- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Alyssa Rosenzweig – The Federation Fallacy
by Alberto Cammozzo March 6, 2019

March 6, 2019

<https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html> The Federation Fallacy 3 Mar 2019 Throughout the free software community, an unbridled aura of justified mistrust fills the air: mistrust of large corporations, mistrust of governments, and of course, mistrust of proprietary software. Each mistrust is connected by a critical thread: centralisation. Thus, permeating the community are calls for decentralisation. To attack the information silos, corporate conglomerates, and governmental surveillance, decentralisation calls for individuals to host servers for their own computing, rather than defaulting on the servers of those rich in data. In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom. Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration. What a dream. Federated systems are all around us. The classic example is e-mail. I host my own email server, so I have the privilege of managing my own email address. According to the ideas of decentralisation, for an e-mail user to be fully free, they should host their own e-mail server. But do you host your own mail server? Do your friends? Does your grandmother? Setting up a mail server often is time-consuming, ad hoc, and brittle; despite technical literacy and the hours I poured in, I continue to have problems with my e-mail delivery. Of course, e-mail is technically federated, but for pragmatic reasons, most people’s personal e-mail is controlled by a centralised service like Google Gmail. Is Google a small individual you know personally? There’s no surprise large companies administer most e-mail accounts; it is the expected consequence of economies of scale. Due to the overhead of running a mail server, it makes economic sense to centralise. Decentralisation, while certainly possible, is impractical for email; accordingly, there are considerable privacy and censorship risks for many e-mail users, submitting to the rules of a massive service provider. But maybe, due to its configuration complexity, e-mail could be an outlier. What about the federated chat protocol, XMPP? Well? How many people do you know who run their own XMPP server? The protocol family claims over one billion users; you may unwittingly be one of them. But almost every one of those users is connecting not to the federated, open paradise, but rather to a walled garden. Of course, a few users connect to their personal server via a free software client, but most connect to Facebook’s walled garden, via Facebook’s app: WhatsApp. Yes, internally the ever-popular, ever-proprietary WhatsApp was once a federated protocol. Inside WhatsApp is XMPP, but WhatsApp users are isolated from non-WhatsApp users. Likewise, users preferring free software for practical or ideological reasons are isolated from their friends on WhatsApp. Federation was baked into the genes of this protocol, but while the original “freedom-preserving” chat system claims a few technically advanced adherents, the freedom of the masses was unfortunately lost to corporate interests. Chat protocols aside, arguably the web itself is a classic, if overlooked, example of a federated system. The web, as a collection of interlinked websites backed by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, contains the two essential features of a federated, decentralised system. Every author is their own publisher with their own web server, decentralising the web. Similarly, authors are encouraged to link their pages to other pages on other parts of the Internet, hosted by other authors, and in exchange, other pages tend to link to them, creating an interconnected – federated? – system. The fabric of the Internet itself follows the decentralised technical structure. Yet the web is no friend of freedom. The overwhelming majority of web traffic is to commercial silos without users’ best interests at heart. It is certainly possible, if complicated, to host a web server oneself. But practically, the English-speaking web is undeniably centralised around Silicon Valley enterprises, the same enterprises that pose considerable threats to user freedom without the possibility of informed consent. Decentralisation specifically seeks to push back against these Internet masters, yet these centralised giants are operating within the technical framework of a decentralised system. Admittedly, the web is nebulous as an example of federation. What do we make of Mastodon, a freedom-respecting federated alternative to Twitter, whose network of servers hosted by diverse individuals and organizations is lovingly known as the “fediverse”? Mastodon is perhaps the most promising example of a federated system staying true to its grassroots ideals, so far lacking the tell-tale signs of large-scale corporate tampering. If any federated system can work, let it be Mastodon. But let’s look at the data first. In comparison to some other federated systems, a comprehensive list of federated Mastodon instances (servers) is available for browsing online at instances.social. Some non-Mastodon microblogging services are mixed in, as they federate with Mastodon, knitting together the larger “fediverse”. Nevertheless, some simple scripting allows the machine-readable list to be downloaded and processed. Analysing the data, after filtering out instances with no users, we see there are 3070 listed instances. So far, sounds good – that is 3070x more theoretically independent instances than Twitter. Looking at user count, we see there are just under two-million user accounts registered. In other words, there is an average of 642 users per instance. Already the federation fantasy is feeling shaky. How could one system administrator maintain close friendships with over six-hundred people? How could so many people trust a single administrator with their private status updates and direct messages? It seems improbable, if not impossible. With the amount of time required to maintain intimacy with 640 people, there would be no time left in a day to maintain a large Mastodon instance! But what’s really striking about the data is the distribution of users across the instances. In the federation fantasy, given 3,070 instances, we hope that 50% of the user base is spread across 1,535 instances, and the other 50% across the other 1535 instances. That is, in fantasy land, every instance would host an equal number of users (642). In reality, guess how many instances encompass half of the user base. Maybe 1,000? Alright, there are some big instances in there, so perhaps 100? Well, there are a lot of really tiny instances mixed in, so possibly only 20? The answer? Three. Just three instances