- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

What are the policy options? A systematic review of policy responses to the impacts of robotisation and automation on the labour market | EU Science Hub
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 14, 2019

July 14, 2019

https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-resear… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

1 0

Money’s no object for Facebook, so hit it where it hurts | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo July 14, 2019

July 14, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/14/facebook-google-fines…> If you want a measure of the problem society will have in controlling the tech giants, then ponder this: as it has become clear that the US Federal Trade Commission is about to impose a fine of $5bn (£4bn) on Facebook for violating a decree governing privacy breaches, the company’s share price went up! This is a landmark moment. It’s the biggest ever fine imposed by the FTC, the body set up to police American capitalism. And $5bn is a lot of money in anybody’s language. Anybody’s but Facebook’s. It represents just a month of revenues and the stock market knew it. Facebook’s capitalisation went up $6bn with the news. This was a fine that actually increased Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth. But what it has exposed once and for all is a company that is out of control on a global scale. The investigation was launched in March 2018 after the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr revealed that the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the private information of more than 50 million Facebook users. In 2012, Facebook had made a deal with the FTC – a consent decree – to protect user privacy. Facebook to be fined $5bn for Cambridge Analytica privacy violations – reports Read more What the surging share price reflects is the unconscionable profitability of the tech business when it reaches the scale at which these companies operate. For regulators, this should be a wake-up call. Controlling tech companies can’t be done by fines alone. Regulators have to hit them where it really hurts. In the case of the two leading practitioners of surveillance capitalism, Google and Facebook, this means adopting a wide-spectrum approach. There is no silver bullet. First, regulators need to focus on these companies’ capacity to hoover up and monetise the data they extract from their users’ online behaviour. Since much of this data has been accumulated in a lawless (or at any rate law-free) environment and it now constitutes their most valuable asset (not to mention the insuperable barrier to entry for potential competitors), Google and Facebook should be obliged to make the data available to other organisations (including in the public sector) under controlled conditions. Second, given that the entire digital industry runs on data, competition authorities ought to be much more sceptical about the acquisition strategies of digital giants. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, for example, Facebook ought never to have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram. The mistake was to believe that these were distinctly different entities, whereas in fact they were all data companies. Nothing comparable in the media industry would have been allowed, or indeed in many other areas of industrial life. Equally, Google should never have been allowed to buy YouTube, and it should now be compelled to hive it off as a separate outfit. Third, competition authorities should put the opaque, high-speed data-trading marketplaces owned and operated by Google and Facebook under the microscope – as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority now intends to do. In no other area of industrial life would companies be allowed to be operators of such vast and entirely opaque marketplaces. As in many others areas of life, sunlight can be a good disinfectant. Finally, the perennial bluff of the surveillance capitalists – that they are indispensable agents of innovation – should be called. Much of this “innovation” has come from their acquisition of creative startups rather than the ingenuity of their internal talents. Their standard procedure from the outset has been to acquire potential disruptive startups before they are able to scale up. We need to wise up to this strategy and make it harder to pull off. Fines are a necessary but not sufficient way of getting this rogue industry under democratic control. • John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University

1 0

FTC approves a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over Cambridge Analytica scandal
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 13, 2019

July 13, 2019

https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/88333/social-networks/ftc-facebook-fin… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

1 0

Internet of Things: Energy boon or bane?
by don Luca Peyron July 13, 2019

July 13, 2019

I consumi, un problema di sistema! Buona lettura dl https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6438/326 _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

1 0

NYT: "Fernando Corbató, a Father of Your Computer (and Your Password), Dies at 93"
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 13, 2019

July 13, 2019

*Fernando Corbató, a Father of Your Computer (and Your Password), Dies at 93* /By Katie Hafner/ July 12, 2019 Fernando Corbató, whose work on computer time-sharing in the 1960s helped pave the way for the personal computer, as well as the computer password, died on Friday at a nursing home in Newburyport, Mass. He was 93. His wife, Emily Corbató, said the cause was complications of diabetes. At his death he was a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Corbató, who spent his entire career at M.I.T., oversaw a project in the early 1960s called the Compatible Time-Sharing System, or C.T.S.S., which allowed multiple users in different locations to access a single computer simultaneously through telephone lines. At the time, computing was done in large batches, and users typically had to wait until the next day to get the results of a computation. In a 1963 public television interview, Dr. Corbató described batch processing as “infuriating” for its inefficiency. The advent of time-sharing, however, reinforced the notion, still in its infancy, that computers could be used interactively. It was an idea that would animate the computing field for decades. [...] continua qui: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html

