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Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity: the Third Paradigm
by GC F May 28, 2018

May 28, 2018

Cari tutti, Pensando di fare cosa gradita, vi volevo comunicare che il mio nuovo libro *Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity: the Third Paradigm* è ora disponibile presso https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/reconciling-copyright-with-cumulative-creativi… . Potete usare il codice VIP35 per uno sconto del 35% sulla versione cartacea del libro. ToC e un capitolo del libro sono disponibili in formato aperto presso: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781788114172/9781788114172.xml. A presto, Giancarlo

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Amazon will track your parcel up it's delivered.
by Luigi Scorca May 26, 2018

May 26, 2018

http://fortune.com/2018/05/25/amazon-map-tracking-delivery/

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Bitcoin estimated to use half a percent of the world's electric energy by end of 2018
by gabriele elia May 25, 2018

May 25, 2018

credo intenda metà dell'energia elettrica usata per servizi IT ... comunque impressive http://primeurmagazine.com/weekly/AE-PR-06-18-58.html Bitcoin estimated to use half a percent of the world's electric energy by end of 2018 16 May 2018 Cambridge - Bitcoin's burgeoning electricity demands have attracted almost as much attention as the cryptocurrency's fluctuating value. But estimating exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses remains a challenge. In the first rigorously peer-reviewed article quantifying Bitcoin's energy requirements, a Commentary having appeared May 16 in the journalJoule, financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries uses a new methodology to pinpoint where Bitcoin's electric energy consumption is headed and how soon it might get there. "We've seen a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations, but we need more scientific discussion on where this network is headed. Right now, the information available is pretty poor quality overall, so I'm hoping that people will use this paper as a foundation for more research", stated Alex de Vries, who works at the Experience Center of PwC in the Netherlands and is the founder of Digiconomist (@DigiEconomist), a blog that aims to better inform cryptocurrency users. His estimates, based in economics, put the minimum current usage of the Bitcoin network at 2.55 gigawatts, which means it uses almost as much electricity as Ireland. A single transaction uses as much electricity as an average household in the Netherlands uses in a month. By the end of this year, he predicts the network could be using as much as 7.7 gigawatts - as much as Austria and half of a percent of the world's total consumption. "To me, half a percent is already quite shocking. It's an extreme difference compared to the regular financial system, and this increasing electricity demand is definitely not going to help us reach our climate goals", he stated. If the price of Bitcoin continues to increase the way some experts have predicted, Alex de Vries believes the network could someday consume 5% of the world's electricity. "That would be quite bad." Bitcoin is dependent on computers that time-stamp transactions into an ongoing chain to prevent duplicate spending of coins. Computers in the network perform calculations continuously, competing for the chance, once every ten minutes, to be appointed to create the next block of transactions in the chain. The user of the computer that wins is awarded 12.5 new coins - a process known as "mining" Bitcoin. But all the time, even the users that don't win are expending computing power. "You are generating numbers the whole time and the machines you're using for that use electricity. But if you want to get a bigger slice of the pie, you need to increase your computing power. So there's a big incentive for people to increase how much they're spending on electricity and on machines", Alex de Vries stated. It's figuring out when that incentive stops paying off that is at the heart of Alex de Vries's estimation method. Economic principles suggest that the entire Bitcoin network will eventually reach an equilibrium where the costs of the hardware and electricity used to mine equal the value of the Bitcoin being mined. And that information can approximate the total amount of electricity that the network will use at said equilibrium. Other researchers have used the fundamentals of this method before, but Alex de Vries goes farther. He uses production information about Bitmain, the biggest manufacturer of Bitcoin mining machines, to estimate both how much of a miner's costs are associated with hardware rather than electricity and when this equilibrium might be reached. And while he does have confidence in his estimates, the problem with this method is that these manufacturers are extremely secretive. "Sometimes the best information we've got is really shaky eyewitness accounts. That's the stuff we have to work with", he stated. Still, he believes that getting a good estimate is important in determining the sustainability of cryptocurrencies moving forward and in helping shape policy around them. Some states in the U.S. have already started to put restrictions around Bitcoin mining. "But you need to base your policy on something. And I think that my method is important in that regard, because it's very forward-looking. It's focused not on the now, but on where we're headed. And I think that's something you really need to know if you're going to draft policy about it", he stated. He also pointed out that there is plenty of room for discussion of his method. "I think everyone agrees on the minimum energy consumption. But the future estimate? That's actually quite debatable. We don't really have a common approach to getting to a future estimate of electricity consumption right now, which is why I am hoping to get this conversation started. I'm doing this research, but a lot of people should be doing it." Alex de Vries is the author of " Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem<http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6> ".

