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Abolish Silicon Valley
by Giacomo Jan. 17, 2019

Jan. 17, 2019

Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime. Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide. ... The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

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Conferenza CDPD 2019 | 30 gennaio 2019, Bruxelles
by Francesco Ruggiero Jan. 17, 2019

Jan. 17, 2019

Carissimi, vi segnalo che il Centro Nexa parteciperà alla conferenza CDPD 2019 <https://www.cpdpconferences.org/>in qualità di Conference Partner e di organizzatore del panel "*How adequacy mechanism works: Progress in EU's governance of cross-border data flows?".* Il panel, co-organizzato con l'Università degli Studi di Torino, avrà luogo venerdì *30 gennaio* alle ore 16, nell'*Area 42 Grand*, Rue des Palais 46, Brussels. Sarà presieduto da *Ugo Pagallo* (Nexa Center and University of Turin) e moderato da *Bojana Bellamy* (Centre for Information Policy Leadership); interverranno *Jos Dumortier *(TimeLex), *Kristina Irion* (University of Amsterdam), *Ralf Sauer *(European Commission), *Fumio Shimpo* (Keio University). Maggiori informazioni sono disponibili alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/cpdp19 Programma completo: https://www.cpdpconferences.org/ -- Francesco Ruggiero Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: http://nexa.polito.it mail: francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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"Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 16, 2019

Jan. 16, 2019

*Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism* /By Nicholas Carr/ JANUARY 15, 2019 I. The Resurrection WE SOMETIMES FORGET that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets.com, Webvan, and Excite@Home, avatars of the so-called New Economy, were punch lines. Disillusioned programmers and entrepreneurs were abandoning their Bay Area bedsits and decamping. Venture funding had dried up. As a business proposition, the information superhighway was looking like a cul-de-sac. Today, less than 20 years on, everything has changed. The top American internet companies are among the most profitable and highly capitalized businesses in history. Not only do they dominate the technology industry but they have much of the world economy in their grip. Their founders and early backers sit atop Rockefeller-sized fortunes. Cities and states court them with billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies. Bright young graduates covet their jobs. Along with their financial clout, the internet giants hold immense social and cultural sway, influencing how all of us think, act, and converse. Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting. [...] continua qui: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-fa…

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No forced facial recognition to unlock phones: judge
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 16, 2019

Jan. 16, 2019

Cosa avrebbe detto il giudice se i dati fossero stati cifrati sul dispositivo e non accessibili presso il provider? Vedremo cosa dirà la corte suprema... <https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/15/government-cant-force-people-to-unlo…> [] The Oakland judge said allowing authorities to force citizens to unlock devices via biometric features in this case would violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search. The government’s request for intrusion into seized devices was too broad because it targeted anyone at the Oakland location believed to be a user of a seized device and wasn’t limited to the two suspects, Westmore said. Permitting forced biometric unlocking in this case would also break the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, Westmore said, noting that courts have ruled that people can’t be forced to reveal a numeric passcode to a device. “While the Court sympathizes with the Government’s interest in accessing the contents of any electronic devices it might lawfully seize, there are other ways that the Government might access the content that do not trample on the Fifth Amendment,” Westmore wrote. Authorities could seek Messenger communications from Facebook, with a warrant if need be, she suggested. “While it may he more expedient to circumvent Facebook, and attempt to gain access by infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination, it is an abuse of power and is unconstitutional,” Westmore wrote. Law enforcement agencies routinely obtain data from seized devices by getting subpoenas, warrants and court orders compelling tech firms to divulge information. Police also use software to break into seized devices they have a warrant to search. But the government can’t force citizens to use any biometric features to unlock devices, Westmore ruled. “The Government may not compel or otherwise utilize fingers, thumbs, facial recognition, optical/iris, or any other biometric feature to unlock electronic devices,” she said in her Jan. 10 decision. []

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Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 15, 2019