1 0

Space Technology: robotica e AI a servizio dell’esplorazione spaziale | 18 luglio 2019
by Francesco Ruggiero July 12, 2019

July 12, 2019

Gentilissimi, vi segnalo un incontro in programma il *18 luglio 2019*, ore 18-20, a *Infini.To - Planetario di Torino*, in via Osservatorio 30, Pino Torinese. *Space Technology: robotica e AI a servizio dell’esplorazione spaziale*, una tavola rotonda per discutere gli innumerevoli temi legati all’esplorazione robotica e umana dello Spazio. Ospiti della serata: *Maria Antonietta Perino* (Thales Alenia Space), *Giancarlo Genta* (Politecnico di Torino),* Giada Genchi* (IIT) e *Antonio Santangelo* (Nexa Center for Internet & Society). Per ulteriori informazioni: info(a)planetarioditorino.it In allegato la locandina dell’evento. Cordiali saluti, Francesco -- Francesco Ruggiero Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

1 0

Google employees are eavesdropping, even in Flemish living rooms, VRT NWS has discovered | Flanders News
by Alberto Cammozzo July 11, 2019

July 11, 2019

<https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/07/10/google-employees-are-eavesdropping-…> [...] Not everyone is aware of the fact that everything you say to your Google smart speakers and your Google Assistant is being recorded and stored. But that is clearly stated in Google’s terms and conditions. And what people are certainly not aware of, simply because Google doesn’t mention it in its terms and conditions, is that Google employees can listen to excerpts from those recordings. Google has continually claimed that it doesn’t eavesdrop. Google Holland even made a smooth YouTube ‘explainer’ to remove any misconceptions about eavesdropping. In this video, Google employees answer the question ‘Does Google eavesdrop?’. They say that the commands are being stored and transferred to Google for analysis. And they very clearly state: ‘No, you are not being eavesdropped’. Google does listen in It is true that Google does not eavesdrop directly, but VRT NWS discovered that it is listening in. Or rather: that it lets people listen in. We let ordinary Flemish people hear some of their own recordings. ‘This is undeniably my own voice’, says one man, clearly surprised. A couple from Waasmunster immediately recognise the voice of their son and their grandchild. What did we do? VRT NWS was able to listen to more than a thousand excerpts recorded via Google Assistant. In these recordings we could clearly hear addresses and other sensitive information. This made it easy for us to find the people involved and confront them with the audio recordings. Why is Google listening in? In the aftermath of the Amazon case, we were able to talk to someone who works for a Google subcontractor. He let us take a look at the system that collects audio via Google Assistant. Thousands of employees worldwide use this system to listen to audio excerpts. In Flanders and Holland, around a dozen people listen to Dutch recordings. Why is Google storing these recordings and why does it have employees listening to them? They are not interested in what you are saying, but the way you are saying it. Google’s computer system consists of smart, self-learning algorithms. And in order to understand the subtle differences and characteristics of the Dutch language, it still needs to learn a lot. Sometimes Google’s search engine has difficulty analysing a certain speech command. When that is the case, they put this command in Google’s online tool Crowdsource. By the way, if you want to help Google get better at describing images and facial expressions, everyone can use this tool (for free). What you will not find in this free tool, is the part where you can describe audio recordings. Google subcontracts that task to outside professionals. They log in to a secure part of the tool that has a list of the audio excerpts they have to analyse. We have three sources confirming that this is the way Google works. Speech recognition automatically generates a script of the recordings. Employees then have to double check to describe the excerpt as accurately as possible: is it a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or a child? What do they say? They write out every cough and every audible comma. These descriptions are constantly improving Google’s search engines, which results in better reactions to commands. One of our sources explains how this works. Most recordings made via Google Home smart speakers are very clear. Recordings made with Google Assistant, the smartphone app, are of telephone quality. But the sound is not distorted in any way. Anonymous? Knowing that people who work for Google indirectly are listening to such recordings raises questions about privacy. In order to avoid excerpts being automatically linked to a user, they are disconnected from the user’s information. They delete the user name and replace it with an anonymous serial number. But, as shown in one of the videos above, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recover someone’s identity; you simply have to listen carefully to what is being said. What’s more, if they don’t know how it is written, these employees have to look up every word, address, personal name or company name on Google or on Facebook. In that way, they often soon discover the identity of the person speaking. Sex... VRT NWS listened to more than a thousand excerpts, 153 of which were conversations that should never have been recorded and during which the command ‘Okay Google’ was clearly not given. But as soon as someone in the vicinity utters a word that sounds a bit like ’Okay Google’, Google Home starts to record. This means that a lot of conversations are recorded unintentionally: bedroom conversations, conversations between parents and their children, but also blazing rows and professional phone calls containing lots of private information. Mistaken recordings can also occur when someone presses the wrong button on his or her phone or unintentionally gives a command. [...]

