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Joseph Stiglitz on artificial intelligence: 'We’re going towards a more divided society'
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 11, 2018

Sept. 11, 2018

The technology could vastly improve lives, the economist says – but only if the tech titans that control it are properly regulated. ‘What we have now is totally inadequate’ <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/joseph-stiglitz-on-artif…> “Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.” On 11 September, the Columbia University professor will be in London to deliver the latest lecture in the Royal Society’s You and AI series. Stiglitz will talk about the future of work, an area where predictions have been frequent, contradictory and unnerving. Last month, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, warned that “large swathes” of Britain’s workforce face unemployment as AI and other technologies automate more jobs. He had less to say about the new positions AI may create. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers in July argued that AI may create as many jobs as it destroys – perhaps even more. As with the Industrial Revolution, the misery would come not from a lack of work, but the difficulty in switching from one job to another. [...] “These new tech giants are raising very deep issues about privacy and the ability to exploit ordinary people that were never present in earlier eras of monopoly power,” says Stiglitz. “Beforehand, you could raise the price. Now you can target particular individuals by exploiting their information.” It is the potential for datasets to be combined that most worries Stiglitz. For example, retailers can now track customers via their smartphones as they move around stores and can gather data on what catches their eye and which displays they walk straight past. “In your interactions with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, they gather an awful lot of data about you. If that data is combined with other data, then companies have a great deal of information about you as an individual – more information than you have on yourself,” he says. “They know, for example, that people who search this way are willing to pay more. They know every store you’ve visited. That means that life is going to be increasingly unpleasant, because your decision to shop in a certain store may result in you paying more money. To the extent that people are aware of this game, it distorts their behaviour. What is clear is that it introduces a level of anxiety in everything we do and it increases inequality even more.” Stiglitz poses a question that he suspects tech firms have faced internally. “Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit somebody.” [...]

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IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 9, 2018

Sept. 9, 2018

Anche se non sono ufficialmente usate, le tecologie per la discriminazione razziale vengono comunque sviluppate. Sorprende che IBM non sia più prudente, dopo le Hollerith machines nella Germania nazista [1] e accuse di aver sviluppato tecnologie per l'apartheid in Sud Africa [2] <https://theintercept.com/2018/09/06/nypd-surveillance-camera-skin-tone-sear…> In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a single command center. Two years later, the NYPD announced that the command center, known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, had integrated cutting-edge video analytics software into select cameras across the city. The video analytics software captured stills of individuals caught on closed-circuit TV footage and automatically labeled the images with physical tags, such as clothing color, allowing police to quickly search through hours of video for images of individuals matching a description of interest. At the time, the software was also starting to generate alerts for unattended packages, cars speeding up a street in the wrong direction, or people entering restricted areas. Over the years, the NYPD has shared only occasional, small updates on the program’s progress. In a 2011 interview with Scientific American, for example, Inspector Salvatore DiPace, then commanding officer of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, said the police department was testing whether the software could box out images of people’s faces as they passed by subway cameras and subsequently cull through the images for various unspecified “facial features.” While facial recognition technology, which measures individual faces at over 16,000 points for fine-grained comparisons with other facial images, has attracted significant legal scrutiny and media attention, this object identification software has largely evaded attention. How exactly this technology came to be developed and which particular features the software was built to catalog have never been revealed publicly by the NYPD. Now, thanks to confidential corporate documents and interviews with many of the technologists involved in developing the software, The Intercept and the Investigative Fund have learned that IBM began developing this object identification technology using secret access to NYPD camera footage. With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone. [...] [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust> [2] <http://hrp.law.harvard.edu/areas-of-focus/previous-areas-of-focus/in-re-sou…>

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"Anatomy of an AI System"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 8, 2018

Sept. 8, 2018

https://anatomyof.ai/ Anatomy of an AI System The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018)

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#copyright: Reconfiguring the Public Benefit for a Digital Trade Economy
by Blengino Sept. 6, 2018

Sept. 6, 2018

The rise of big data and the increasingly widespread adoption of artificial intelligence across many industries have complicated our understanding of the values of twentieth-century intellectual property rules. If anything, the expected social costs (such as privacy) of new technology have already intensified debates - both global and national in scope - about the nature of rules that best foster innovation, facilitate access to public goods, and enable economic development. This paper explores the fundamental questions facing the copyright system in the new industrial and digital era. https://www.ictsd.org/sites/default/files/research/creative_markets_and_copy right_in_the_fourth_industrial_era-okediji-ictsd_final_0.pdf Via Infojustice.org

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Wi-Jacking: Accessing your neighbour’s WiFi without cracking
by Giacomo Tesio Sept. 5, 2018

