- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Aral Balkan: Le aziende tecnologiche minacciano l'esistenza umana
by Giacomo Tesio April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

Analisi interessante di Aral Balkan. Dei vari passaggi degni di nota qui ne trascrivo qualcuno. L'ultimo in particolare esprime bene un'intuizione di cui abbiamo discusso di recente in lista ed è un mio leit motif da tempo (anche se Aral si limita ai dati personali, mentre io ne faccio un discorso più generale). L'informazione (e i dati che la rappresentano) non è e non può essere un prodotto o un bene. E' parte dell'individuo, della persona che l'ha generata, sia essa una canzone, un software o un click su un link. E come parte di un essere umano, non può essere oggetto di proprietà. https://invidio.us/watch?v=xy9gNOnoR8M The problem with technology is who own and controls it so if we as individuals own and control our own technology and the data that gather with that and the insight that it gives us about our lives there is no problem here. That's a system who is compatible with democracy and it's compatible with human righrs. The problem is that there are technologies that are controlled by a handful corporations and that gives them a huge amount of power and insights over us. And that's is not compatible with democracy. [...] What does it mean when corporations know everything about you and you don't know anything about them. [...] We need solutions where we don't rely on benevolent kings. [...] We can do that differently, we can build peer-to-peer systems where we own the data, we own the technology, we own the algorithms. And that changes completely the power structures, that's a more egalitarian power structure. [...] A Peerocracy is a social system that at its heart has individuals, has people whose integrity are intact. We have this in the biological sense, we protect the integrity of the self of the person, of our biological body. We have human rights that protect that (or it should). What we don't have is the same thing in the digital and networked worlds, in the digital and networked age. That's all "Peerocracy" means. It's having that basic structure, the person, safeguarded [...] When we talk about personhood in the digital network age, we are not talking about something that exists just within your biological body but also on your phone to some extent [...] So personhood have to transcend the boundaries of your biological body so that we can protect it within human rights law.

1 0

Facebook takes down far-right groups days before Spanish election | World news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

A conferma che serve una parte terza a monitorare i SN con elezioni in corso... <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/25/facebook-takes-down-far-right…> Facebook has taken down several networks that were spreading far-right content to nearly 1.7 million people in Spain, days before national elections that are expected to see a surge in support for the far-right Vox party. The networks were uncovered in an investigation by the campaign group Avaaz, and taken down only after it presented Facebook with its findings. The discovery of a large network, spreading politically sensitive content unmonitored days before a key European election, is likely to add to concerns about social media firms’ willingness and ability to control hate speech and criminal activity on their sites. On Wednesday British MPs condemned Facebook, Google and Twitter for their refusal to report users to the police when they remove criminal posts, except in rare cases when there is an immediate threat to life or limb. Quick guide Spain general election Avaaz found that the networks in Spain were spreading fake news, including a doctored photo of a political opponent giving a Hitler salute, and misogynist, Islamophobic and homophobic messages. They were also coordinating the publication of identical posts apparently designed to look like spontaneous messages. However, unlike its decision earlier this month to ban British far-right groups in a crackdown on hate organisations, Facebook said it had not taken down the Spanish pages because of their content, or for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” – the network’s sanitised term for manufacturing and spreading fake news. Instead, Facebook said they were targeted for breaking network rules. “We have removed a number of fake and duplicate accounts that were violating our authenticity policies, as well as one page for name change violations,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We aren’t removing accounts or pages for coordinated inauthentic behaviour. “As in other cases, we removed these accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted. Some additional pages were also disabled because they were administered solely by fake accounts.” The largest network – Unidad Nacional Española (UNE) – had more than 1.2 million followers, and others reached hundreds of thousands more. Together they had more than 7 million interactions, at a time of intense political activity and focus on the political rise of the upstart far-right party Vox. [...]

1 0

25 aprile digitale
by don Luca Peyron April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

Rivendicazioni sindacali in salsa digitale... davvero interessante sotto molti profili. dl https://torino.corriere.it/cronaca/19_aprile_25/non-lasciano-mancia-rider-m… www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

2 1

Facebook just hired the co-author of the Patriot Act.
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/facebook-new-general-counsel-patriot-a… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

2 1

Nuovi diritti lavoratori gig economy
by Mauro Alovisio April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

Gent.me/mi segnalo news di interesse: http://www.ansa.it/europa/notizie/rubriche/altrenews/2019/04/16/parlamento-… Un caro saluto Mauro Alovisio

3 3

Britain lets Huawei into part of its 5G networks - Cyber-security
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 25, 2019

April 25, 2019

https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/04/24/britain-lets-huawei-into-part-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

1 0

Put the internet back under your control with the FreedomBox
by Giacomo Tesio April 24, 2019

April 24, 2019

https://www.zdnet.com/article/put-the-internet-back-under-your-control-with… In an interview, Moglen told me this: "Concentration of technology is a surprising outcome of cheap hardware and free software. We could have had a world of peers. Instead, the net we built is the net we didn't want. We're in an age of surveillance with centralized control. We're in a world, which encourages swiping, clicking, and flame throwing." With FreedomBox, "We can undo this. We can make it possible for ordinary people to provide internet services. You can have your own private messaging, services without a man in the middle watching your every move." We can, in short, rebuild the internet so that we, and not multi-billion dollar companies, are in charge. I like this plan.

1 0

Paper: "New Frontiers of Philanthro-capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 24, 2019

April 24, 2019

*New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism* Ryan Burns First published: 15 April 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12534 Abstract Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.

1 0

"Who needs democracy when you have data?" (del 2018)
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 24, 2019

April 24, 2019

*Who needs democracy when you have data?** * /Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.// / by Christina Larson Aug 20, 2018 In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China. For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep? Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI, and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute detail. [...] continua qui: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have…

1 0

"What Would More Democratic A.I. Look Like?"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 24, 2019

April 24, 2019

What Would More Democratic A.I. Look Like? /A new movement is pushing for A.I.’s future to be in the hands of the people/ Andrew Burgess <https://medium.com/@ajburgess> Something curious is happening in Finland. Though much of the global debate around artificial intelligence (A.I.) has become concerned with unaccountable, proprietary systems that could control our lives, the Finnish government has instead decided to embrace the opportunity by rolling out a nationwide educational campaign. Conceived in 2017, shortly after Finland’s A.I. strategy <http://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/160391/TEMrap_47_…> was announced, the government wants to rebuild the country’s economy around the high-end opportunities of artificial intelligence, and has launched a national program <https://www.politico.eu/article/finland-one-percent-ai-artificial-intellige…> to train 1 percent of the population — that’s 55,000 people — in the basics of A.I. “We’ll never have so much money that we will be the leader of artificial intelligence,” said economic minister Mika Lintilä at the launch. “But how we use it — that’s something different.” Artificial intelligence can have many positive applications, from being trained to identify cancerous cells in biopsy screenings, predict weather patterns that can help farmers increase their crop yields, and improve traffic efficiency. But some believe that A.I. expertise is currently too concentrated in the hands of just a few companies with opaque business models, meaning resources are being diverted away <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-07/tech-giants-gorging-o…> from projects that could be more socially, rather than commercially, beneficial. Finland’s approach of making A.I. accessible and understandable to its citizens is part of a broader movement of people who want to democratize the technology, putting utility and opportunity ahead of profit. [...] continua qui: https://medium.com/s/story/what-would-more-democratic-a-i-look-like-ea729f5…

1 0