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Jobs | Trento | An expert researcher in the field of evaluation of innovation policies at the Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (FBK- IRVAPP)
by Luigi Scorca Nov. 29, 2018

Nov. 29, 2018

https://jobs.fbk.eu/Annunci/Jobs_An_expert_researcher_in_the_field_of_evalu…

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Opinion | It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/opinion/technology/technology-gig-econom… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Is the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma using AI to create dystopian cities?
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

Per chi ricorda la pubblicità della Sun Microsystem ("We are the dot in dot com"): questi sono i dot in "dot communism" <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/28/jack-ma-ai-dystopian-…> On the outskirts of Hangzhou, eastern China, in Alibaba’s <https://www.theguardian.com/business/alibaba> Cloud Town, a Silicon Valley-style working and leisure hub, cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence (AI) and smart city developments at one of China’s largest tech companies are showcased. It is a half-empty dystopia of almost comic proportions where the future of automation and infrastructure in southern China is played out. While Alibaba exhibitions and conferences occur sporadically, the full scope of what goes on there remains hidden. Having long claimed to be apolitical, Jack Ma <https://www.theguardian.com/business/jack-ma>, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of the tech giant Alibaba, was recently revealed to be a member of the ruling Communist party of China (CCP) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46353767>. It’s another in a long list of links between corporate and state apparatus that stretch far beyond the borders of China. Nevertheless, a glimpse into the projects the company is working on in Cloud Town, considered in light of these revelations, should set the alarm bells ringing with fear of a dystopian future of state and corporate control. Technologies in development at Cloud Town range from AI pedestrian crossing lights that use facial recognition to identify the age of a road-crosser and give them a longer green light if they are old/slow enough, to AI drone cars that can respond to passengers needs. The greatest feature of the car, explained the proud representative, is that its media panel, linked to the user’s smartphone, reads patterns of movement, food choices and potentially even photos and comments, and then crosses this with millions of data sets to make predictions about what the user might like to eat and how they might like to travel there or have the food travel to them. In short, the new citizen outsources part of their decision-making processes, and maybe even part of their desire, to Alibaba. Our very impulses are mapped and planned in advance. The triangulation between data, predictive technology and desire could be the single most important relationship taking us into the dystopian smart city future. [...]

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Amazon, ok alla licenza di operatore postale
by Luigi Scorca Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

Vi segnalo questa notizia apparsa ieri sui principali giornali italiani. https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2018/11/27/news/amazon_poste_licenza-212… Per chi vuole saperne di più su come la tecnologia cambia la catena di produzione dei servizi postali, sia con l'integrazione verticale con le piattaforme di commercio elettronico sia con la fornitura di servizi amorfi, consiglio il Nexa Lunch Seminar del 28 Febbraio 2018 https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-58 Luigi

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Un premio alla memoria di Stefano Rodotà. L'ha istituito il Comitato della Convenzione 108 del Consiglio d’Europa
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

https://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb… *Un premio alla memoria di Stefano Rodotà L'ha istituito il Comitato della Convenzione 108 del Consiglio d’Europa* Il Comitato della Convenzione 108 del 1981 <https://www.coe.int/en/web/data-protection/consultative-committee-tpd>del Consiglio d’Europa, ha deciso di istituire un Premio in onore e alla memoria del grande giurista Stefano Rodotà. Il Premio, destinato a ricercatori e studenti, punta a valorizzare e a dare visibilità a progetti di ricerca innovativi e originali nel campo della protezione dei dati personali sviluppati in ambito universitario. L’iniziativa del Comitato - di cui è presidente una rappresentante del Garante italiano - nasce con l’intento di far progredire la riflessione sulle tematiche legate alla privacy, in particolare nel mondo digitale. Il conferimento del premio si colloca in un momento storico importante per la Convenzione 108 sulla protezione delle persone rispetto al trattamento automatizzato di dati a carattere personale: con l’adozione (maggio 2018) e l’apertura alla firma degli stati del Protocollo emendativo della 108 (ottobre 2018), si è infatti concluso un processo di revisione volto a rispondere alle molte sfide intervenute negli anni con l'avvento delle nuove tecnologie, assicurando la tenuta dei principi della Convenzione <https://rm.coe.int/convention-108-convention-for-the-protection-of-individu…>e rafforzandone i meccanismi per la sua effettiva implementazione. Il Premio Rodotà verrà assegnato per la prima volta il 28 gennaio 2019 in occasione della Giornata Europea della protezione dei dati personali. Il vincitore avrà l’onore di presentare il suo progetto alla prossima riunione plenaria del Comitato della Convenzione 108 che si terrà a Strasburgo dal 12 al 14 giugno 2019. Il modello per partecipare al Premio è disponibile sul sito del Consiglio d’Europa: https://www.coe.int/en/web/data-protection/rodota-award. Le domande di partecipazione devono essere presentate in lingua inglese o francese entro il 18 dicembre 2018 all’indirizzo*dataprotection(a)coe.int <mailto:dataprotection@coe.int>*). /Roma, 28 novembre 2018/

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Blockchain - Risoluzione del Parlamento Europeo
by Guido Noto La Diega Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