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NTSB preliminary report on the fatal Uber self-driving car collision
by Giacomo Tesio May 25, 2018

May 25, 2018

> > According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first > registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about 6 seconds > before impact, when *the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph*. > As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system > software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and > then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path. > At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an > emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision. > According to Uber,* emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while > the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for > erratic vehicle behavior.* The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene > and take action. > *The system is not designed to alert the operator.* > https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prel… Giacomo

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Mobile Giants: Please Don’t Share the Where
by Alberto Cammozzo May 24, 2018

May 24, 2018

In seguito alla questione LocationSmart, è in evidenza il fatto che la posizione degli utenti negli USA viene venduta dei servizi telefonici. Nulla di nuovo. Qualcuno sa come siamo messi in Italia/EU? <https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/mobile-giants-please-dont-share-the-whe…> Your mobile phone is giving away your approximate location all day long. This isn’t exactly a secret: It has to share this data with your mobile provider constantly to provide better call quality and to route any emergency 911 calls straight to your location. But now, the major mobile providers in the United States — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — are selling this location information to third party companies — in real time — without your consent or a court order, and with apparently zero accountability for how this data will be used, stored, shared or protected. Think about what’s at stake in a world where anyone can track your location at any time and in real-time. Right now, to be free of constant tracking the only thing you can do is remove the SIM card from your mobile device never put it back in unless you want people to know where you are. It may be tough to put a price on one’s location privacy, but here’s something of which you can be sure: The mobile carriers are selling data about where you are at any time, without your consent, to third-parties for probably far less than you might be willing to pay to secure it. The problem is that as long as anyone but the phone companies and law enforcement agencies with a valid court order can access this data, it is always going to be at extremely high risk of being hacked, stolen and misused. Consider just two recent examples. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that a little-known data broker named Securus was selling local police forces around the country the ability to look up the precise location of any cell phone across all of the major U.S. mobile networks. Then it emerged that Securus had been hacked, its database of hundreds of law enforcement officer usernames and passwords plundered. We also found out that Securus’ data was ultimately obtained from a California-based location tracking firm LocationSmart. On May 17, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news of research by Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Robert Xiao, who discovered that a LocastionSmart try-before-you-buy opt-in demo of the company’s technology was wide open — allowing real-time lookups from anyone on anyone’s mobile device — without any sort of authentication, consent or authorization. Xiao said it took him all of about 15 minutes to discover that LocationSmart’s lookup tool could be used to track the location of virtually any mobile phone user in the United States. [...]

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FYI: mailing lists nuovamente online
by Giovanni Garifo May 24, 2018

May 24, 2018

A tutti gli iscritti alle mailing lists del Centro Nexa, vi informo che tutte le mailing lists ospitate dal Centro Nexa sono nuovamente online. Cordiali saluti -- Giovanni Garifo IT Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino w. nexa.polito.it/people/ggarifo l. linkedin.com/in/giovannigarifo

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"UK.gov's use of black box algorithms to decide stuff needs watching"
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 24, 2018

May 24, 2018

*UK.gov's use of black box algorithms to decide stuff needs watching* /PS: Don't forget to try to cash in on public data – MPs/ By Rebecca Hill 23 May 2018 at 12:40 Increased use of algorithms in decision-making risks disproportionately affecting certain groups, MPs have said, urging the government to boost transparency and tackle bias - but not forget the value of public data. In a report on algorithmic decision-making, published today, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said the tech has the potential to improve public services and drive wider innovation in a range of sectors, from transport to healthcare. It said the data held by public authorities could be a potentially lucrative asset, urging the government to ensure it negotiates good deals for its use by private companies. However, the MPs also sounded a strong note of caution - emphasising that algorithms should not be seen as a magic formula; rather they have the potential to be biased and need to operate in a strong regulatory and ethical framework. […] Continua qui: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/23/ukgov_told_to_treat_algorithms_wit…

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Doctorow: The emerging split in modern trustbusting: Alexander Hamilton’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism vs Thomas Jefferson’s Redecentralization – Boing Boing
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 24, 2018

May 24, 2018

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/too-big-to-fail-2.html/ The emerging split in modern trustbusting: Alexander Hamilton's Fully Automated Luxury Communism vs Thomas Jefferson's Redecentralization 2 days ago Cory Doctorow From the late 1970s on, the Chicago School economists worked with the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Brian Mulroney to dismantle antitrust enforcement, declaring that the only time government should intervene is when monopolists conspired to raise prices -- everything else was fair game. Some 40 years later, a new generation of trustbusters have emerged, with their crosshairs centered on Big Tech, the first industry to grow up under these new, monopoly-friendly rules, and thus the first (but far from the only) example of an industry in which markets, finance and regulatory capture were allowed to work their magic to produce a highly concentrated sector of seemingly untame-able giants who are growing bigger by the day. The new anti-monopolism is still in its infancy but a very old division has emerged within its ranks: the Jeffersonian ideal of decentralized power (represented by trustbusters who want to break up Big Tech into small, manageable firms that are too small to crush emerging rivals or capture regulators) versus the Hamiltonian ideal of efficiency at scale, tempered by expert regulation that forces firms to behave in the public interest (with the end-game sometimes being "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" in which the central planning efficiencies of Wal-Mart and Amazon are put in the public's hands, rather than their shareholders'). (....) (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Ce la faranno i nostri eroi? http://openlettertomogherini.world/
by Roberto Dolci May 24, 2018

May 24, 2018

http://openlettertomogherini.world/

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FYI: domani 24 maggio - mailing lists non raggiungibili
by Giovanni Garifo May 23, 2018

May 23, 2018

A tutti gli iscritti alle mailing lists del Centro Nexa, vi informo che domani, 24 maggio, le mailing lists ospitate presso i nostri server non saranno raggiungibili per l'intera giornata a causa di interventi tecnici. Riceverete comunicazione mediante la mailing list una volta che tutti i servizi saranno tornati online. Cordiali saluti -- Giovanni Garifo IT Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino w. nexa.polito.it/people/ggarifo l. linkedin.com/in/giovannigarifo

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