- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

EU cybersecurity and police chiefs reach breakthrough agreement on encryption
by Alberto Cammozzo May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

[...] After two days of meetings at Europol’s headquarters in the Hague, Wainwright and Helmbrecht said this afternoon (20 May) that they’d found common ground on when police can intercept encrypted communication. Despite Wainwright’s previous protests about encryption, he and Helmbrecht agreed that built-in backdoors to encryption don’t provide a secure fix to police frustrations. “While this would give investigators lawful access in the event of serious crimes or terrorist threats, it would also increase the attack surface for malicious abuse, which, consequently, would have much wider implications for society,” the directors wrote in a statement. The two agency chiefs’ statement echoes Helmbrecht’s plea for preserving strong encryption. “Intercepting an encrypted communication or breaking into a digital service might be considered as proportional with respect to an individual suspect, but breaking the cryptographic mechanisms might cause collateral damage,” their statement reads. Helmbrecht told EurActiv in March that weakening encryption could be catastrophic for cybersecurity and make any system that relies on encryption—like banking software—more vulnerable. While Helmbrecht and Wainwright say they oppose mandatory backdoors in encryption, they do want policies that give police more leeway to crack encryption legally. The directors write that if encrypted information is needed for security reasons, “feasible solutions to decryption without weakening the protective mechanisms must be offered, both in legislation and through continuous technical evolution”. <http://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-cybersecurity-and-police-ch…> In che modo quello che non è possibile tecnicamente dovrebbe diventarlo legalmente? Qualcuno ha notizie più precise sull'accordo ENISA-Europol e sulle "feasible solutions"? ciao, Alberto

1 0

Nell'azienda che sorveglia tutto
by Fabio Chiusi May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

Lettura inquietante, specie su quanto sia semplice introiettare e normalizzare la sorveglianza costante: http://buff.ly/25koHeD F. Inviato da iPhone

1 0

Artificial Intelligence: Law and Policy
by Alessandro Mantelero May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

Artificial Intelligence: Law and Policy University of Washington School of Law, workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW’s Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-99kMuWlXk&feature=youtu.be -- Alessandro Mantelero Politecnico di Torino Nexa Center for Internet and Society | Director of Privacy European Data Protection Law Review | Associate Editor http://staff.polito.it/alessandro.mantelero EMAIL POLICY: twice a day (Mon-Fri)

1 0

FB facial recognition lawsuit
by Alberto Cammozzo May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

Facebook loses first round in suit over storing biometric data Facebook Inc (FB.O <http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FB.O>) lost the first round in a court fight against some of its users who sued the social networking company, alleging it "unlawfully" collected and stored users' biometric data derived from their faces in photographs. The judge presiding over the case in a California federal court on Thursday turned down Facebook's motion seeking dismissal of the suit. Facebook filed the motion arguing that the users could not file a complaint under Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) as they had agreed in their user agreement that California law would govern their disputes with the company, and that BIPA does not apply to "tag suggestions." The court found that Illinois law applies and that the plaintiffs have stated a claim under BIPA. The complainants had alleged that Facebook's face recognition feature that suggests "tags" on photos unlawfully collected and stored biometric data, in violation of the Illinois BIPA. The case was filed by some Illinois residents under Illinois law, but the parties agreed to transfer the case to the California court, the court order showed. Facebook was also hit with a lawsuit over its plan to issue new stock last month. The company said in April it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded. Facebook was not immediately available for comment. <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-lawsuit-idUSKCN0XX08U> Alberto

5 7

Ars: "How the Internet works: Submarine fibre, brains in jars, and coaxial cables"
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

Per un ingegnere come me, articoli come questi sono emozionanti :-) juan carlos ----- *How the Internet works: Submarine fibre, brains in jars, and coaxial cables* /A deep dive into Internet infrastructure, plus a rare visit to a subsea cable landing site./ by Bob Dormon - May 24, 2016 9:57am CEST Ah, there you are. That didn't take too long, surely? Just a click or a tap and, if you’ve some 21st century connectivity, you landed on this page in a trice. But how does it work? Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP, or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet. And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, the number of our connected devices swells, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day? Well, we’re going to tell you over the next 7,000 words. Table of Contents The secret world of cable landing sites Armoured submarine cables Fixing cables at sea QAM, DWDM, QPSK... The cable guise Testing submarine cables The power of nightmares Next stop: Data centre A change in the data tide The NOC's NOC The ISP's ISP's SLA The last mile VDSL2 DOCSIS The last 100 metres Back to the future of wired Internet Quite a trip […] Continua qui: http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-wo…

