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Fundamental Rights as Bycatch – Russia’s Anti-Fake News Legislation - Oreste Pollicino
by Giovanni De Gregorio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

Cari tutti, vorrei condividere con voi la blog entry del Prof. Pollicino che analizza in chiave comparata la legge approvata recentemente dalla Russia contro le fake news: O. Pollicino, Fundamental Rights as Bycatch – Russia’s Anti-Fake News Legislation, Verfassungsblog, 28 marzo 2019 disponibile all'indirizzo https://verfassungsblog.de/fundamental-rights-as-bycatch-russias-anti-fake-… Un saluto Giovanni De Gregorio --- Dai il tuo 5x1000 alla Bocconi. Aiuta gli studenti meritevoli a costruire il proprio futuro. CF 80024610158. www.unibocconi.it/5x1000 Please note that the above message is addressed only to individuals filing Italian income tax returns. 5x1000 is a percentage of Italian personal income tax that taxpayers can allocate to Universities, scientific research and non profit organizations. ---

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Eben Moglen Interviewed by NPR about Boeing Affair
by Giacomo Tesio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

“What we’re looking at in the case of some aerodynamic software taking over for pilots without telling them is an example of why even if you didn’t think this had anything to do with politics, it is still true that systems that don’t explain themselves to human beings who interact with them are dangerous…If we in the 21st century still believe in human autonomy, then we need to put that value into the software that runs our world.” “In the twenty-first century, there will be two kinds of autonomous systems. There will be autonomous systems made by despotism, most noticeably by the Chinese Communist Party’s economy and society. And they will not explain what they are doing because that’s the whole point: eliminating democracy, freedom of human beings, civil liberty as ideas. The only alternative to that kind of autonomous system is whatever we will invent. That is to say it’s a political task from the part of humanity that believes in freedom to build these technologies to support rather than to threaten human freedom.” http://softwarefreedom.org/news/2019/mar/22/npr-boeing/

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Developing for Android is like being a (demonetized) YouTuber
by Giacomo Tesio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

<https://gbl08ma.com/developing-for-android-is-like-being-a-demonetized-yout…>

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Aren’t AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?
by Giacomo Tesio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

<https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/amp-cache-copyright> Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are specially formatted web pages that companies like Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft copy off publishers’ websites and make available through their own AMP Cache web servers. There is no redistribution license agreement between the AMP Caches and the publishers, so how come AMP Caches aren’t considered copyright infringement on a massive scale? Like the name suggest, albeit heavily disputed, the purpose of AMP is to speed up webpage delivery time and performance on high-latency mobile devices. Web publishers can either choose to specifically create AMP-formatted web pages in addition or instead of their regular web pages. Some publishing platform may create AMP variants alongside the regular web page without the knowledge of the author (the copyright holder). [...] # Requirements for caching safe harbor provisions Caches and caches are vaguely defined in copyright laws. However; Australian, Canadian, European Union, and USA laws agree that the caching process must be automatic and that the caches must follow industry standards for removing and updating cached materials. AMP Caches satisfies this requirement by supporting the industry standard HTTP Cache-Control header and other related caching headers. EU law also requires that the caching must only be done for the purpose of making communications more efficient; which is how Google have presented AMP all along. Copyright laws require that no modifications are made to the cached creative works. Australian and Canadian copyright laws specifically grants exceptions to this requirement for changes made by an undefined technical processes. EU and USA copyright laws have no such exceptions. AMP Caches makes a few notable optimizations and modifications to cached content. These changes performed by the AMP Caches are done to achieve high performance but it may also be stripping away their safe harbor provisions as allowed for under EU and USA copyright laws. [...] # The implied license An implied license in the context of copyright law is a license granted by a rights holder in the absence of an expressly written contract. You really need to be a copyright lawyer to make any sense of the finer details of implied licenses. Most resources on implied licenses that I found on the web consists of little more than lawyers shaking their heads at the lack of an expressly written legal agreement in their place.

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The Linux Foundation is Not About Linux
by Giacomo Tesio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

<http://techrights.org/2019/03/26/the-linux-foundation-is-not-about-linux/> Linux Foundation (LF) objectives/missions do not resemble what the Open Source Development Labs, Inc. (OSDL) was founded to accomplish; this puts at grave threat the very raison d’être of both GNU and Linux. [...] The Linux Foundation is big business, it’s big money. [...] What has the LF turned into since? We’re probably going to write about their courses and events separately (in the future), but in the meantime not enough people have paid attention to how the salaries exploded (what kind of “charity” pays people like a million bucks a year)? Based on ProPublica, the IRS has had nothing (public at least, as this is the latest and last) since 2016, so we assume that this “charity” now has $100,000,000 or more in turnover (annual). That’s massive. If they double the salaries, accordingly (doubling the turnover), that’s nearly a million bucks a year for a dozen or so staff members. But that’s not what matters (the money); it’s how they use that money which matters and it feels as though LF staff tries to silence/suppress people who investigate it. [...] What does the LF help with? Putting GNU inside Windows? What about GNU/Linux desktops? It seems like “adding Netflix” (DRM) is the priority now.