1 0

Schrems II will seriously stress test EU’s data privacy rules
by Alberto Cammozzo July 11, 2019

July 11, 2019

<https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/schrems-ii-will-seriously-st…> At long last, a critical Irish data privacy case this week wended its somewhat tortuous and costly way to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. Justices heard arguments in a full-day hearing on Tuesday in the so-called Schrems II case, which questions whether data transfer template agreements, called standard contractual clauses (SCCs), adequately meet Europe’s data protection laws. If CJEU justices believe they don’t, there’s every possibility the court could halt data flows from Europe to the US, and also between the EU and the UK if Britain finally brexits. Unimaginable? Blame the lack of imagination on the US (government, agencies and companies), which has for years ignored the letter of European data protection law and data transfer framework Safe Harbour, on the assumption that, first, they didn’t really mean what they purported to say and could be flexibly interpreted, and second, that the EU never really enforced them anyway (which, in fairness, seems to be the case). And then there was that third assumption laid bare by those awkward Snowden revelations: that EU protections didn’t apply to national security agencies conducting mass surveillance by indiscriminately sweeping up data from technology and social media companies. Along came a young Austrian lawyer and campaigner, Max Schrems, with a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC). He asked whether his Facebook data could be adequately safeguarded, given Edward Snowden’s disclosures. Vested interests The CJEU, in its first Schrems decision in 2015, thought not. This shocked, but only because the majority of vested interests hadn’t been paying attention. In another Irish-originating case brought by Digital Rights Ireland, the same court had already found in 2013 that EU states couldn’t just grab data and hang on to it for random periods, for no explicit purpose, just in case it might be useful someday. Schrems I invalidated Safe Harbour, and a new arrangement was needed. So we got the problematical Privacy Shield, which has not yet been tried in the CJEU’s crucible – though that, too, lies ahead, in a complementary case brought by three French data privacy groups. Meanwhile, after the conclusion of the first Schrems case, the DPC disclosed that Facebook actually used SCCs as a bespoke data protection equivalent to Privacy Shield. Schrems filed another complaint, this time focusing on whether these contract clauses could be adequately enforced. The DPC sought to get this referred to the CJEU. In doing so, the office decided on an approach that still baffles privacy specialists and lawyers: bringing the case to the commercial court, where cases can run up costs of about €1 million a week (a hefty bill for Irish taxpayers, when these observers feel other courts or possibly a direct referral should have worked); and making Max Schrems the defendant, alongside Facebook, in his own complaint, leaving him potentially exposed to those costs. This sets an alarming precedent: if a complainant could be made a defendant, anyone filing a complaint with the Irish DPC – the regulator for just about every significant data-ingesting multinational – could risk liability for costs. Eventually, Schrems was indemnified against costs, but the DPC’s office has yet to justify a route that has introduced a financial chilling effect on anyone considering privacy complaints. In the end, the CJEU referral was forthcoming, despite an Irish Supreme Court appeal by Facebook. At Tuesday’s hearing, however, some participants questioned why the referral was made in the first place by a DPC who, they argued, could have taken a decision herself. But, given ongoing uncertainty about the solidity of Privacy Shield or SCCs, the newness of the GDPR, and lack of procedural clarity, a referral in this important case was possibly a better route, as Castlebridge privacy consultant Daragh O Brien argued in a blog post. [...]

