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The global battle for the internet is just starting | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo March 25, 2019

March 25, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/25/cold-war-digital-chin…> [...] On one side sits the system used in China, which produces vast amounts of personal data and blurs into a huge apparatus of state surveillance and censorship. This model is centred on two online behemoths, whose dominance partly comes down to the fact that Chinese consumerism is all about paying via your smartphone, rather than an old-fashioned plastic card. There’s the e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, and Tencent, which owns WeChat, the platform used by more than 1 billion people every day. It does so many things – payments, social networking, messaging, travel booking, gaming – that participating in society without it seems all but impossible. On the other side of the modern digital divide is the version of the internet pioneered in the west and now spreading around the planet, which revolves around Google and Facebook. These giants also feast on a mountain of personal information, but present themselves as a contrasting embodiment of personal freedom and liberal values, even as they embed the social model now known as surveillance capitalism. One of the central questions of our age is which model will become pre-eminent, not least among the half of humanity who are not yet online. With Donald Trump’s trade war providing a crude kind of mood music, the battle so far is not quite as simple as Chinese platforms duking it out with their US counterparts: the tech clash has been more visible in tensions over nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, particularly when it comes to the activities of the IT giant Huawei. But look at high levels of tech investment by China in India and Africa, the prospect of Alibaba butting heads with Amazon, or the international competition between Uber and its Chinese equivalent Didi, and you get a flavour of the future – particularly when it comes to China’s mastery of mobile payment systems, which leaves most western countries standing. Across the world, geopolitics is fast boiling down to whether China or the US is the most influential tech player. [...]

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Parents are exploiting their children on YouTube for fame and easy money
by Giacomo Tesio March 24, 2019

March 24, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/22/parents-exploiting-ch… In 2017, a family was investigated over the making of YouTube videos on its channel DaddyOFive (175m views), in which the parents “pranked” their kids by screaming in their faces and making them cry hysterically. And another family was charged with child endangerment for putting their eight-year-old and his nanny in the bed of a pickup truck and haring around a small town in southern California (1 million people watched the video). This week, when welfare officers in Arizona visited the house of the woman who runs Fantastic Adventures, a channel that has racked up more than 250m views, they found a household of traumatised children who alleged they had been pepper-sprayed and locked in cupboards for forgetting their lines. Online, meanwhile, they were shown doing endlessly jolly things and performing like ponies. [...] There are more pressing regulatory issues around YouTube, and the child exploitation racket, unless there is provable abuse, is probably impossible to curtail, not least because it is the natural end point to the universal dynamic that we are all content providers now. ____ La facilità con cui ci si affretta a giustificare queste aberrazioni (it is the natural end point to the universal dynamic that we are all content providers now) mi lascia sempre perplesso. Forse qui, più che la censura, funzionerebbero bene le tasse. Tasse per la piattaforma per ogni visualizzazione di video che presenti minori, e tasse ancora più salate per gli utenti che li caricano, in modo tale da rendere fortemente antieconomico lo sfruttamento dei bambini per entrambi gli sfruttatori. Giacomo

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ISPs: We’re Definitely Not the Internet Police, Until We Decide We Should Be
by Giacomo Tesio March 24, 2019