Sept. 5, 2018

Elliott Thompson descrive un interessante attacco a cui praticamente tutte le reti WiFi sono vulnerabili. Abusing ‘by design’ behaviour to attack millions of WiFi networks. > [...] > > The browser behaviour relates to *saved credentials*. When credentials > are saved within a browser, they are tied to a URL and automatically > inserted into the same fields when they are seen again. The accepted home > router weakness is simply the *use of unencrypted HTTP connections to the > management interfaces*. By combining these two components it was possible to *gain access to > various networks without cracking a single handshake*, which is the > currently most-used method of gaining access to a WPA/WPA2 network but > requires a weak passphrase. > Da https://www.surecloud.com/sc-blog/wifi-hijacking L'unica vera soluzione consiste nel modificare i router per servire l'interfaccia attraverso HTTPS. Ma per evitare che sia sufficiente il reverse engineering del firmware di un singolo router per compromettere tutti gli utenti di quel modello, ciascun router dovrebbe avere il proprio certificato, con chiavi private diverse da tutte le altre (e se lasciate ad uno sconosciuto accesso fisico al router per il tempo necessario ad attaccare il firmware... avete un problema più grosso del router). Purtroppo questa soluzione richiede la modifica della linea di produzione di TUTTI i produttori di router del pianeta. Dunque vi sconsiglio di trattenere il fiato. Sarebbe bello che qualcuno, *viste le straordinarie condizioni di necessità ed urgenza*, prendesse in carico la questione con competenza. Da un lato potrebbe "incentivare" i produttori a correggere il problema (almeno sui nuovi prodotti), dall'altro potrebbe affrontare l'emergenza nella pubblica amministrazione e nelle infrastrutture strategiche del paese. Perché anche se siamo indietro su molti fronti, scommetto che impiegati connessi al wifi di comuni, banche e ospedali ce ne siano tanti. D'altro canto, è un buco di sicurezza minore rispetto a quello fornito da JavaScript (che permette risultati analoghi ma permette di veicolare anche molti altri attacchi completamente diversi) e nonostante i rischi che corrono tutti gli utenti del mondo, nessuno sembra avere il coraggio di pretendere risposte da Google e Mozilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081 Nel frattempo vi consiglio caldamente di *rimuovere dal vostro browser* (soprattutto se è basato su Chromium, come Google Chrome o Opera, ad esempio su un cellulare Android) le credenziali di accesso alla vostra rete. Giacomo

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How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 4, 2018

Sept. 4, 2018

bell'articolo di Zeynep Tufekci su MIT technology review/,/ e analisi ben bilanciata/.// / <https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tah…> [...] How did all this happen? How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord? There are several key lessons. First, the weakening of old-style information gatekeepers (such as media, NGOs, and government and academic institutions), while empowering the underdogs, has also, in another way, deeply disempowered underdogs. Dissidents can more easily circumvent censorship, but the public sphere they can now reach is often too noisy and confusing for them to have an impact. Those hoping to make positive social change have to convince people both that something in the world needs changing and there is a constructive, reasonable way to change it. Authoritarians and extremists, on the other hand, often merely have to muddy the waters and weaken trust in general so that everyone is too fractured and paralyzed to act. The old gatekeepers blocked some truth and dissent, but they blocked many forms of misinformation too. Second, the new, algorithmic gatekeepers aren’t merely (as they like to believe) neutral conduits for both truth and falsehood. They make their money by keeping people on their sites and apps; that aligns their incentives closely with those who stoke outrage, spread misinformation, and appeal to people’s existing biases and preferences. Old gatekeepers failed in many ways, and no doubt that failure helped fuel mistrust and doubt; but the new gatekeepers /succeed/ by fueling mistrust and doubt, as long as the clicks keep coming. Third, the loss of gatekeepers has been especially severe in local journalism. While some big US media outlets have managed (so far) to survive the upheaval wrought by the internet, this upending has almost completely broken local newspapers, and it has hurt the industry in many other countries. That has opened fertile ground for misinformation. It has also meant less investigation of and accountability for those who exercise power, especially at the local level. The Russian operatives who created fake local media brands across the US either understood the hunger for local news or just lucked into this strategy. Without local checks and balances, local corruption grows and trickles up to feed a global corruption wave playing a major part in many of the current political crises. The fourth lesson has to do with the much-touted issue of filter bubbles or echo chambers—the claim that online, we encounter only views similar to our own. This isn’t completely true. While algorithms will often feed people some of what they already want to hear, research shows that we probably encounter a wider variety of opinions online than we do offline, or than we did before the advent of digital tools. Rather, the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts. A similar dynamic played a role in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The revolutionaries were caught up in infighting on social media as they broke into ever smaller groups, while at the same time authoritarians were mobilizing their own supporters to attack the dissidents, defining them as traitors or foreigners. Such “patriotic” trolling and harassment is probably more common, and a bigger threat to dissidents, than attacks orchestrated by governments. This is also how Russian operatives fueled polarization in the United States, posing simultaneously as immigrants and white supremacists, angry Trump supporters and “Bernie bros.” The content of the argument didn’t matter; they were looking to paralyze and polarize rather than convince. Without old-style gatekeepers in the way, their messages could reach anyone, and with digital analytics at their fingertips, they could hone those messages just like any advertiser or political campaign. Fifth, and finally, Russia exploited the US’s weak digital security—its “nobody but us” mind-set—to subvert the public debate around the 2016 election. The hacking and release of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta amounted to a censorship campaign, flooding conventional media channels with mostly irrelevant content. As the Clinton e-mail scandal dominated the news cycle, neither Trump’s nor Clinton’s campaign got the kind of media scrutiny it deserved. There are no easy answers, and no purely digital answers. This shows, ultimately, that “nobody but us” depended on a mistaken interpretation of what digital security means. The US may well still have the deepest offensive capabilities in cybersecurity. But Podesta fell for a phishing e-mail, the simplest form of hacking, and the US media fell for attention hacking. Through their hunger for clicks and eyeballs, and their failure to understand how the new digital sphere operates, they were diverted from their core job into a confusing swamp. Security isn’t just about who has more Cray supercomputers and cryptography experts but about understanding how attention, information overload, and social bonding work in the digital era. This potent combination explains why, since the Arab Spring, authoritarianism and misinformation have thrived, and a free-flowing contest of ideas has not. Perhaps the simplest statement of the problem, though, is encapsulated in Facebook’s original mission statement (which the social network changed in 2017, after a backlash against its role in spreading misinformation). It was to make the world “more open and connected.” It turns out that this isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good. Open to /what/, and connected /how/? The need to ask those questions is perhaps the biggest lesson of all. What is to be done? There are no easy answers. More important, there are no purely digital answers. [...]

