Today I met two long time friends and discussed an interesting concept: layer 2 identity networks we believe in a couple of years it will be evident it’s a fundamental concept that needs to develope and consolidate as WOT will likely not become a widely accepted system maybe we’ll write something more explanatory on the issue

A tragedy. My thoughts and prayers to all the victims, especially to the civilian ones, and horror for the acts on children and women First initial thoughts: one state cannot base their intelligence on the digital dimension. It can be a supplement, but not the core. The core should remain traditional intelligence with infiltrators, information acquisition, field observation etc. Corollary: we should be careful on giving up fundamental rights in the digital domain in view of an expected return of more safety. Law abiding citizens see their right diminshed while terrorist route around controls. Second initial thought: social media are…

What about that “black box” that determines ranking of Google’s auctions results based on the value the ad represents to Google ? (Booking’s dollars are greener than mine ?) The news: Source: Bloomberg Alphabet Inc.’s Google changed its advertising auction formula in 2017, raising prices by 15% and likely making the company billions of dollars in additional revenue, according to an economist testifying for the US Justice Department in the antitrust case against the search giant. Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via…

You walk into a bar blindfolded.You buy a Martini cocktail.The bartender tells you it was very good and a handsome brunette drank it.No one else confirmsYou pay satisfied and leave. You go to your banker.You tell him to buy some stocks.He tells you he bought them and sends you a slip of paper saying he did.No one else confirms.You leave satisfied. You go to your advertising space provider.You participate in an auction.Your supplier tells you that it was held, that you won it, and that the advertisement was displayed and seen N times.No one else confirms.You pay satisfied and leave.…

Here’s the hard fact: Google has failed to their corporate values still published today; they have gone against all they have spent millions and millions of dollars to convince users. There is a deliberate deterioration of search results to increase ADV revenues Google deliberately makes a product worse to make more money. Long gone are the days when Brin and Page wanted interference-free advertising Long gone are the days of Google’s phylosophy, of “Ten things we know to be true”, still advertised today. 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 2. It’s best to do one thing…

OK, so basically Mr. Musk has decided to remove the text from the quotation of external sites. The EU’s Copyright directive (article 15th) allows for some copyright exceptions for online uses: Member States shall provide publishers of press publications established in a Member State with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the online use of their press publications by information society service providers.The rights provided for in the first subparagraph shall not apply to private or non-commercial uses of press publications by individual users.The protection granted under the first subparagraph shall not…

Warning: IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) much of the debate about training language models by exploiting books concerns whether these models make use of training texts in a way that is compatible with copyright exceptions here the jurists are divided and as I have written in previous posts and articles there are good arguments in support of one or the other thesis i.e. that it is permissible to use pre-existing texts because the products of LLMs are not derivative works or that it is not permissible to use these texts because the products of LLMs are derivative works that…

Today, on the anniversary of the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for using “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to maintain its monopoly power.” The FTC and the suing states say “Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.” The states suing are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and…

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…