1 0

Can we talk in confidence? The death of candour in the age of surveillance | World news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo July 11, 2019

July 11, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/11/can-we-talk-in-confidence-the…> "Dance like no one is watching,” the American journalist Olivia Nuzzi wrote in 2014. “Email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.” Nuzzi’s advice could have saved Kim Darroch an awful lot of trouble. The UK ambassador to the US has just been forced to resign after describing Donald Trump and his administration as “inept” and “uniquely dysfunctional” in diplomatic memos that were subsequently leaked to the Mail on Sunday. Darroch’s crime is hardly one of inaccuracy. The only person in the world who seems to disagree with the ambassador’s assessment is Trump himself, who called the civil servant “wacky” and “very stupid” in a dysfunctional series of tweets on Tuesday. But there is no denying that the memos were, well, not particularly diplomatic. An important skill of an ambassador to the US is to balance two competing requirements: to honestly report to your superiors the fact that the president is inept, while remaining chummy with the inept president. Darroch is not the first person to face trouble over seemingly private thoughts becoming public. Emails get hacked and published (awkward revelations, Donna Brazile); microphones thought to be turned off are actually broadcasting (better apologise, Gordon Brown); documents get released under freedom of information or data protection laws (be more circumspect, GCHQ); old blogposts are rediscovered in a new light (get deleting, Ben Bradley) … the list seems never-ending. [...] The death of frankness is one symptom of the wider dearth of ambient privacy in our daily lives. The cheery Silicon Valley surveillance state that prevents us from speaking plainly in private is the same one that requires us to warn our children – or be warned by our parents – not to post things online that might harm employment prospects, and the same one that ensures we vet every utterance to make sure that it doesn’t take on some darker meaning outside of the context in which it was presented. There is no external agent mandating this self-censorship, at least not in the west: in China and Saudi Arabia, Cegłowski notes, the same capacity is used as a tool of social control. In the UK and the US, “We’re using it to show ads. But the infrastructure of total surveillance is everywhere the same, and everywhere being deployed at scale.” [...]

1 0

Re: [nexa] Cloud, Germania a lavoro per piattaforma nazionale: Sovranità tecnologica
by Diego Giorio July 10, 2019

July 10, 2019

Dalla mia relazione ad e-privacy del 2017, parlando del sistema di conservazione degli Enti Pubblici; naturalmente è un discorso valido anche per le imprese, anche se preferirei tenere separati i due aspetti. Mi fa piacere vedere che non sono il solo a pensarla in un certo modo, e spero che non resti un caso isolato nel panorama europeo Eppure in molti documenti, raccomandazioni, linee guida, si continua a parlare di cloud in modo astratto e generico. Viene dunque spontaneo chiedersi: se già ci sono le norme e le strutture, perché non potenziarle ed estenderle ad un backup completo dei dati digitali dell’intero Ente? Perché lasciare questi data center ai privati e non realizzare dei data center statali o europei espressamente dedicati alle pubbliche amministrazioni, dove conservare i dati in tutta sicurezza? Sicurezza intesa a 360°, quindi sia nei confronti del disaster recovery che di una conservazione di dati pubblici esclusivamente presso strutture pubbliche sicure e riservate. Saluti a tutti D. ________________________________ From: nexa <nexa-bounces(a)server-nexa.polito.it> on behalf of J.C. DE MARTIN <demartin(a)polito.it> Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2019 6:12 PM To: Center Nexa Subject: [nexa] Cloud, Germania a lavoro per piattaforma nazionale: Sovranità tecnologica https://www.key4biz.it/cloud-la-germania-allopera-per-la-piattaforma-nazion… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any)) _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa

2 1