encompass 50.8% of users. The most popular instance in the Mastodon universe sports over a half a million users. The runner up is mastodon.social, the flagship instance run by the developer, clocking in at just over three-hundred thousand. These two instances alone encompass 41.2% of users. It is true that many Mastodon users have multiple accounts spread out across different instances, so it may be more reliable to check by a metric like number of status updates. Unfortunately, results there are similar: half of reported status updates correspond to a mere five instances. Overall, Mastodon certainly encourages people to use its technical ability to host their own instances for themselves, their friends, and their shared interest groups. True, federation technically allows all 3,070 instances to connect to each other, subject to the policies of each instance owner. But practically, what have we achieved when the typical Mastodon user has an account on one of just three instances? If we define its success by decentralisation, unfortunately – unsurprisingly – Mastodon has failed. Unless you use an obscure micro instance, what good is decentralisation anyway? Mastodon users per instance Visually, the above graph shows user count on the Y-axis, where the X-axis corresponds to the instance popularity ranking. So, the most popular instance is the left-most point, the second most popular instance is a hair to the right of it, and all the way on the right is the tiniest instance. In total, the plot shows the distribution of users on (primarily Mastodon) instances In the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal, the graph should be a horizontal line showing each instance with 642 people. Of course, due to substantial inequality between instance size, we expect to see a power distribution, with a spike on the left that quickly falls and tapers out. Power laws govern much of the real world; many phenomena behave according to this unequal distribution. But look at that graph. Calling this distribution a power law would be generous to say the least. There is a massive spike corresponding to just a few instances, and the rest of the graph is nearly invisible to the naked eye, so tiny and so overshadowed by just a few giants. Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law. Ultimately, there are two types of production-quality networked systems: those designed for centralisation, and those designed for federation. But from the tales of e-mail, XMPP, the web, and Mastodon, it is clear that federation does not mean decentralisation. Each federated system analyzed above only became production-quality and accessible to the masses at the immense cost of centralisation. Each service retains the theoretical ability to federate with tiny self-hosted servers, but the vast majority of users are de facto concentrated about a few major servers. E-mail concentrated on Google, XMPP concentrated on Facebook, the web concentrated on Silicon Valley, and Mastodon concentrated onto a few flagship instances. Indeed, it seems all networked systems tend towards centralisation as the natural consequence of growth. Some systems, both legitimate and illegitimate, are intentionally designed for centralisation. Other systems, like those in the Mastodon universe, are specifically designed to avoid centralisation, but even these succumb to the centralised black hole as their user bases grow towards the event horizon. Consequently, it is not enough to build systems that “can” federate: all four case studies above can federate but de facto stay centralised. Nor is it enough to “save ourselves”, self-hosting our own decentralised digital islands, while ignoring the reality of the masses. We cannot close our eyes and rest, content with freedom in our personal bubble, ignoring the reality of our non-technical friends and family who do not enjoy the same luxuries of privacy and free speech. We cannot ignore their struggles after resolving our own, justifying our behaviour to ourselves given that there is no technical obstacle to their digital freedom “if only” they abandoned their convenience and dedicated themselves to learning system administration and software debugging. With or without decentralised free software, within the technocracy our non-technical loved ones are barred from liberty over their own lives. Decentralisation is certainly better than dependence on centralised corporate conglomerates, but for whom? A society free for the few is a society in chains. Nevertheless, as we mourn the centralised fates of these promising systems and yearn to improve the future, we must understand that centralisation is inevitable. For those of us immersed in the decentralised dream, this fact is uncomfortable to face, but until we do, we will never move on to build systems that are truly free. The fact is, as networked systems designers our choice is rarely “concentrated power or dispersed power?”, but rather “where will power centralise?” If we quixotically opt to cede power over our creations via decentralisation, inevitably someone else will fill the power gap. Alas, naive decentralisation is an experiment in anarchy. Anarchy, whether real or cyber, is a zone where life is “nasty, brutish, and short”; there is no guarantee of true freedom. In any anarchy, soon the power hungry will fill in the void. Remember, history teaches these new despots often establish totalitarian regimes no better than those originally overturned. Did microblogging suffer a parallel fate? If the explosion of Mastodon dethroned Twitter, it did so at the cost of establishing a new instance as the new king. For freedom’s sake, face the facts: federation is dead. But there is hope. In political history, the birth of free nations typically contains three stages: dictatorship, briefly overthrown to anarchy, reformed to democracy. Democracy balances the will of the people with the efficiency of centralisation. Democratic freedom is incompatible with an oligarchic authority, accumulating power imposing their will on others. But neither is democracy a free-for-all; some degree of centralisation is acceptable and even useful for protecting liberty, provided it’s centralised around a legitimate, democratic institution. So it is in cyberspace. As the Internet blossomed into chains, the lucrative, exploitative practices of the Silicon Valley giants created digital totalitarianism, a system offering profits for the few at the expense of freedom of the many: information dictatorship. The decentralisation movement understands this oppression as a consequence of unjust organized power, and platforms like Mastodon are successfully overthrowing this information dictatorship, in its absence creating information anarchy. While the story does