March 24, 2019

https://torrentfreak.com/isps-were-definitely-not-the-internet-police-until… On several occasions over the years, TorrentFreak has reported on file-sharing platforms being blocked by ISPs, apparently for no reason at all. On later examination, however, we’ve discovered that organizations such as the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation charity have sometimes collaborated with ISPs to implement blocks, after child exploitation material was found on online platforms. Blocking whole platforms is unquestionably overkill, a point I raised with the IWF some years ago. However, when you begin to talk with these people – the people who have to view sickening content on a daily basis to prevent child abusers from sharing their filth online – sympathy is very, very easy to find. [...] But what about a video of innocent men, women and children being massacred in New Zealand? Should that be censored too? The Mirror newspaper in the UK didn’t think so, and actually put some of the footage on its front page. It was widely condemned for doing so. That said, the decision whether to censor was a question that Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and dozens of other platforms answered quickly. According to their Terms of Service, such content is disallowed and that conversation – like it or not – is now all but over; their platform, their rules. One of the big questions that has emerged, however, is whether the powers that be should prevent us from seeing such horrific acts for ourselves, perhaps in order to fully appreciate what we are up against in this so-called civilization of ours. [...] So did we really need to witness a lone-gunman massacre innocents live on Facebook to appreciate just how deluded some people can become? Or should we be protected from ourselves, based on the notion that it will deprive extremists of publicity, by those in power who claim to know better? If those powers include ISPs, the answer is already with us. As widely reported, in the wake of the attack ISPs in both Australia and New Zealand took it upon themselves to begin blocking the terrorist’s video, wherever it could be found online but couldn’t be immediately taken down. [...] Of course, no one wishes to trivialize mass murder by comparing it to copyright infringement, it’s obvious to any fool what the priority is here when people are under attack. But important actions over access to information don’t exist in a bubble. Either ISPs are the Internet Police whenever they deem fit or they are not, and in the absence of legislation stating otherwise, all of these ISPs may have just opened up Pandora’s box. [...] the barrier to entry – to wider Internet censorship – has now been arguably lowered and there will be plenty of groups standing by with their own sets of demands. Insisting that ISPs aren’t the Internet Police won’t be a position the companies above will be able to hold so easily anymore. [...] But, ultimately, it didn’t matter, because as an adult, I took control of my own destiny. I personally chose not to watch the video (explicit text descriptions online were harrowing enough) and I’m hoping that my response to the senders will mean I’ll never receive anything like it again. Not to say I can’t find the video online – anyone can inside 10 mins – but it’s the educated choice of the individual that counts here, not the power of ISPs. ISPs do not have the power to change human nature – only our life experiences, education, and values can. The monster who perpetrated the crimes last week clearly has severe problems in that area. That being said, seeing such horrors for oneself can sometimes have a positive effect. A video I viewed on Kazaa (if I recall correctly) in the early 2000s, of what was claimed to be a soldier getting his throat cut, was the best aversion therapy against senseless violence that I have ever experienced. The guy lost his life in the most awful way but if only one good thing came of that, it is the persistent belief that violence and brutality should be avoided at all costs. We can only hope that most of the people who viewed the video this week experienced a similar epiphany and positive effect – perhaps not fully today, but one that matures with time. But make no mistake, censorship – via blocking or other means – will not change the minds of the twisted, nor those reveling in obstruction while rubbing salt in the wounds. [...] While we dissect the motivations of the killer, we should also consider why no one – not a single person – reported the massacre to Facebook as it was live-streamed. [...] Plenty of groups are queuing up to have them censor content they find objectionable but there’s still a decent chance they won’t exploit that for their own ends. For now, we can only hope that a sense of perspective prevails and that education and compassion will prevent more of these atrocities happening in the future.

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A Mess on the Sidewalk | John Lorinc
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 24, 2019

March 24, 2019

Inside the great digital mis-engineering of the Toronto waterfront https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-mess-on-the-sidewalk-lorinc (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Claire L. Evans : « Quand l’informatique a pris de la valeur, les femmes ont dû quitter le terrain »
by Alberto Cammozzo March 23, 2019

March 23, 2019

<https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/03/23/claire-l-evans-quand-l-inf…> Auteure d’un livre sur l’implication des femmes dans l’histoire de l’informatique et d’Internet, elle revient sur leurs parcours, aussi intéressants que ceux de Steve Jobs ou de Tim Berners-Lee. Grace Hopper, Hedi Lamar, Margaret Hamilton…, ces quelques noms sont souvent cités pour rappeler la contribution des femmes à l’informatique dans un grand récit où les héros et les légendes sont les génies masculins. Le profil des employés et des leaders des GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) de la Silicon Valley semble donner raison à cette idée que l’informatique serait depuis toujours et avant tout une affaire d’hommes. C’est faux. Les femmes ont été à l’avant-garde de l’informatique. Même le mot « ordinateur » (computer, en anglais) a été emprunté aux ordinatrices qui exécutaient des calculs mathématiques compliqués bien avant les machines, dès le XIXe siècle. Dans son ouvrage inédit en France, Broad Band, The Untold story of the women who made the Internet (Penguin, 2018), Claire L. Evans démonte une image d’Epinal tenace dans la tech : celle de l’étudiant geek, seul au fond de son garage. Fan d’informatique et du Net depuis son plus jeune âge, grâce notamment à son père programmeur chez Intel, elle a enquêté pendant deux ans sur l’implication des femmes dans ce milieu, depuis Ada Lovelace, qui a publié le premier programme en 1843, à la cyberféministe Sadie Plant, figure des années 1990. [...]