1 0

Of Course Facebook Is Biased. That’s How Tech Works Today | WIRED
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/course-facebook-biased-thats-tech-works-today/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

3 2

Uber knows you'll probably pay surge pricing if your battery is about to die | The Verge
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 24, 2016

May 24, 2016

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/20/11721890/uber-surge-pricing-low-battery (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

1 0

Berkman Center Webcast live oggi ore 18 - Are we shifting to a new post-capitalist value regime?
by Giuseppe Futia May 24, 2016

May 24, 2016

Are we shifting to a new post-capitalist value regime? https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Bauwens <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/06/sigal> *with Michel Bauwens, Founder and Director of the P2P Foundation* Today, 6.00 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live Every 500 years or so, European civilization and now world civilization, has been rocked by fundamental shifts in its value regime, in which the rules of the game for acquiring wealth and livelihoods have dramatically changed. Following Benkler's seminal Wealth of Networks, which first identifies peer production, the P2P Foundation has collated a vast amount of empirical evidence of newly emerging value practices, which exist in a uneasy relationship with the dominant political economy, and of which some authors claim, like Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason, that it augurs a fundamental shift. What would be the conditions for this new regime to become autonomous and even dominant, and what are the signs of it happening? As context, we will be using the Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks framework of David Ronfeldt, the Relational Grammar of Alan Page Fiske, and the evolution of modes of exchange as described by Kojin Karatini in The Structure of World History. We will argue that there is consistent evidence that the structural crises of the dominant political economy is leading to responses that are prefigurative of a new value regime, of which the seed forms can be clearly discened. About Michel Michel Bauwens is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world. In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'. In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics. http://commonsandeconomics.org His recent book 'Save the world - Towards a Post Capitalist Society with P2P' is based on a series of interviews with Jean Lievens, originally published in Dutch in 2014 it has since been translated and published in French with an English language publication expected in the near future http://www.samkinsley.com/2015/03/31/to-save-the-world-preface-by-bernard-s… In more academic work Michel co-authored with Vasilis Kostakis ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy’ published by Palgrave Pivot in 2014. http://p2pfoundation.net/Network_Society_and_Future_Scenarios_for_a_Collabo… He has also writen for Al Jazeera and Open Democracy. He is listed at #82, on the Post Growth Institute (En)Rich list. http://enrichlist.org/the-list/ Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

1 0

Largest Study of Online Tracking Proves Google Really Is Watching Us All
by Alessandro Mantelero May 24, 2016

May 24, 2016

If you read or clicked anything online today, some part of Google probably knows about it. That’s one lesson from the largest study yet of the technology that tracks people’s movements around the Web. When Princeton researchers logged the use of tracking code on the Internet’s million most popular websites, Google code was found on a majority of them. Google Analytics, a product used to log visitors to websites that integrates with the company’s ad-targeting systems, was found on almost 70 percent of sites. DoubleClick, a dedicated ad-serving system from Google, was found on close to 50 percent of sites. The top five most common tracking tools were all Google-owned. The new study, which was conducted using an open-source tool, also uncovered a stealthy new technique used by some small tracking companies that exploits the way browsers process audio, using it to “fingerprint” computers so they can be tracked around the Web. The researchers say the technology they used to collect their findings could help regulators and the developers of tools that block tracking, like some ad blockers [...] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601488/largest-study-of-online-tracking-… -- Alessandro Mantelero Politecnico di Torino Nexa Center for Internet and Society | Director of Privacy European Data Protection Law Review | Associate Editor http://staff.polito.it/alessandro.mantelero

1 0

Pro Publica: "Machine Bias. There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks"
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 23, 2016

May 23, 2016

*Machine Bias* /There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. // //And it’s biased against blacks/ By Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica May 23, 2016 On a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid’s blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs. Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances — which belonged to a 6-year-old boy — a woman came running after them saying, “That’s my kid’s stuff.” Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away. But it was too late — a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of $80. […] Continua qui: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-crimina…

2 1