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111° Mercoledì di Nexa | 12 settembre 2018
by Nexa Media Sept. 3, 2018

Sept. 3, 2018

Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-111> NEXA 111° Mercoledì di Nexa Mercoledì 12 settembre 2018, ore 18.00 - 20.00 Politecnico di Torino http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-111 Il futuro del lavoro: sfide e opportunità della digitalizzazione Speaker Andrea Glorioso (Policy Officer - Commissione Europea) This event will be webcast live: http://nexa.polito.it/upcoming-events Gli sviluppi tecnologici, in particolare nell'ambito delle tecnologie dell'informazione e della comunicazione, stanno rapidamente e significativamente *influenzando la natura, qualità e produttività del lavoro*. L'Europa, come altre regioni del mondo, si trova ad affrontare la sfida di guidare questi cambiamenti per sostenere lo sviluppo economico e al tempo stesso assicurare condizioni di lavoro e di protezione sociale avanzate. I cambiamenti tecnologici possono potenzialmente creare nuovi posti di lavoro, aumentarne la produttività, e stimolare investimenti e innovazione. Ma *questi benefici non sono automatici, né equamente distribuiti*. La tentazione di rallentare o persino fermare questi cambiamenti è forte – ma che ciò sia possibile è del tutto opinabile, specie in un contesto globalizzato in cui la competizione con altri paesi è fortissima. Si tratta dunque di gestire questi cambiamenti e orientarli in direzioni socialmente e politicamente accettabili. Andrea Glorioso discuterà *l'approccio della Commissione Europea per gestire questi cambiamenti epocali*, un approccio basato sul "pilastro europeo dei diritti sociali", su investimenti mirati in ricerca e sviluppo, e sulla cooperazione con le autorità degli Stati Membri e di tutti gli attori sociali. /Si segnala che il dott. Glorioso, il giorno successivo, giovedì *13/09* alle ore *11*, terrà un altro talk, sempre al Politecnico, dal titolo: "Il digitale è politico: le tecnologie della comunicazione e dell'informazione tra Obama e Trump. Quale ruolo per l'Europa? <https://nexa.polito.it/2018/05/aglorioso>"/. BIOGRAFIE - e informazioni supplementari [GLORIOSO] *Andrea GLORIOSO* lavora per la Commissione Europea (DG CONNECT) dal 2007, inizialmente sulle politiche di sicurezza informatica, privacy e protezione dei dati personali, e Internet Governance; più recentemente, sul tema del "futuro del lavoro". Da giugno 2014 a gennaio 2018 è stato consigliere diplomatico per "l'economia digitale" presso la Delegazione dell'Unione Europea negli U.S.A. È laureato in Scienze Politiche presso l'Università di Padova e ha un master in Diritti di Proprietà Intellettuale dell'Università di Torino/WIPO Worldwide Academy. Nel 2016 e nel 2017 è stato un "fellow" dell'Institute for Tele-Information della Columbia University". *Letture consigliate e link utili:* * Il pilastro europeo dei diritti sociali <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/deeper-and-fairer-economic-and-m…>. * Gruppo di esperti sull'impatto delle trasformazioni digitali sui mercati del lavoro UE, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/call-expression-interest…. * European Political Strategy Centre, Strategic Note #13, Strategic Note #13: The Future of Work <https://ec.europa.eu/epsc/file/strategic-note-13-future-work_en>. * EUROFOUND, Automation, digitalisation and platforms: Implications for work and employment <https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2018/automation-digital…>. * Commissione Europea, Rapporto 2017, Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2017 <http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=8030&furtherP…>. Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che studia Internet e il suo effetto sulla società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma divulgativo, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Francesco Ruggiero*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 349 1335082, francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it <mailto:francesco.ruggiero@polito.it>. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>.

