For those of you who are not familiar with “newspeak”, it is an artificial language idea described by Orwell in his book 1984 The specific purpose of newspeak is not only to provide a means of expression that would replace the old worldview, but to homogenize the thinking of the people. A cornerstone of newspeak was “doublethink”, which consists of accepting as true either one hypothesis or its opposite, whichever the party considers appropriate. Google and Apple are notoriously excellent at conditioning the worldview (for apple we speak of the “reality distortion field” as described in wikipedia) Now they also…

My friend Ernesto Ciorra, CO innovation and sustainability officer at ENEL (90th largest company in the world by revenue, with €140 billion in 2022 and the second largest power company in the world by revenue after the State Grid Corporation of China) published a post on linkedin on the fact that batteries+electric lines are preferable to hydrogen because energy conversion efficiency to/from hydrogen is very low. (an undoubtable fact of physics) This argument, though, does not buy me fully in. My point is: in a world where energy production in some moments has a 0 (or negative) cost, who cares…

If Bollorè will allow, at a next shareholders’ meeting, Telecom Italia could be split between network and services, Netco and Servco. If the deal goes ahead, there are talks of allocating 15 thousand employees to Servco and 25 thousand to Netco.Fifteen thousand employees is three times as many as Vodafone, which is not exactly a “very fit” company. How will Servco be sustainable? Furthermore, the company has never operated without market constraints related to its dominant position. This is not a cultural legacy to be underestimated. Allocating more people to Netco might relieve Servco, but Netco would become sustainable only…

A law passed unanimously in the Italian parliament against piracy requires ISPs to poison DNS and block IP addresses within 30′ of notification. The idea is that this will block pirate streaming of sporting events while the event is in progress. Rightholders will have flaggers who will notify the Communications Authority-AGCOM (the Italian NRA) of the ip addresses and domain names to be blocked, and AGCOM will forward them to all ISPs operating in Italy for blocking, which must take place, as mentioned, within 30′. Given the tight timeframe, AGCOM will not be able to perform any checks: it will…

From quinta@venere.inet.it Tue Jan 17 13:44 MET 1995 Received: from venere.inet.it by ghost.dsi.unimi.it with SMTP id AA19145 (5.65+/IDA-1.3.5 for ); Tue, 17 Jan 95 13:38:42 +0100 Return-Path: <quinta@venere.inet.it> Received: (from quinta@localhost) by venere.inet.it (8.6.9/8.6.9) id NAA27313; Tue, 17 Jan 1995 13:38:23 +0100 Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 13:38:23 +0100 From: Stefano Quintarelli <Stefano.Quintarelli@Inet.IT> Message-Id: <199501171238.NAA27313@venere.inet.it> To: <> Subject: I.NET – X-Mailer: AIR Mail 3.X (SPRY, Inc.) Status: RO Egr. Dr. , A seguito della Sua richiesta, Le invio documentazione informativa riguardante le fasce di connettivita’ da noi proposte, i nostri prodotti e le attivita’ a supporto dell’offerta. Innanzitutto desidero evidenziare…

UPDATE 1: il servizio è qui: https://domiciliodigitale.gov.it/ UPDATE 2: come scritto nella privacy policy: “. In caso di cancellazione volontaria, questa ha effetto decorsi 30 giorni dalla relativa richiesta.” che poi è il limite del diritto all’oblio del GDPR. Per farlo basta autenticarsi con SPID. Source: Corriere della Sera  I vantaggi per il cittadino sono diversi: le notifiche arriveranno in tempo reale, senza rischio di ritardi o problemi relativi al mancato recapito, con notevole risparmio in termini di tempo e costi, grazie ad esempio all’azzeramento del tempo necessario a recarsi presso i servizi postali e al minore utilizzo della carta…

The immense Douglas Hofstadterhas published this article “Generative AI Should Not Replace Thinking at My University” on The Atlantic, which I praised in another blog post. A friend of mine who’s a computer science professor expressed some grievances at my position saying that …” Prof. Hofstadter is an old professor while you’re young (sic!), how can youagree and amplify those exaggerations ? Nobody pretends to replace human thinking. Those tools should be used for those tasks where human thinking is not deeply involved” This same morning I wrote an article for a law journal on AI and regulation, based on…

It seems very likely to me that  requirements like this are going to expand and become common everywhere. When I was an Italian member of the parliament I made a proposal to protect anonimity while ensuring laws enforceability. It is basically a double blind mechanism so that only courts can obtain all the information and resolve anonimity. You can find below my (brief) keynote with the proposal at the Euroconsumer’s event was held online on Feb 3rd, 2022 Source: Ars Technica The broad law comes with heavy burdens for online platforms. It requires basically any digital services provider that collects…

This report from The Economist tells of a first self driving public transport bus in uk (though always with an operator who has to correct the computer) IMHO these figures reported by the Economist make little sense, if none at all from a public good perspective. In the UK there are 31 thousand buses with an average life of 9.4 years (source: UK government statistics data) between now and 2035 there will therefore be a total replacement of the fleet. it turns out that a self driving bus would cost 1.35 million pounds while the cost of a traditional bus…

“Chiamiamoli per quello che sono, dei dittatori”M. Draghi, 8 aprile 2021. In vista di una elezione importantissima, l’elezione che l’Economist ha definito “The most important election in 2023”, cosa fa Elmo ? Su richiesta di Erdogan, censura l’opposizione. “Elon Musk gives in to government pressure, censors tweets before Turkey election” Così come possiamo dimostrare coerenza anche solo facendo la spesa, penso che ciascuno dovrebbe porsi seriamente la domanda se continuare ad apportare il proprio valore ad un compare di dittatori. Io non scrivo piu’ un bit su twitter.