Il Parlamento Europeo ha adottato una risoluzione sulla blockchain Fra le altre cose, il Parlamento Calls for an assessment of governance models within the diverse consensus mechanisms under development, taking into account the potential needs of intermediary systems, actors and organisations in order to validate and verify the authenticity of the exchanges and to prevent fraudulent behaviour in good time; Calls on the Commission to explore the possibility of creating an EU-wide, highly scalable and interoperable network that makes use of the technological resources of educational institutions in the Union, with a view to adopting this technology for sharing data and information, thus contributing to the more effective recognition of academic and professional qualifications Calls on the Commission to closely monitor technological developments (such as quantum computing), assess technological risks, support resilience to a cyberattack or a system breakdown, and promote data protection projects that ensure the sustainability of DLT platform La risoluzione e' disponibile all'indirizzo http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P8-TA-2… -- Guido Guido Noto La Diega, PhD FHEA Senior Lecturer / European Research Partnerships Coordinator @ Northumbria Law School Director @italiot | Fellow @nexacenter | Co-convenor @NINSOrig | Co-founder @DPA2018 Northumbria Law School City Campus East, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST noto.la.diega(a)gmail.com +44(0)191 349 5562 You can access my papers on Academia.edu <http://northumbria.academia.edu/GuidoNotoLaDiega> and on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1794950>) This e-mail and any attachment hereto are strictly confidential and are exclusively intended for the person above identified. Without intended recipient’s entitlement, use, copy and dissemination of this e-mail is prohibited. If you have received it in error, please advice us immediately by telephone and return the documents received to the above address, deleting the files. Thank you. Unless necessary, please do not print this e-mail.

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We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.
by Giacomo Nov. 28, 2018

Nov. 28, 2018

> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: > we object to technologies that aid the powerful > in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. > The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in > its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and > to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly > in China would establish a dangerous precedent > at a volatile political moment, one that would > make it harder for Google to deny other countries > similar concessions. https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google…

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The Monopolization of America
by Luigi Scorca Nov. 27, 2018

Nov. 27, 2018

In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show. A must read, in my view. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/opinion/monopolies-in-the-us.html

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From Airbnb to city bikes, the ‘sharing economy’ has been bought up by big money | Evgeny Morozov | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 27, 2018

Nov. 27, 2018

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/airbnb-city-bikes-sha…> Of all the ideologies spawned by Silicon Valley, that of techno-populism – the making of empty promises on the basis of seismic digital disruption – is the strangest. Promising a world of immediate and painless personal empowerment, techno-populism is ambiguous enough to unite big tech firms, startups, cryptocurrency aficionados and even some political parties. The history is murky, but we do know the date when it went mainstream. It can be traced to Time magazine’s selection, in 2006, of “You” – the millions of ordinary people behind the user-generated web of the 2000s – as its Person of the Year. That choice ingrained techno-populist themes deep into our collective unconscious. While actual contributors to sites such as Wikipedia or Flickr were relatively few, the celebration of them delayed and deflected questions about corporate power and the durability of the emerging digital utopia. Just a few years later, that utopia was no more: highly centralised and dominated by a handful of platforms, the web was a shadow of its former eccentric self. When Uber and Airbnb were young, it was easy to believe a global revolution would liberate informal economic activity In 2018, the omnipotent creative user of 2006 has become a zombie-like content junkie, lethally addicted to scrolling and liking, forever trapped in the invisible cages of data brokers. A noble effort to make everyone an honorary member of the Bloomsbury group has instead condemned all of us to the eternal rosters of Cambridge Analytica. [...]

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Designing Proof of Human-work Puzzles, for Cryptocurrency and Beyond
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 26, 2018

Nov. 26, 2018

Ero sicuro che qualcuno avrebbe pensato a combinare digital labor e bitcoin mining (bastava cercare "human proof of work"). Chiaramente saranno solo attività "fun, educational and beneficial to society". L'immagine di un capannone pieno di diseredati che cliccano captcha evidentemente non sfiora gli autori... <https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/145.pdf> [...] At its core, Bitcoin’s distributed consensus protocol is based on moderately hard Proofs of Work (PoW) [24]. In Bitcoin the Hashcash [3] PoW puzzles are used to extend the blockchain, a cryptographic data-structure in which the public ledger is recorded. A PoW puzzle should be moderately hard for a computer to solve, but the PoW solution should be easy for a computer to verify. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin require that this hardness parameter of PoW puzzles be tunable. An adversary would need to control 51% of the computational power in the Bitcoin network to be able to alter the blockchain and prevent users from reaching the correct consensus 1 . While Bitcoin cleverly avoids the Sybil attack by using PoW puzzles, there are still many undesirable features of this distributed consensus protocol. For example, construcing the proofs of work is energy intensive making the mining process in this distributed consensus protocol environmentally unfriendly. Furthermore, the mining process is dominated by a smaller number of professional miners with customized hardware making it unprofitable for others to join — this raises the natural concern that a few professional miners might collude to alter the public ledger [47]. Indeed, the mining pool GHash.io 2 recently exceeded 50% of the computational power in Bitcoin. While other techniques like Proofs of Space [48, 26] or Proofs of Stake [8] have been proposed to build the blockchain in a distributed consensus protocol each of these techniques has its own drawbacks. It is clearly desirable to find new techniques for reaching a stable distributed consensus. In this paper we ask the following question: Is it possible to design proof of human-work puzzles that are suitable for a decentralized cryptocurrency? We believe that a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Human-work might offer many advantages over other approaches. First, the mining process would be eco-friendly. Second, instead of wasting ‘human cycles,’ it might be possible to base the proofs of human work on activities that are fun [35], educational [34] or even beneficial to society [57, 36]. Third, proofs of human work are fair by nature in the sense that two individuals will generally perform a comparable amount of work to produce a proof of human work. Thus, professional or rich miners would not have an significant advantage over regular users. [...]

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