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The Meltdown of the Web
by Giacomo Tesio Sept. 3, 2018

Sept. 3, 2018

Ciao, visto che apparentemente gli esperti di sicurezza di Mozilla e Google non hanno capito bene il problema, ho pubblicato un semplice exploit che bypassa i firewall aziendali attraverso qualsiasi browser compatibile con i Living Standards del WHATWG (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari... su desktop e su smartphone). Trovate le istruzioni su https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m (insieme ad una brevissima analisi del significato profondo di questa storia). Giacomo

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India Pushes Back Against Tech ‘Colonization’ by Internet Giants
by gianlucaquaglia＠gmail.com Sept. 2, 2018

Sept. 2, 2018

By Vindu Goel Aug. 31, 2018 NEW DELHI — In India, American companies dominate the internet. Facebook’s WhatsApp is the most popular app on phones. Virtually every smartphone runs on Google’s Android system. YouTube is the favorite video platform and Amazon is the No. 2 online retailer. For some Indian political leaders, it is as if their nation — which was ruled by Britain for a century until 1947 — is being conquered by colonial powers all over again. And they are determined to stop it. [...] continua qui https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/technology/india-technology-american-gia…

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The Web is still a DARPA weapon.
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 31, 2018

Aug. 31, 2018

Salve, vi propongo questa breve analisi storico politica di due gravi vulnerabilità tecniche "nascoste in piena vista" nel Web 2.0. https://medium.com/@giacomo_59737/the-web-is-still-a- darpa-weapon-31e3c3b032b8 La più interessante permette a chiunque controlli una CDN (ad esempio Google CDN o Amazon CloudFront) e sia in grado di profilare gli utenti con adeguata precisione, di introdurre surrettiziamente materiale illegale sul PC (nella cache del browser, per la precisione) di persone specifiche o piccoli gruppi, senza lasciare tracce e senza destare sospetti nel resto della popolazione. L'attacco in realtà è piuttosto semplice ed è disponibile anche a governi e persino piccole aziende purché dispongano di informazioni sufficienti per identificare gli obbiettivi durante la loro visita al sito. Una CDN, tuttavia, ha la possibilità di far veicolare l'attacco a siti di terzi (di cui le vittime si fidano), ha una maggiore probabilità di passare inosservata ed è semplicemente meno sospetta, garantendosi una perfetta "plausible deniability". Il trucco è semplicemente modificare uno dei javascript inviati al browser delle vittime (senza modificarne la dimensione, cosa piuttosto semplice vista la presenza di header di copyright etc nei JS minimizzati dei framework maggiormente utilizzati) servendoli con header HTTP Expire e Cache control appropriati. Tale JS scarica il contenuto illegale solo nella cache (ad esempio attraverso una immagine trasparente molto piccola aggiunta dallo script stesso al DOM), poi rimuove le tracce e riscarica se stesso dalla CDN nella versione pulita, sovrascrivendo il file in cache. Una analisi forense del disco del pc troverebbe facilmente il contenuto illegale nella cache dell'utente (immaginiamo un documento rubato.. o peggio), ma nessuna traccia dell'attacco, attribuendo il documento alla vittima ignara. In realtà l'attacco non è descritto in questo dettaglio nell'articolo perché è piuttosto ovvio, ma credo possa essere di maggiore interesse qui per comprendere la portata politica del problema. L'altra vulnerabilità è piuttosto di natura geopolitica, ma credo sia ben nota in questa mailing list. Spero possa essere una lettura interessante e vi prego di segnalarmi eventuali approfondimenti ed errori tecnici, storici (molti degli eventi citati sono avvenuti prima che io nascessi) o grammaticali... :-) A presto! Giacomo

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