not end with anarchy, it need not end with a return to the status quo or to the aristocracy of the technical elite. No, in the power vacuum left by the victory of decentralisation lies the opportunity to create something new, something beautiful, something promising true digital freedom for everyone. After the fall of the information dictatorship, balancing in our fingertips is the precious opportunity to create information democracy. Like its real world counterpart, information democracy is partially centralised for efficiency but encourages community participation for legitimacy. This primarily centralised democratic model is the only realistic option, evident from the structure of free nations in the real world. Yes, there is centralisation required, but we cannot continue to paint centralisation as the virtual bogeyman. Spreading fear is a natural knee jerk reaction to the illegitimate corporatocracy, but we cannot succumb to fear. Whether physical or virtual, centralisation is not evil; it is merely morally neutral. That said, when we ultimately do centralise, we must ensure that the central organization belongs to us, the users, not to special interests. On this point, both corporate and decentralised services alike fail. Yes, corporate interests are oligarchies, bowing to money, but so too is the decentralised technocracy, bowing to arcane technical know-how. In a truly democratic digital space, participation must be accessible to everyone, not just those with money or expertise. If my grandmother cannot participate in the administration of the technology she uses, her best interests may not be adequately represented by the technology. Whether she is beholden to a corporation or to a system administrator, that is not digital freedom. These features distinguish information democracy from its predecessors, creating a system not only more practical but also freer than the federated anarchy. In any democracy, centralised power is wielded to protect freedom, but in decentralised anarchy, no power is wielded at all. Anarchy fantasizes that freedom protects itself; inevitably, life in anarchy is life in chains, for any freedom gained is temporary as the system collapses under the tragedy of the commons and the paradox of tolerance. Granted, information democracy is not a perfect system; in a virtual world composed primarily of information oligarchies, it is natural to be wary of its potential to stray from its ideals. Nevertheless, the few flaws of information democracy directly mirror the flaws of physical democracy; most objections to information democracy were raised centuries ago during the spread of real-world democracies. Indeed, democracy is not perfect, but it is the only just system we have. Fear cannot blind us, painting perfect as the enemy of good. However flawed, democracy is the only option for a free world. Without further ado, if proprietary services are dictatorships and decentralised services oligarchic anarchies, imagine democratic microblogging: a flagship instance with a clear set of liberal rules, reached by mutual consensus in the community. When necessary, these rules are enforced by an elected moderation team voted in by the community, though generally bureaucracy should be minimized. The platform is entirely free software, so anyone technical can contribute via code. The server exposes a public API, allowing third-party clients to flourish without encumbering progress on the “official” client. Similarly, although the service is primarily centralised, the servers may permit federation if relevant. Ideally, when sensitive data like private messages is involved, communications are end-to-end encrypted and possibly even peer-to-peer, minimizing the centralised server’s power. Sound good? These criteria are non-exhaustive but illustrate the potential for information democracy. More importantly, sound familiar? Many of these ideals are already embodied by Mastodon. Mastodon may not have lived up to its federated fantasy, and judging it by its own meter stick of decentralisation, it failed. But judging it by the standards of an information democracy, regardless of its inadvertent centralisation, Mastodon is a success story. True, Mastodon is de facto centralised, but despite the size of the largest instances, it retains the ability to federate with other Mastodon instances. Further, Mastodon is able to federate with other free software friendly networks via a pair of common protocols, creating the familial fabric of the “fediverse”. Centralization and federation can certainly co-exist in harmony to improve efficiency while retaining user choice. Nevertheless, the most successful information democracy is orders of magnitude larger than Mastodon. A centralised site with a documented set of rules reached by community consensus, hosted by a non-profit funded by donations from the user base itself. A community governed by administrators elected by participants in the community. A site whose source code is licensed as free software, allowing specialized adaptations to flourish, complementing rather than harming the main instance. A site that embraces free culture to ensure its fruits are accessible to all of humanity in perpetuity. Wikipedia. The Wikipedia projects embody the ideals of information democracy. Yes, Wikipedia is centralised; indeed, its software does not directly federate with other smaller wikis, many of which mirror Wikipedia articles – and that’s okay. Wikipedia derives its user freedom not from decentralisation, but from participatory democracy structures. Anyone can edit; with some exceptions to keep logistics manageable, a new user’s first edit is valued as much an administrator’s one-millionth. Typically, conflicts are resolved not from a top-down dictatorship, despite the centralisation, but rather from bottom-up consensus seeking. Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy, but it nevertheless operates as an information democracy, no experimentation needed. To protect the digital freedom of everyone, not just the wealthy or the technically inclined, we need information democracy. To see the future of Internet liberty for the few, look not to Silicon Valley, for overwhelming commercial interests can never adequately protect the user. To see the future of liberty for the many, look not to the obscurity of XMPP, for arcane technical voodoo can never be wielded by those who need it most. To see the free future, look to Wikipedia. Whether online or in the real world, rejecting dictatorships is not enough for freedom. We must endorse democracy. Thank you to April, Connor, Florrie, and Natalia for soundboarding and reading early drafts. This page is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0. Spread free culture!

