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The Welfare State Is Committing Suicide by Artificial Intelligence – Foreign Policy
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 26, 2018

Dec. 26, 2018

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/25/the-welfare-state-is-committing-suicid… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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BoingBoing: "YouTube let a contentID scammer steal a popular video"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 26, 2018

Dec. 26, 2018

*YouTube let a contentID scammer steal a popular video** * At considerable expense, Christian Friedrich Johannes Büttner, the man behind successful YouTube channel TheFatRat, recorded and posted an original music video. It ran up 47m views, helping to place him among the higher echeleons of YouTube's hitmakers. But then a scammer—someone with no posted videos, no working contact info and no significant internet presence—claimed ownership of it through YouTube's ContentID system. Büttner appealed and was denied. [...] continua qui: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/26/youtube-let-a-contentid-scamme.html

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"Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 26, 2018

Dec. 26, 2018

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 20 NO. 1 (SPRING 2018) *Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future** */ //Alan Jacobs/ Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good exercise to reflect on the fact that, should any or all of them disappear, no user would have any legal or practical recourse. I started thinking about this situation a few years ago when Tumblr—a platform devoted to a highly streamlined form of blogging, with an emphasis on easy reposting from other accounts—was bought by Yahoo. I was a heavy user of Tumblr at the time, having made thousands of posts, and given the propensity of large tech companies to buy smaller ones and then shut them down, I wondered what would become of my posts if Yahoo decided that Tumblr wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining it. I found that I was troubled by the possibility to a degree I hadn’t anticipated. It would be hyperbolic (not to say comical) to describe my Tumblr as a work of art, but I had put a lot of thought into what went on it, and sometimes I enjoyed looking through the sequence of posts, noticing how I had woven certain themes into that sequence, or feeling pleasure at having found interesting and unusual images. I felt a surge of proprietary affection—and anxiety. [...] continua qui: https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Spring_Jacobs.php

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Silicon Noir and the End of Techno-Optimism: The Intercept’s 2018 Tech Coverage
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 26, 2018

Dec. 26, 2018

Bella rassegna dell'anno in cui la marea è cambiata da tecnofila a tecno-avversa._ _ Auguriamoci che il prossimo anno venga ricordato come quello della riscossa delle tecnologie, delle leggi e delle pratiche a favore della libertà_. _ <https://theintercept.com/2018/12/24/the-intercept-2018-tech/>_ _ This will likely go down as the year in which technology, once envisioned as an empowering and equalizing force, finally went headlong down the path toward dystopia and oppression. Our story this summer about Google planning to return to China with censored search at first shocked Silicon Valley, but it was the dark nature of what followed — internal dissent squelched, executives dissembling, Chinese users to be closely tracked — that proved most surprising. Other depressing developments seemed right out of an ominous sci-fi film like “Blade Runner,” whether it was reporting that revealed the National Security Agency’s prowess at voice recognition, Facebook’s plans to use artificial intelligence to predict users’ future behavior, or just how badly ultrawealthy Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was exploiting underlings. As tech enters 2019, its brightest days seem to be well behind it. [...] Alberto

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Huawei Had a Deal To Give Washington Redskins Fans Free Wi-Fi, Until the Government Stepped In - Slashdot
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 24, 2018

Dec. 24, 2018

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/12/24/1630203/huawei-had-a-deal-to-give-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Paris Review: "The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 24, 2018

Dec. 24, 2018

THE PARIS REVIEW * The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story** * By Zachary Mason /Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence and a novelist. He lives in California.// / December 20, 2018 Some of Facebook’s AIs invented their own language, one incomprehensible to humans, at which Facebook’s researchers panicked and were compelled to pull the plug. At least, this was the story I heard on a Vanity Fair podcast. The host seemed deeply disturbed by the thought of these alien, almost Lovecraftian beings taking shape under the blithe gaze of an amoral tech giant. [...] Continua qui: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/20/the-truth-about-ai-a-secular…

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Happy Holidays Card
by Nexa Media Dec. 24, 2018

Dec. 24, 2018

[image: cartolinanatale18.gif] -- 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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Switzerland’s new Tesla police cars hit data protection roadblock
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 22, 2018

Dec. 22, 2018

<https://www.thelocal.ch/20181220/switzerlands-new-tesla-police-cars-hit-dat…> On December 5th, police in the canton unveiled the first of seven new Tesla X 100D emergency response vehicles, each with a price tag of 140,000 Swiss francs (€124,000). But now there are fears a planned spring 2019 roll-out will be delayed after concerns were raised about the fact that the internet-connected could "listen in" on their drivers because key commands are voice-activated. Data from these voice recordings could theoretically be mined from Tesla servers, regional daily BaslerZeitung initially reported. However, the newspaper later clarified that this example had been intended as a fictitious example of a potential issue with the Tesla police cars after the carmaker on Friday stated that its vehicles do not make record voice. "Thus, no voice recordings are conducted and, logically, no voice recordings are transmitted to the server and evaluated," said Tesla in comments emailed to Swiss news outlets including The Local on Friday. But there are still issues with the fact that Tesla can remotely access its cars – as was demonstrated in 2017 when the company remotely upgraded the batteries of vehicle owners escaping from the path of Hurricane Irma in the US state of Florida. In addition, Tesla can access information on the location of its cars to diagnose and resolve vehicle issues, although the company states this option is limited to a small number of personnel. The company can also, with customer consent, collect anonymized information on the direction and speed its cars are travelling – potentially problematic for a police force. [...]

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Geoff Hinton Dismissed The Need For Explainable AI: 8 Experts Explain Why He's Wrong
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 22, 2018

Dec. 22, 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/12/20/geoff-hinton-dismiss… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Free software and the revolt against transactionality
by Giacomo Dec. 21, 2018

Dec. 21, 2018

> Writing free software is a politically radical act: while software has low > reproduction cost, both the use value and the initial labor value of good > software is high, so putting it into the public domain is a kind of perpetual > jubilee (those who use it do not owe the author anything in exchange for > its use-value) and a potlatch in the sense that the labor is exchanged for > nothing at all. Copyleft licenses are even more radical: all derived > software remains free from the normal mechanisms that drive labor into a > state of transactionality. Although one can sell free software, the cost of > reproduction is so low (and the legal mechanisms for preventing > reproduction so hamstrung by the license itself) that it makes more > sense to treat paying for free software as a gift-in-kind, rather than an > exchange. > > The idea of “open source” changed this. > For twenty years, we’ve been making corporations rich by buying into > standardization and scale — making it feasible for them to funnel us into > silos. We can stop this process, and perhaps even reverse it, by refusing > to make un-frivolous software. Personal software should be personal: it > should not scale or conform; it should chafe at strictures the same way > you do, and burst out of any box that dare enclose it. https://medium.com/@enkiv2/free-software-and-the-revolt-against-transaction… È brillante: Frivolous Free Software contro il conformismo del serissimo open source aziendale! :-D Giacomo

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