Oct. 16, 2019

Oct. 16, 2019

https://www.federalismi.it/nv14/editoriale.cfm?eid=533&content=L%27%2B%27%2… Consigliato specialmente se ci fosseri persistenti problemi di insonnia Buona serata O

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3rd edition of the CEIPI Advanced Training on Internet Platforms
by GC F Oct. 16, 2019

Oct. 16, 2019

Cari tutti, La terza edizione del "CEIPI Advanced Training on Internet Platforms, GDPR and IP Enforcement" si avvicina rapidamente e si terrà il 28-30 novembre presso il CEIPI in Strasburgo. Ci sono ancora posti disponibili. informazioni circa iscrizione, programma e corpo docente sono disponibili al link sottostante: http://www.ceipi.edu/en/training-seminars/internet-platforms-gdpr-and-intel… Una copia del programma è anche allegata. Condividete se possibile. A presto, Giancarlo

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1) How to Build a Low-tech Internet & 2) CollapseOS
by Alberto Cammozzo Oct. 16, 2019

Oct. 16, 2019

Due segnalazioni low-tech: 1- <https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet/> Wireless internet access is on the rise in both modern consumer societies and in the developing world. In rich countries, however, the focus is on always-on connectivity and ever higher access speeds. In poor countries, on the other hand, connectivity is achieved through much more low-tech, often asynchronous networks. While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet higher and higher, the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions. If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies. Best of all, there’s no need to wait for governments or companies to facilitate: we can build our own resilient communication infrastructure if we cooperate with one another. This is demonstrated by several community networks in Europe, of which the largest has more than 35,000 users already. More than half of the global population does not have access to the “worldwide” web. Up to now, the internet is mainly an urban phenomenon, especially in “developing” countries. Telecommunication companies are usually reluctant to extend their network outside cities due to a combination of high infrastructure costs, low population density, limited ability to pay for services, and an unreliable or non-existent electricity infrastructure. Even in remote regions of “developed” countries, internet connectivity isn’t always available. Internet companies such as Facebook and Google regularly make headlines with plans for connecting these remote regions to the internet. Facebook tries to achieve this with drones, while Google counts on high-altitude balloons. There are major technological challenges, but the main objection to these plans is their commercial character. Obviously, Google and Facebook want to connect more people to the internet because that would increase their revenues. Facebook especially receives lots of criticism because their network promotes their own site in particular, and blocks most other internet applications. 1 Meanwhile, several research groups and network enthusiasts have developed and implemented much cheaper alternative network technologies to solve these issues. Although these low-tech networks have proven their worth, they have received much less attention. Contrary to the projects of internet companies, they are set up by small organisations or by the users themselves. This guarantees an open network that benefits the users instead of a handful of corporations. At the same time, these low-tech networks are very energy efficient. [...] 2- Segnalo anche questo progetto che mira a costruire un sistema operativo con le cpu a 8 bit (Z80) da recuperare quando (secondo la previsione dell'autore) la società industriale collasserà e non avremo più cpu a 64/32 bit. <https://collapseos.org/> I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?). The fast rate of progress we've seen since the advent of electronics happened in very specific conditions that won't be there post-collapse, so we can't hope to be able to bootstrap new electronic technology as fast we did without a good "starter kit" to help us do so. Electronics yield enormous power, a power that will give significant advantages to communities that manage to continue mastering it. This will usher a new age of scavenger electronics: parts can't be manufactured any more, but we have billions of parts lying around. Those who can manage to create new designs from those parts with low-tech tools will be very powerful. Among these scavenged parts are microcontrollers, which are especially powerful but need complex tools (often computers) to program them. Computers, after a couple of decades, will break down beyond repair and we won't be able to program microcontrollers any more. To avoid this fate, we need to have a system that can be designed from scavenged parts and program microcontrollers. We also need the generation of engineers that will follow us to be able to create new designs instead of inheriting a legacy of machines that they can't recreate and barely maintain. This is where Collapse OS comes in. [...]

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Opinion | Are We Ready for Satellites That See Our Every Move? - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 16, 2019

Oct. 16, 2019

Are We Ready for Satellites That See Our Every Move? We should consider the ethical implications of satellites that can identify us, and our license plates, from space. By Sarah Parcak Ms. Parcak is an archaeologist and remote-sensing expert. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opinion/satellite-image-surveillance-tha… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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