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Will Robots Change Human Relationships? - The Atlantic
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

TECHNOLOGY How AI Will Rewire Us For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship. NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS APRIL 2019 ISSUE https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/robots-human-relations… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Re: [nexa] ENISA sulla sicurezza dei sistemi ICT elettorali
by Diego Latella March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

Grazie Fabio. A chi volesse approfondire l'argomento (e comprendere come l'e-vote e l'i-vote mettano a rischio alcuni principi fondamentali sui quali si basano i procedimenti elettorali, e molto piu' di quanto non possano farli i sistemi cartacei) suggerisco: Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? – June 1, 2012 by Douglas W. Jones (Author), Barbara Simons (Author) ricordando ai piu' giovani che B. Simons e' stata, fra le altre cose, Presidente dell'ACM. Diego > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2019 11:49:24 +0100 > From: "Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) - lists" <lists(a)infosecurity.ch> > To: Center Nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] ENISA sulla sicurezza dei sistemi ICT elettorali > Message-ID: <67f9c319-bba8-bb68-f085-964f320723af(a)infosecurity.ch> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed" > > Mentre il Governo, e nello specifico M5S, promuove il voto online per > le > politiche, l’ENISA ci informa: > > Election cybersecurity - Challenges and opportunities > https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-position-papers-and-opinions… > > Molto interessate da approfondire, nella sezione 5 entra nel merito del > voto elettronico e voto online, chiaramente identificandoli come rischi > abbandonati da tutti i paesi europei (tranne Belgio ed Estonia) e > sottolineando come il voto online sia enormemente più rischioso del > voto > elettronico. > > "Given that the majority of Member States have either postponed or > discontinued the use of electronic voting, the risk associated with the > voting process can be considered to be somewhat reduced. Examples > > of countries that have postponed or discontinued electronic voting > include Ireland,15 the Netherlands,16 France,17 Finland18 and > Germany.19 > In the Netherlands in 2017, the government also decided to return to > counting votes by hand instead of the electronic counting due to > cybersecurity concerns.20 Examples of countries that make use of > electronic voting technology include Estonia21 and Belgium22. > > Taking into consideration that, as noted above, the roll- out of > electronic voting has been either discontinued or postponed in a number > of Member States, the cybersecurity risk level in relation to the > voting > process is considered medium. This cybersecurity risk level is likely > to > be higher in countries where e-voting systems are being implemented. A > distinction should also be made between online and offline e-voting > systems, where the former is likely to entail a higher cybersecurity > risk level than the latter. " > > Fabio >