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How malevolent machine learning could derail AI - MIT Technology Review
by antonio.vetro＠polito.it March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

Nuove frontiere del reverse engineering. Oltre a quanto suggerisce il titolo, in realtà potrebbero rivelarsi utili per testare l'affidabilità di sistemi di apprendimento automatico. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613170/emtech-digital-dawn-song-adversar… AV == Sent from my wireless device ==

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The culture war at the heart of open source
by Giacomo Tesio March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

<https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source> In talking to developers about open source, you’ll also hear something else. Something that’s been itching in the back of my brain for a while, and the thing that led me to write this. You’ll often hear developers talk about how the relationship between businesses and open source developers is messy. Complicated. Businesses don’t “give back enough,” won’t pay people to work on open source. That it’s all take and no give. I’ve said a lot of that stuff myself. But here’s the thing: that’s why the concept of open source was created in the first place. It’s there, plain as day, if you ask the folks who actually created it. Open source was a way to make free software better for businesses. This doesn’t mean that it’s beyond critique, of course. The relationship can improve. I don’t think these developers are stupid, or hypocrites. This is where we’re at today. The Free Software movement was created, and then Open Source was created as a reaction to that. Today’s developers have never learned about this history, or don’t care about it, or actively think it’s irrelevant. And so we have a war. A war for the meaning of open source. A war fought with tweets, and blog posts, and discussions. A war between the old guard, those who created the idea originally, and the new generation, the developers who have taken the base idea and run with it. I think history will repeat itself. In the same way that the open source movement said “we’re like free software, but with these changes,” I think we’ll end up with a new movement. For the same reasons that “open source” came up with a new name, I think the movement that will arise from today’s developers will also need a new name. I’m not sure what that movement will look like, and I’ll explore why in another post. To give you a teaser: the problem is in the way that both Free Software and Open Source are formulated. The rot is in the roots, and I’m not yet sure what will replace it.

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Why Data Is Never Raw - The New Atlantis
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 27, 2019

March 27, 2019

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-data-is-never-raw (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Cars are regulated for safety – why not information technology?
by Alberto Cammozzo March 26, 2019

March 26, 2019

<http://theconversation.com/cars-are-regulated-for-safety-why-not-informatio…> As the computing industry grapples with its role in society, many people, both in the field and outside it, are talking about a crisis of ethics. There is a massive rush to hire chief ethics officers, retool codes of professional ethics and teach ethics to students. But as a scholar of computing – and a teacher of a course on computing, ethics and society at Rice University – I am skeptical of the assumptions that what ails technology is a lack of ethics, and that the best fix is to teach technologists about ethics. Instead, in my view, the solution is government action, which aims at balancing regulation, ethics and markets. This isn’t a radical new idea: It’s how society treats cars and driving. Consider, for instance, the Ford Model T, the first mass-produced and mass-consumed automobile. Its debut in 1908 launched the automobile age, a time of great mobility – and widespread death. Car crashes kill more than a million people worldwide each year – but the fatality rate per mile driven has been dropping almost since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. The reason for that improving safety record is not that people learning to drive studied the ethics of responsible and safe driving. Rather, they were taught, and tested on, the rules of the road, in order to obtain a driving license. Other regulations improved how roads were built, required car makers to adopt new safety features, mandated accident insurance, and outlawed drunk driving and other unsafe behaviors. I believe a similar approach – regulation, in addition to ethics education for technologists, as well as market competition – is needed today to make modern technology safe for society as a whole. Flaws in the basic business model In the 1980s, internet pioneers adopted a philosophy that “information wants to be free” – so website owners didn’t charge readers for access to the content. Instead, internet companies used advertising to support their efforts. That led them to collect personal data on their users and offer micro-targeted advertising to make money, which social scientist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” This business model is enormously profitable, so it’s unlikely internet companies will abandon it on their own as a result of ethical qualms. Even in the face of blistering critiques and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the massive profits are compelling. The real problem with surveillance capitalism is not that it is unethical – which I believe it is – but that it is completely legal in most countries. It is unreasonable to expect for-profit corporations to avoid profitable businesses that are legal. In my view, it is not enough to simply criticize internet companies’ ethics. If society finds the surveillance business model offensive, then the remedy is not an ethical outrage, but making laws and regulations that govern it, or even prevent it altogether. Of course, public policy cannot be divorced from ethics. Selling human organs is banned in the U.S. in part because society finds it ethically repugnant to profit from life itself. But the ban is enforced by laws, not by an ongoing ethics debate. As Chief Justice Earl Warren remarked: “In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.” Regulation has benefits For decades, the information-technology industry has successfully lobbied against attempts to legislate or regulate it, arguing that “regulation stifles innovation.” Of course, that assumes all innovation is good. It has become evidently clear that this is not always the case: Some of the internet giants’ innovation has harmed democratic society in the U.S. and around the world. In fact, one purpose of regulation is to chill certain kinds of innovation – specifically, those that the public finds wrong, distasteful or unhelpful to the advancement of society. Regulation can also encourage innovation in ways society deems beneficial. There is no question that regulations on the automobile industry encouraged innovation in safety and fuel efficiency. Some members of Congress have proposed a number of ambitious plans to tackle information warfare, consumer protection, competition in digital technology and the role of artificial intelligence in society. But much simpler – and more widely supported – rules could make a huge difference for individual customers and society as a whole. For instance, federal regulators could require software terms and licenses include plain language that’s easily understood by anyone – perhaps modeled on the longstanding “plain English rule” for corporate financial filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Laws or rules could also require companies to disclose data breaches quickly, both to officials and the public at large. That might even spark innovation as firms increase their efforts to prevent and detect network intrusions and data theft. Another relatively easy opportunity would be to regulate automated judicial decision systems, including requiring that they not be deployed before passing an independent audit showing that they are fair and unbiased. Those straightforward regulations could pave the way for thinking and talking about whether and how to regulate the sizes of these big technology firms. But rule-making need not start with the hardest problems – there’s plenty to do that most people would agree on right away. The bottom line is that technology advances have been moving very fast, while public policy has lagged behind. It is time for public policy to catch up with technology. If technology is driving the future, society should do the steering.

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Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years — Krebs on Security
by Alberto Cammozzo March 25, 2019

March 25, 2019

<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of…>

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