Jan. 15, 2019

La donna che inventò l'inverse document frequency (TF/IDF è una misura fondamentale per chi fa analisi testuale). Sparck Jones [] came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” [] Sparck Jones cautioned engineers to think of their work’s impact on society. “There is an interaction between the context and the programming task itself,” she said. “You don’t need a fundamental philosophical discussion every time you put finger to keyboard, but as computing is spreading so far into people’s lives, you need to think about these things.” <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked…> Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines A pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked…> /Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With //Overlooked/ <https://nytimes.com/overlooked>/, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times./ By Nellie Bowles When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead. In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google. A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications. “A lot of the stuff she was working on until five or 10 years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted,” said John Tait, a longtime friend who works with the British Computer Society. Sparck Jones’s seminal 1972 paper in the Journal of Documentation laid the groundwork for the modern search engine. In it, she combined statistics with linguistics — an unusual approach at the time — to establish formulas that embodied principles for how computers could interpret relationships between words. By 2007, Sparck Jones said, “pretty much every web engine uses those principles.” “Anything that does index-term weighting using any kind of statistical information will be using a weighting function that I published in 1972,” she said in an interview with the British Computer Society <https://www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/10791>. Karen Ida Boalth Sparck Jones was born on Aug. 26, 1935, in Huddersfield, England, a textile manufacturing town. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Sparck, who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War II. When studying history and then philosophy (the department was then called moral sciences) at Cambridge, she met the head of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to enter the field. Sparck Jones later describe <http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones>d her as “a very strange and interesting woman” who, unusual for the time, used her maiden name professionally. Sparck Jones, too, kept her name when she married Roger Needham <https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/business/roger-needham-computer-security…>, a fellow computer scientist, in 1958, saying, “It maintains a permanent existence of your own.” Sparck Jones started working for Ms. Masterman. She wanted to figure out how to program a computer to understand words that could have many meanings (for example “field”) and set about programming a massive thesaurus. “A lot of the stuff she was working on until five or 10 years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted,” John Tait, of the British Computer Society, said about Sparck Jones.CreditComputer Laboratory/University of Cambridge“All words in a natural language are ambiguous; they have multiple senses,” she said in anoral history interview for the History Center of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “How do you find out which sense they’ve got in any particular use?” In 1964, Sparck Jones published “Synonymy and Semantic Classification,” which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. In 1972, she introduced the concept of inverse document frequency, which counts the number of times a term is used in a document in order to determine the term’s importance; it, too, is a foundation of modern search engines. Sparck Jones began working on early speech recognition systems in the 1980s. Most mornings and afternoons, she and her husband, a pioneer in software security, debated theory in the Cambridge department’s tea room. Their home in Coton, just west of Cambridge, was full of books, art and found items, like an interesting piece of driftwood or a Victorian-era knife grinder. They had a second house in the same village, using it to store the overflow of their book collection and as her artist’s arch Lab. Sailing was another passion of Sparck Jones and Needham. They restored an 1872 vintage sailboat called Fanny of Cowes <http://www.oga.org.uk/boat/fanny-cowes> and raced it against other old boats along the east coast of England. They chose not to have children. “They wanted their intellectual life,” said Andrew Herbert, her friend and a fellow computer scientist. “They were clearly deeply in love with each other all the way through their life.” Sparck Jones had a booming voice and a puckish sense of humor. At work, she usually wore a simple uniform: bluejeans, red sweater, white blouse. She also wore a brooch, which she made from stones and part of a horseshoe. When she had to bike to a formal dinner, as one often did at Cambridge, she was known to use clothing pegs to pin her dress to the handlebars. In 1982, the British government tapped Sparck Jones to work on the Alvey Program, an initiative to encourage more computer science research across the country. In 1993, she wrote, with Julia R. Galliers, “Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems,” the seminal textbook on the topic. <https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783540613091> Sparck Jones became president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, an international group for professionals in the field, in 1994. She became a full-time professor at Cambridge in 1999 — and it had bothered her that it took so long. For all the years before, she had been on contract with the university, an untenured and lower-status form of academic employment referred to as “living on soft money.” “Cambridge was in many ways not user-friendly, in the sense of women-friendly,” she said of the delay. Sparck Jones died of cancer on April 4, 2007. She was 71. Though she did not receive an obituary in The Times, her husband did, in 2003 <https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/business/roger-needham-computer-security…>. Today, researchers are still citing her formulas. Ideas she wrote about are now being put into practice as artificial intelligence research becomes more prevalent. “It points to how far ahead of her time she was, how consequential her work was, how little it was valued for the first 20 years,” said Martha Palmer, a professor in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Colorado. Sparck Jones mentored a generation of researchers, male and female,and came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” She was ahead of her time in another respect. Decades before Silicon Valley was having its moral reckoning, Sparck Jones cautioned engineers to think of their work’s impact on society. “There is an interaction between the context and the programming task itself,” she said. “You don’t need a fundamental philosophical discussion every time you put finger to keyboard, but as computing is spreading so far into people’s lives, you need to think about these things.”

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Article 13 is almost finished – and it will change the internet as we know it
by Giacomo Tesio Jan. 15, 2019

Jan. 15, 2019

Da https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/article-13-almost-finished/ ``` Negotiations about the EU copyright reform law have resumed: After missing the original Christmas deadline, negotiators for the European Parliament and Council are now aiming to finalise the text on January 21, 2019. The negotiators have reached agreement on the core of Article 13, which will change the internet as we know it: They want to make internet platforms directly liable for any copyright infringements their users commit. What remains to be decided: Exactly what lengths will platforms need to go to to avoid or limit their liability? Just how much they will need to restrict our ability to post and share our creations online? ``` Oltre 10 anni fa, se non ricordo male, fu trafugato parte del codice sorgente di Windows (credo che fosse XP, ma vado a memoria). Sarebbe divertente vedere Microsoft responsabile della violazione del proprio copyright da parte di un utente se quel sorgente fosse uploadato su GitHub... :-) Giacomo