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Evento GirlsTech
by Francesco Ronchi March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

Salve a tutti, Sono nuovo nella lista e sperando di fare cosa gradita vorrei segnalarvi questo evento, che si terrà il 14 al TAG, a tema gender gap, equality e inclusion. https://www.girlstech.it Se qualcuno fosse interessato a partecipare alla conferenza, può contattarmi direttamente, ci sono ancora alcuni posti disponibili. Buon pomeriggio Francesco Ronchi Synesthesia 3475220151 Sent from mobile phone

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Incarnazione digitale - autopromozione
by don Luca Peyron March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

Carissimi tutti, mi permetto di segnalare un lavoro da me pubblicato per i tipi di Elledici che si pone un po' a cavaliere di temi diversi, il titolo lo prefigura: Incarnazione Digitale - custodire l'umano nell'infosfera. https://www.elledici.org/negozio/incarnazione-digitale/ Buona lettura per chi lo desidera. dl _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Why do Governments always get internet regulation wrong? NINSO guest talk
by Guido Noto La Diega March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

Vedete evento in calce e allegato, so che per la maggior parte di voi sara' impossibile partecipare, ma scrivetemi se interessati e vi giro il link della registrazione video Cheers Guido ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Guido Noto La Diega <guido.notoladiega(a)northumbria.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2019 at 15:21 Subject: Why do Governments always get internet regulation wrong? NINSO guest talk To: Guido Noto La Diega <guido.notoladiega(a)northumbria.ac.uk> Cc: Paul Bernal (LAW - Staff) <Paul.Bernal(a)uea.ac.uk> Hi there! We’re delighted to invite you to a NINSO guest talk <https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/academic-departments/northumbria-law…> with Dr Paul Bernal (UEA) on ‘*Why do Governments always get internet regulation wrong?*’ WHAT: The regulation of the internet is becoming a bigger deal by the day. Fake news, trolling, copyright, extremist content, hate speech and more are all coming increasingly under the focus of governments. How do we get to grips with Facebook and Google? What about piracy? And yet with almost every move our governments seem to get it wrong - from excessive and ineffective surveillance to counterproductive ‘anti-trolling’ laws and copyright enforcement that threatens to stifle free speech and alienate generations. Why do we seem to always get it wrong? Using his new book, *The Internet, Warts and All: Free Speech, Privacy and Truth, *Paul Bernal will show how these issues are all interlinked and suggest at least some ways forward that might have a chance of some kind of success - by looking at the internet more honestly: examining it ‘warts and all’. WHO: Paul Bernal is a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Media Law at the University of East Anglia, and specialises in internet privacy and related rights – his book *The Internet, Warts and All: Free Speech, Privacy and Truth* was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. His areas of research interest include surveillance by both government agencies and corporations, the political use of data and the use (and misuse) of social media: he is a prolific blogger (at https://paulbernal.wordpress.com) and tweeter (as @paulbernalUK). WHEN: Tuesday 12th March in at 1-2pm WHERE: CCE1 – 410 (Northumbria University, Faculty of Business and Law) WHY: delicious food will be served before the talk at 12:30 (and yes, the speaker is brilliant and the topic is hot) J HOW: register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/why-do-governments-always-get-internet-regul… Cheers Guido on behalf of NINSO Northumbria Internet & Society Research Group PS Last seats available for Rachel Adam’s talk ‘Make Google Do It’ on virtual assistants and gender: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/make-google-do-it-tickets-56349087638 *Guido Noto La Diega, PhD* *Senior Lecturer – International Research Partnerships Coordinator (Law)* *Northumbria University Director @italiot | Co-convenor @NinsoRIG | Fellow @nexacenter* T: +44(0)191 349 5562 E: *guido.notoladiega(a)northumbria.ac.uk <guido.notoladiega(a)northumbria.ac.uk>* Room 105, Faculty of Business and Law, City Campus East 1, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, United Kingdom Recent papers include: ‘Against the dehumanisation of decision-making <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3188080>. Algorithmic decisions at the crossroads of intellectual property, data protection, and freedom of information’ (2018) ‘Can the law fix the problems of fashion? <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3198514> An empirical study on social norms and power imbalance in the fashion industry’ (2018) Visit Academia.edu <http://northumbria.academia.edu/GuidoNotoLaDiega> and SSRN <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1794950> for open access to my research! *[image: northumbria new logo]* <https://www.linkedin.com/in/guido-noto-la-diega-ph-d-6696146/> *GO GREEN, KEEP IT ON SCREEN!*

