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Cybersecurity Act
by VALENTINA BORGESE March 18, 2019

March 18, 2019

Dears all, Last week MEPs adopted a Cybersecurity Act, the first EU-wide cybersecurity certification scheme. For more information see http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190307IPR30694/meps-adop… Cheers Valentina Borgese Ph.D. Student in Ph.D. in Private Law, Roman Law and European Legal Culture at Pavia University *Specialization: Intellectual property law and unfair competition* Visiting Ph.D. Student at Northumbria University Visiting Ph.D. Student at USI *Email*: Unipv <valentina.borgese01(a)universitadipavia.it> * / Northumbria <valentina.borgese(a)northumbria.ac.uk>/ USI <valentina.borgese(a)usi.ch>* *Skype*: *valentina.borgese01(a)universitadipavia.it <valentina.borgese01(a)universitadipavia.it>* *Tel*: +39 320 1477904 / +41 765 419 545

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CEIPI Advanced Training on AI and IP
by GC F March 18, 2019

March 18, 2019

Cari tutti, annuncio che la seconda edizione del "CEIPI Advanced Training on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property" si terrà il 16-18 maggio a Strasburgo. Maggiori informazioni e il programma sono disponibili al link sottostante: http://www.ceipi.edu/en/training-seminars/artificial-intelligence-and-intel… Si tratta di tre giorni dedicati a discutere tutti gli aspetti rilevanti in materia di proprietà intellettuale e intelligenza artificiale con grande enfasi dedicata alle questioni brevettuali, gestione e protezione dei dati che alimentano i processi di *Machine Learning*, *smart contract* e *blockchain*, ma anche creatività generata da AI e applicazione ( *enforcement*) automatizzata dei diritti di proprietà intelletuale in rete. L'edizione passata ha avuto grande successo con partecipanti da 13 paesi europei, Brasile, Canada, Stati Uniti, Cina e Malesia e rappresentati di diverse istitutzioni internazionali, tra cui molti provenienti dallo European Patent Office. I posti disponibili si stanno esaurendo rapidamente anche quest'anno. Vi prego di condividere l'annuncio con chi possa essere interessato e raggiungetemi via email per ulteriori informazioni. Con i saluti più cordiali, Giancarlo

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DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System
by Giacomo March 17, 2019

March 17, 2019

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw84q7/darpa-is-building-a-dolla… The system will be fully open source and designed with newly developed secure hardware to make the system not only impervious to certain kinds of hacking, but also allow voters to verify that their votes were recorded accurately. [...] The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don’t have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results. But DARPA and Galois won’t be asking people to blindly trust that their voting systems are secure—as voting machine vendors currently do. Instead they’ll be publishing source code for the software online and bring prototypes of the systems to the Def Con Voting Village this summer and next, so that hackers and researchers will be able to freely examine the systems themselves and conduct penetration tests to gauge their security. They’ll also be working with a number of university teams over the next year to have them examine the systems in formal test environments. [...] The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch. “We will not have a voting system that we can deploy. That’s not what we do,” said Salmon. “We will show a methodology that could be used by others to build a voting system that is completely secure.” [...] “If we were to build a fake radar system, it could demonstrate secure hardware, but it wouldn’t be useful to anybody. [DARPA] love the fact that we’re building a demonstrator that might actually be useful to the world,” Kiniry said. [...] The DARPA secure hardware program involves six teams from several universities as well as Lockheed Martin. Each team was tasked with creating three secure CPU designs. Galois, which is part of the SSITH project, plans to build its voting system on top of the secure hardware designed by these teams, and will create a prototype for each CPU design. [...] Not only are teams developing secure CPUs but to best take advantage of what a secure CPU offers, they’re developing new versions of open source C-compilers so they can recompile the entire software stack on a system—the operating system, the kernel, all the libraries and all the user software that’s written in C. [...]

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The Amazon Drama | Ajay Singh Chaudhary
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 17, 2019

March 17, 2019

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-amazon-drama-chaudhary (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Cambridge Analytica a year on: ‘a lesson in institutional failure’ | UK news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo March 17, 2019