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Il matching algoritmico al potere: Gilets Jaunes e populismo social
by Antonio Casilli Jan. 14, 2019

Jan. 14, 2019

La Fondation Jean-Jaurès (vicina a quel che resta del Parti Socialiste, quindi sappiate applicare le ponderazioni politiche del caso) pubblica nell'Obs (settimanale centrista) una lunga nota in due parti sulla genealogia digitale del movimento dei Gilets Jaunes. Une prima parte presenta una carrellata storica delle pagine Facebook più frequentate e si sofferma sul ruolo dell'algoritmo di Facebook nell'impennata della visibilità del movimento: > "Questo riorientamento emotivo e geografico nella prioritizzazione delle informazioni su Facebook è un importante punto di svolta. Il fatto che Priscillia > Ludosky ed Eric Drouet, i due utilizzatori dietro l'iniziativa di mobilitazione online, provengano dallo stesso dipartimento non è una coincidenza. Non si > conoscevano: è stato il nuovo algoritmo di Facebook che li ha messi in contatto, individuando interessi comuni e vicinanza spaziale. La diffusione del > movimento nelle province ha seguito la stessa logica e lo stesso meccanismo." https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20190111.OBS8351/plongee-dans-les-compt… La seconda parte contiene invece un'analisi dettagliata delle strategie di comunicazione sui social di Eric Drouet e Maxime Nicolle, due leader di fatto, parecchio orientati a destra, di un movimento che si vuole "senza leader" e "né di destra né di sinistra". > "Anche se preferiscono definirsi come semplici "messaggeri delle rivendicazioni popolari", presentano in realtà tutti gli attributi dei leader 2.0: liberi > da intermediari, non eletti, mai ufficialmente indotti, ma legittimati dal pubblico generato dai loro video. A questo proposito, i loro ripetuti appelli a > non nominare dei dirigenti suonano sempre più come il desiderio di impedire l'emergere di un nome che non sarebbe il loro." https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20190114.OBS8414/eric-drouet-et-maxime-…

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"Automating Society"
by fabio chiusi Jan. 14, 2019

Jan. 14, 2019

Segnalo perché credo in lista possa interessare: il 29 gennaio viene presentato al Parlamento Europeo un rapporto di Algorithm Watch sull'automated decision-making (ADM) in Europa, e in 12 paesi in particolare (io ho curato la parte sull'Italia). Sul rapporto: "For the report “Automating Society – Taking Stock of Automated Decision-Making in the EU”, our experts have looked at the situation at the EU level but also in 12 Member States: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. We assessed not only the political discussions and initiatives in these countries but also present a section “ADM in Action” for all states, listing examples of automated decision-making already in use." Altre informazioni, qui: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/automating-society/ f.

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Internet Governance Forum, i cittadini possono disegnare il futuro della rete
by Arturo Di Corinto Jan. 14, 2019

Jan. 14, 2019

Per i nexiani, da Repubblica-- Internet Governance Forum, i cittadini possono disegnare il futuro della rete È online la call per partecipare alla definizione dei temi e delle proposte da portare a Berlino all'Internet Governance Forum, il "parlamento" che ogni anno discute a livello mondiale la direzione dello sviluppo della rete. E l'Italia prova a organizzarsi *di ARTURO DI CORINTO* https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/sicurezza/2019/01/09/news/internet_gov… Aggiunta importante. Poche ore fa è venuta a mancare una nostra amica, Antonella Giulia Pizzaleo, con cui abbiamo condiviso un pezzo di percorso dell'IGF. L'articolo, scritto prima della notizia, lo dedico a lei. A. -- Arturo Di Corinto www.dicorinto.it ---------------------------------> AVVERTENZE AI SENSI DEL D.Lgs. 196/2003 Le informazioni contenute in questo messaggio di posta elettronica e/o nel/i file/s allegato/i sono da considerarsi strettamente riservate. Il loro utilizzo è consentito esclusivamente al destinatario del messaggio, per le finalità indicate nel messaggio stesso. Qualora riceviate questo messaggio senza esserne il destinatario, Vi preghiamo cortesemente di darcene notizia via e-mail e di procedere alla distruzione del messaggio stesso, cancellandolo dal Vostro sistema. Conservare il messaggio stesso, divulgarlo anche in parte, distribuirlo ad altri soggetti, copiarlo, od utilizzarlo per finalità diverse, costituisce comportamento contrario ai principi dettati dal D.Lgs. 196/2003

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Don’t believe the hype: the media are unwittingly selling us an AI fantasy | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 13, 2019

Jan. 13, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/13/dont-believe-the-hype… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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