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Appello dei ricercatori di intelligenza artificiale, robotica e informatica e discipline collegate per la messa al bando delle armi completamente autonome
by Diego Latella March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019

[Ci scusiamo per eventuali duplicazioni del presente messaggio, del quale chiediamo la massima diffusione] Cara/o Collega, Ci siamo fatti promotori di una iniziativa con la quale chiediamo al Governo e al Parlamento italiani di assumere una decisa posizione contro le armi autonome nelle sedi politiche nazionali e negli opportuni forum diplomatici internazionali. Se condividi le preoccupazioni di tanti ricercatori in merito allo sviluppo di armi autonome e ad un loro eventuale uso, ti invitiamo a sottoscrivere (preferibilmente entro il prossimo 10 marzo) l’appello sotto accluso, che verrà presentato ai media e all’attenzione dei decisori politici il 12 marzo p.v. a Roma (dettagli sull’appuntamento verranno diffusi a breve). Per la sottoscrizione, è sufficiente che tu spedisca una email con: NOME: COGNOME: TITOLO/RUOLO ACCADEMICO: DISCIPLINA DI RICERCA: AFFILIAZIONE: a tutti e tre i seguenti indirizzi: diego.latella(a)isti.cnr.it <mailto:diego.latella@isti.cnr.it> guglielmo.tamburrini(a)unina.it <mailto:guglielmo.tamburrini@unina.it> segreteria(a)disarmo.org <mailto:segreteria@disarmo.org> Ringraziando per l’attenzione inviamo i più cordiali saluti Daniele Amoroso (Dip. di Giurisprudenza dell'Univ. di Cagliari; ICRAC - International Committee for Robots Arms Control) Diego Latella (Ist. di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "A. Faedo" del CNR; Unione degli Scienziati Per il Disarmo ONLUS) Guglielmo Tamburrini (Dip. di Ingegneria elettrica e delle Tecnologie dell'Informazione dell'Univ. Federico II di Napoli; ICRAC - International Committee for Robots Arms Control) Francesco Vignarca (Rete Italiana per il Disarmo) Appello dei ricercatori di intelligenza artificiale, robotica e informatica e discipline collegate per la messa al bando delle armi completamente autonome Come ricercatori nei settori scientifici dell’intelligenza artificiale (IA), della robotica, dell'informatica e di altri ambiti ad essi collegati seguiamo con interesse e apprezzamento le iniziative nazionali volte a definire strategie di ampio respiro per la ricerca, la formazione, gli investimenti e l’innovazione tecnologica nell’ambito dell’IA e della robotica. Negli ultimi decenni, la ricerca nell’IA e nella robotica avanzata ha conseguito risultati molto importanti, grazie ai quali si possono sviluppare macchine intelligenti capaci di svolgere compiti complessi in collaborazione con gli esseri umani o anche in piena autonomia da essi. Le nuove tecnologie dell’IA e della robotica possono trasformare profondamente e migliorare le nostre infrastrutture, i trasporti, la produzione industriale, i servizi pubblici, la difesa nazionale, i servizi alle imprese, le cure sanitarie e molti altri settori di grande rilevanza sociale ed economica. Ma le opportunità tecnologiche di ogni epoca non sono mai disgiunte da grandi responsabilità morali. Siamo tenuti a guidare con intelligenza e sensibilità morale la trasformazione tecnologica in atto, individuando, prevenendo e contrastando utilizzazioni moralmente inaccettabili delle tecnologie dell’IA e della robotica avanzata. Come ricercatori in sintonia con numerose e autorevoli voci in ogni parte del mondo, esprimiamo la nostra profonda preoccupazione per lo sviluppo delle armi completamente autonome. Basate principalmente sulle tecnologie dell’IA e della robotica avanzata, le armi completamente autonome sono in grado di selezionare e attaccare un obiettivo in piena autonomia, senza essere soggette a un controllo umano significativo. Lo sviluppo delle armi autonome costituisce una grave minaccia per il rispetto delle leggi umanitarie in guerra; può interrompere la catena di comando e controllo, la quale consente di individuare i soggetti responsabili per eventuali crimini di guerra; dà a delle macchine la possibilità di decidere della vita o della morte di un essere umano; impedisce alle potenziali vittime di fare appello all’umanità condivisa degli avversari. Eliminando il controllo umano significativo sulla legittimità degli obiettivi militari e sulle decisioni di vita o di morte, le armi autonome si collocano al di là di una linea moralmente invalicabile. Le armi autonome pongono anche nuove minacce per la pace e la stabilità internazionale, accelerando il ritmo dei conflitti e amplificando le interazioni ostili tra armi autonome oltre ogni possibilità di comprensione e controllo da parte degli esseri umani. Come ricercatori, esprimiamo la nostra ferma opposizione alle armi autonome. Le armi autonome sono attualmente ancora in uno stadio iniziale di sviluppo e diffusione. Abbiamo ancora la possibilità di fermare la corsa a questo nuovo tipo di armi. Ma non c’è molto tempo. Chiediamo pertanto che il Governo e il Parlamento italiani assumano una decisa posizione contro le armi autonome nelle sedi politiche nazionali e negli opportuni forum diplomatici internazionali - a cominciare dalla prossima riunione della Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) che si terrà presso la sede delle Nazioni Unite a Ginevra dal 25 al 29 marzo 2019 - e si uniscano al nutrito gruppo di Stati e di Parlamenti nazionali che si sono già espressi in favore di un Trattato internazionale vincolante per messa al bando di questa tipologia di sistemi d'arma.