March 17, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-year-on…> It’s a measure of how much has changed in a year that, last month the UK, parliament published an official report that called Facebook “digital gangsters” and said that Britain’s electoral laws no longer worked. It was a report that drew on hours of testimony from Cambridge Analytica directors, Facebook executives and dozens of expert witnesses: 73 in total, of whom MPs had asked 4,350 questions. And its conclusion? That Silicon Valley’s tech platforms were out of control, none more so than Facebook, which it said had treated parliament with “contempt”. And it’s a measure of how much hasn’t changed that this was a news story for just two hours on a Monday morning before the next Westminster drama – the launch of the Independent Group – knocked it off the headline slots. It was a year ago this weekend that the Observer published the first in a series of stories, known as the Cambridge Analytica Files, that led to parliament grappling with these questions. The account of a whistleblower from inside the data analytics firm that had worked in different capacities – the details are still disputed – on the two pivotal campaigns of 2016 that gave us Brexit and Trump. Christopher Wylie, a 28-year-old Canadian and former research director at Cambridge Analytica, revealed how the company had exploited Facebook data harvested from millions of people across the world to profile and target them with political messages and misinformation, without their knowledge or consent. What followed can only be described as a media firestorm. The story made headlines all over the world. In the week after we published Wylie’s interview, Britain’s information commissioner obtained a warrant to enter Cambridge Analytica’s offices and seize its servers. Questions were asked in parliament. Facebook’s share price plunged more than $50bn. It has now fallen well over twice that. The affair raged for months. Cambridge Analytica rode it out, initially, but finally called in the administrators in May. In April Facebook admitted it wasn’t 50 million users who had had their profiles mined, as we had reported, it was actually 87 million users. Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before US congress. And in October the Information Commissioner’s Office fined Facebook its maximum possible penalty – £500,000 (which Facebook is appealing against). When I meet Wylie to discuss the story a year on, I ask if he’s managed to process it all yet – the impact, the fallout, the loss of billions of dollars. “No,” he says. “I mean… how do you fathom a billion dollars? I’ve never seen a billion dollars. I don’t think anybody has. Maybe the US Treasury. But no, I can’t fathom that.” The year has been like a mirage, he says. “A lot of those months didn’t feel real. It felt like being in la-la land.” Wylie became a public figure overnight. And the story triggered what, in many ways, looks like a year of reckoning for the tech industry. Damian Collins, the chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s 18-month-long fake news inquiry, which delivered last month’s report, described the story’s publication as a “pivotal moment” when “public attitudes and government policy towards the tech companies started to change”. Last week, on the 30th anniversary of the worldwide web, its creator Tim Berners-Lee urged people to stop the “downward plunge” to “a dysfunctional future” that the Cambridge Analytica scandal had helped expose. It was, Berners-Lee said, the moment people realised that “elections had been manipulated using data that they contributed”. The problem is that while the tech companies have been called to account, they haven’t actually been held accountable. In November, after Zuckerberg refused to comply with a summons to parliament to answer questions about Facebook’s role in the scandal, Collins convened an international committee of nine parliaments. Zuckerberg refused to come to that too. [...]

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GNUnet 0.11.0 (dopo 5 anni di sviluppo)
by Giacomo March 16, 2019

March 16, 2019

GNUnet is a new network protocol stack for building secure, distributed, and privacy-preserving applications. With strong roots in academic research, our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. GNUnet is typically run as an overlay network on top of the the existing Internet infrastructure forming the basis of a hybrid peer-to-peer mesh and relay backbone for applications to run on. It could just as well be run independently of the Internet, over dedicated radio and cable. GNUnet is made for an open society: It's a self-organizing network and it is free software as in freedom. GNUnet puts you in control of your data. You determine which data to share with whom, and you're not pressured to accept compromises. https://gnunet.org/en/ _____ Per i nerd in lista è una vecchia conoscenza, ma in questi anni si è arricchita di nuovi componenti come GNU Taler, un sistema di pagamento anonimo per chi compra ma tracciabile per chi vende (insomma le tasse si devono proprio pagare!) Ok, fra le dipendenze c'è MySQL, non proprio una pagliuzza nell'occhio. :-) Ma l'architettura è interessante. Esplora l'idea di una rete anonima, cifrata e totalmente decentralizzata costruita sulla infrastruttura esistente, rimpiazzando anche il sistema DNS gerarchico. Ed il core è scritto per lo più in C! Un grande vantaggio in termini di portabilità! Giacomo

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The Autocrat’s New Tool Kit - WSJ
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 16, 2019

March 16, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-autocrats-new-tool-kit-11552662637 (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Krugman: "Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages"
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 16, 2019

March 16, 2019

*Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages* /Progressives shouldn’t fall for facile technology fatalism.// / By Paul Krugman The other day I found myself, as I often do, at a conference discussing lagging wages and soaring inequality. There was a lot of interesting discussion. But one thing that struck me was how many of the participants just assumed that robots are a big part of the problem — that machines are taking away the good jobs, or even jobs in general. For the most part this wasn’t even presented as a hypothesis, just as part of what everyone knows. And this assumption has real implications for policy discussion. For example, a lot of the agitation for a universal basic income comes from the belief that jobs will become ever scarcer as the robot apocalypse overtakes the economy. So it seems like a good idea to point out that in this case what everyone knows isn’t true. [...] continua qui: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/opinion/robots-jobs.html

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Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 16, 2019

March 16, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/facebook-data-deals-investiga… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Erosion of Public Control Over Public Utilities – Law and Political Economy
by J.C. DE MARTIN March 15, 2019

March 15, 2019

https://lpeblog.org/2019/03/14/the-erosion-of-public-control-over-public-ut… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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