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Adversarial attacks on medical machine learning | Science
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 23, 2019

March 23, 2019

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6433/1287.full (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Oltre le bolle e le echo chambers
by don Luca Peyron March 22, 2019

March 22, 2019

Non è inusuale che Netflix, incamerando i dati di visione dei suoi clienti, cerchi il più possibile di personalizzare l’esperienza sulla piattaforma, attraverso una selezione di titoli e perfino di immagini costruita su misura sui gusti di ciascuno. Ricordate le storie a bivi di Topolino? Siamo molto oltre? Scenari interessanti. Buona lettura Dl https://www.wired.it/play/televisione/2019/03/20/love-death-and-robots-ordi…

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Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 22, 2019

March 22, 2019

http://fortune.com/longform/medical-records/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Medtronic Conexus Radio Frequency Telemetry Protocol Vulnerability
by Giacomo Tesio March 22, 2019

March 22, 2019

The Conexus telemetry protocol utilized within this ecosystem does not implement authentication or authorization. An attacker with adjacent short-range access to an affected product, in situations where the product’s radio is turned on, can inject, replay, modify, and/or intercept data within the telemetry communication. This communication protocol provides the ability to read and write memory values to affected implanted cardiac devices; therefore, an attacker could exploit this communication protocol to change memory in the implanted cardiac device. https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSMA-19-080-01 ____ Come minimo, l'azienda andrebbe condannata alla sostituzione del device con uno che applichi le più basilari norme di sicurezza informatica, ma... chi si assume i rischio degli interventi cardio-chirurgici di sostituzione? Qui l'incompetenza qui valica i confini aziendali. Chi ha autorizzato la commercializzazione? Come risponde del danno che ha causato ai malati? Non stiamo parlando di un attacco macchiavellico che sfrutta ignote vulnerabilità zero-day! Il sistema non prevede alcuna autenticazione, alcuna autorizzazione e nessuna protezione crittografica delle comunicazioni! Giacomo

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FreeTube: The Private YouTube Client
by Giacomo Tesio March 22, 2019

March 22, 2019

FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux built around using YouTube more privately. You can enjoy your favorite content and creators without your habits being tracked. All of your user data is stored locally and never sent or published to the internet. Being powered by the Invidious API, FreeTube has become one of the best methods to watch YouTube privately on desktop. https://freetubeapp.io/ Privacy has become a heated topic over the past few years and consumers have become much more aware of the growing issues with large companies. Personal information and other data are being mass collected for the purpose of "Relevant Advertisements" and suggested content. Consumers that don't like this sort of collection have been trying to hide their habits and switch to alternatives. As these consumers work on a more private life, some have realized the difficulty of moving away certain services like YouTube. Alternatives exist, however these alternatives lack the content that these consumers have become used to. Many will still use YouTube despite the privacy risks that it may have. FreeTube's mission is to help as many people in this group as we can. Our goal is to allow users to watch YouTube in a familiar and user friendly way while minimizing the privacy violations that come from using YouTube. https://freetubeapp.io/about.php ___ Mi sento sempre seriamente... "sporco" a condividere link a YouTube e trovo molto odioso quando video interessanti sono distribuiti SOLO via YouTube (ancora di più quando tali contenuti sono prodotti con soldi pubblici). Io sono in grado di minimizzare la diffusione di informazioni personali, ma mi rendo conto che questo non vale per tutti. Usare FreeTube per accedere non esclude tutte le possibilità di tracciamento, ma ne limita enormemente la portata. Future versioni potrebbero anche ricercare il video su PeerTube escludendo completamente il tracciamento da parte di Google (almeno.. io l'ho proposto agli sviluppatori: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/issues/237 ) NOTA: probabilmente YouTube non è la sorgente maggiore di dati personali per Google, Google Analytics è molto più subdolo perché viene installato gratuitamente da sviluppatori web cui non interessa la privacy dei propri visitatori, ma gli utenti non hanno alcun modo per evitare che questo tracci ed incroci ogni più piccola interazione su tutti i siti che lo utilizzano. Un cavallo di troia, invisibile ai più. Anche qui, è possibile mitigare i rischi personali (disabilitando JavaScript), ma l'unica vera soluzione è diffondere la consapevolezza del problema. Particolarmente triste è ritrovarsi su un sito istituzionale o didattico e venire tracciati da Google. Un faro in questo senso è http://fare.polito.it che distribuisce ottimo materiale didattico utilizzando solo 2 cookie tecnici. Giacomo

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