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Social network sites and acquiring current affairs knowledge: The impact of Twitter and Facebook usage on learning about the news
by Enrico Nardelli March 4, 2019

March 4, 2019

(Non mi pare di averlo visto passare in lista...) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19331681.2019.1572568 This study investigates how the use of Twitter and Facebook affects citizens’ knowledge acquisition, and whether this effect is conditional upon people’s political interest. Using a panel survey design with repeated measures of knowledge acquisition, this study is able to disentangle causality and to demonstrate that more frequent usage of Twitter positively affects the acquisition of current affairs knowledge. The opposite is found for Facebook: More frequent Facebook usage causes a decline in knowledge acquisition. This negative effect of Facebook usage occurred particularly for citizens with less political interest, thereby, amplifying the existing knowledge gap between politically interested and uninterested citizens. -- EN ===================================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Dipartimento di Matematica - Universita' di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it home page: http://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/enardelli/ http://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ ===================================================================== --

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TIME and ROOM CHANGE - Ian Kerr - 4 March - Can robots invade your privacy? - Bocconi
by Alina Trapova March 4, 2019

March 4, 2019

Dear all, Today's (4 March 2019) the public lecture by Prof Ian Kerr on "Can robots invade your privacy?" has been moved to *3.30 pm to room 301* in the same building - via Sarfatti 25, Bocconi University. *Can Robots Invade Your Privacy?* Machines are getting pretty good at doing things by themselves. They can sense their environments. They can learn from the data that they have gathered or been given. And, they can make accurate predictions or sound decisions about people and things which can be acted upon without human intervention or oversight. As a result, robots and AIs are starting to outperform human experts in an increasing array of narrow tasks, including driving, surgery, and medical diagnostics. This is fueling a growing optimism that robots and AIs will exceed humans more generally and spectacularly; some think, to the point where we will have to consider their moral and legal status. But the law does not currently think about robots in this way. For example, when it comes to spying robots or AI used by law enforcement agencies to conduct mass surveillance, privacy law generally applies only when some human comes to know what the robots know. Judge Posner, for example, has famously opined that robots and AIs cannot invade privacy because they are not sentient beings. Indeed, most judges and many lawyers share the view that since robots and AIs are incapable of human-level cognition, they are of no consequence to our privacy—we don’t need to worry about privacy unless or until there are human eyes on the data. In this keynote address, Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology challenges the traditional view from both a legal and ethical perspective. He argues that when the likes of Siri or Alexa are able to form reliable beliefs about us and are also able to act on those beliefs, the traditional approach of Judge Posner and others leads to the wrong conclusion in law and in ethics.

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Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws | Technology | The Guardian
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 3, 2019

March 3, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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